It has been 22 years since he led South Africa to glory in the African Cup of Nations. In a new book, Clive Barker recounts his career as a salesman by day and taxi driver by night, and to FORBES AFRICA, that he is not done with the future of African football.

We are in Melville, a charming suburb in Johannesburg, and finding house number 55 is not as easy as Google Maps makes it out to be.
Finally, we arrive, there are two dogs by the gate, we ring the bell, and Clive Barker’s son answers the door.
The small room has a larger-than-life presence – Barker is on a couch watching a World Cup match repeat. It’s the right time and place to watch world soccer, in the company of a legend.
Standing up, shaking hands, the genial septuagenarian directs us to the patio not too far from the television and facing a landscaped yard.
The first South African coach to qualify for the World Cup in 1998, before that, Barker had led South Africa to victory in the African Cup of Nations in 1996.
For a country going through reconciliation and healing since the end of apartheid only two years earlier, it was historic. That moment changed a country’s destiny in sport, as also Barker’s life.
“People often say to me, ‘what was the biggest moment in your football career?’ And I say ‘it was when Nelson Mandela became the president of this country, he promised to come and watch us play football’. In those days, nobody came to watch us play besides the supporters and on his big day, South Africa’s greatest day, he decided to come watch us play against Zambia and of course we won. He gave us a speech which went on for 25 minutes and the Zambians blamed that for the reason they lost,” says Barker, a tear rolling down his cheek as he speaks about his interactions with Mandela.
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Barker made his professional debut at the age of 17, and has had a long history in the game, from being close to starting an international career with Leicester in England to now unearthing soccer talent in South Africa’s townships.
“I played football professionally and of course, everybody has a dream to play overseas. I was on track to do that. Unfortunately, over an Easter weekend, we played in Johannesburg against a team called Rangers. I injured my knee very badly and in those days, you could do the cartilage operation but you couldn’t do the ligament operation and so I had my first setback and three years later, when the other knee went, that’s when I decided to go into coaching,” says Barker.
Without throwing in the towel after the injury, Barker decided to go into business to make ends meet. The failure of his venture did not keep him down. To avoid bankruptcy, and to avoid losing his family home, more sacrifices had to be made.
<div id="attachment_37083" style="width: 750px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37083" class="wp-image-37083 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/CliveBarker_GL-5-1024x649.jpg" alt="" width="740" height="469" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/CliveBarker_GL-5-1024x649.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/CliveBarker_GL-5-300x190.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/CliveBarker_GL-5-600x380.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/CliveBarker_GL-5-768x487.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/CliveBarker_GL-5.jpg 1654w" sizes="(max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" />Clive Barker. Photo by Gypseenia Lion</div>
“I had to make that decision. I was going to lose my house and of course my family stayed there. I thought the only thing I could do was work during the night and I found that driving taxis was good. And I became a taxi driver. A salesperson by day and a taxi driver by night. We were able to do our shopping on Saturdays with the money we earned during the week. I paid off the creditors because I did not want to cross the street and someone tells me I owe them money.”
Football is similar to business, he says. “You start out as an individual, you have an idea and you develop it.”
Starting his coaching career after working as a driver for almost a year in 1973, Barker has groomed and trained a number of soccer stars such as Andre Arendse, Shaun Bartlett and Steve Komphela who continue in their coaching careers.
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This undiscovered talent in townships brought to light by Barker over the years shaped legends in South African football.
“Thank goodness I went to the townships because I would have never known what was going on in South Africa,” he says.
Coaching patterns have changed drastically from the classic tracksuit-wearing coach paying close attention on the 90-minute game while shouting at the referee from the sidelines.
“In the olden days, you were more refined and were looked up to as a father figure, making all these runs, turns and somersaults and obscenities to the referee, there was a pattern emerging. My pattern emerged when we [AmaZulu] played Kaizer Chiefs in KwaMashu [a township in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province]. We won by 3-2, and the team hoisted me up at the end of the game and they pickpocketed me, from there on, I learned tracksuits are nothing more than tracksuits.”
Barker is looking forward to set his feet on the green pitch – he has been on a break.
“At the moment, I’m recovering from an illness that I had. I am starting to feel better. It’s the reason why I hadn’t been coaching for the last year-and-half but I’m certainly feeling well and when I am recovered, I am hoping to go back to coaching.”
In South Africa, soccer has always been more than a match, it’s a heady mixture of emotions and the shrill vuvuzelas (plastic horn). In Barker’s time, players had signature moves or tricks to keep the spectators entertained. This is one element that remains unique to South African football.
“If we copy the likes of Brazil, we could never beat them; if we copied the Italian style of football we could never beat them. If we developed the style of football that we had, then there was a pattern to it. Imagine me going to Doctor Khumalo or ‘Shoes’ Moshoeu saying ‘you can’t dribble, you can’t back-heel the ball’. If I took the nice part of football away from them, we would end up with robots.
<blockquote>“I think we lost out on a great opportunity to make a huge imprint in football not only in Africa in particular but throughout the whole world”.</blockquote>
With the non-stop action and unpredictability of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, African representation has declined drastically nearing the final stages.
The 74-year-old patriot, with great disappointment, tells FORBES AFRICA he feels sad in many ways as he had always been one to root for an African country to be world champions. However, according to Barker, not all hope is lost for Africa.
“Once we go back to the drawing board, and have a look at why we are not dominating&#8230; I know the better players get pulled over to Europe, and they could control the destiny. If you look at the World Cup and the countries that qualified, I can tell you now that France is going to win. I think because they add a bit of the African flair.”
Coach, a book on the life and times of Barker, was launched in July.
“The game has been so good to me, the people of South Africa have been good to me. Always encouraging, even the reaction to the book is fantastic. I wasn’t sure if I was going to recover from my illness and I decided that the best time to write this book is now,” says Barker, set to return soon to coaching more soccer stars, and shaping a future that will one day bring the World Cup to Africa.
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CliveBarker_GL-2

The Cab Driver, Coach And The Cup

A political science student felt so angry and so strongly about a statue that early one morning he woke and drove to one of the townships on the fringes of Cape Town. Here he picked up a bucket of faeces, heavy from the night before. He put the stinking bucket into his car and drove to the University of Cape Town (UCT).
For the last few hundred yards, Chumani Maxwele, put the bucket on his shoulder. He wore running tights and a pink construction hat and clearly had no respect. His destination was the green lawns and scented flowers of the entrance to the university. He took a deep breath and threw the manure into the face of one of the world’s most famous colonialists who had died more than a century before.
<div id="attachment_4680" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4680" class="size-medium wp-image-4680" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Chumane-Maxwele-047-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Chumane Maxwele</div>
Maxwele was an angry Africanist who didn’t feel this face fitted in his continent; the face belonged to the statue of arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, who died just down the road in his beach house at Muizenberg in 1902, and who donated the land to the university.
“The statue was a political symbol. Even when Rhodes was still alive and now dead, he represents a particular symbol of black people in pain, suffering and dispossession. If you look at the images of Rhodes, it’s all these African people lying with horses, his articulations and so on, you can tell there’s a direct relation between Rhodes and UCT, and UCT being controlled by white people. And there’s a direct relation with who controls the economy of the country and the state of black people. And yet the university takes so much pride in the man,” says Maxwele.
The bucket of faeces launched the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign. After a month of unrest and consultations at the university, the statue was transferred to a museum in Cape Town.
The anger from UCT reverberated across the country, with dozens of colonial statues defaced or destroyed by angry youth. Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, survived two wars but couldn’t dodge the red paint of protesters outside Parliament in Cape Town.
Exactly two years after Maxwele started the campaign, FORBES AFRICA spoke to the man in Cape Town. He had just left the gym, dressed in blue and white shirt, tight blue jeans and black brogues. He kept his composure throughout but his emphasis to decolonize the university was as sharp as it was two years ago. He looked nothing like the rabble-rouser portrayed in the newspapers.
“The process of bringing the poo to the statue, it was within political education in this country. People talk about townships and health issues at the university level, and yet these things are really happening. Us black people, we are there, we know these things first hand. People keep the poo buckets in their rooms at night, and in the morning take them to the pavement. And kids play with them, no one cares. I thought I might as well bring one to the university, as a way of saying there’s a problem there but at the same time addressing the racial problems at UCT,” says Maxwele.
At face value, Maxwele’s campaign can be simplified as only against Rhodes’ statue but the man insists there’s more to it than meets the eye.
“There are a lot of complicated issues involved in Rhodes Must Fall. Coming to the university as a rural African student, you are sort of told to leave who you are at the university’s entrance. There’s so much institutional and personal racism going on. Part of my protest was to exhibit white arrogance and black assimilation into the university system,” says Maxwele.
“On the question of curriculum, what is being taught and who is teaching it, and how it is being taught. There’s no way you are going to talk about the brutal killing of black people with what it deserves as a white person. UCT doesn’t recognize apartheid.”
Maxwele says black students and academics have accepted they must assimilate to survive. They fear they’ll be excluded and persecuted like he was.
“It is not easy to be honest to your cause. I have been suspended by the university for two years in 2015 and 2016,” he says.
In September last year, the anti-statue feeling spread to the University of Ghana where students and academics petitioned for the removal of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue. The protesters claimed the proponent of non-violence was racist and the university must replace his statue with an African hero.
The President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, unveiled the statue in June last year at the University of Ghana campus as a symbol of close ties between the two countries.
Gandhi, a native of India, spent 21 years in South Africa as a lawyer and civil rights activist. More than half a century after his assassination in India, like Cecil John Rhodes, Gandhi’s legacy divides the world.
Ashwin Desai, a professor of sociology in South Africa and co-author of The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, wrote that Gandhi was never a saint, not even close.
“Some youngsters recently defaced Gandhi’s statue in Johannesburg for his perceived racism, while others demanded the defaming of Nelson Mandela, seen as a figure of excessive compromise who heralded disastrous economic policies…” says Desai.
The fervour and anger around statues grows. Many philosophers give reasons for this. The only certainty is if you put up a statue in Africa, be assured someone will want to tear it down.

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The Cab Driver, Coach And The Cup

The Fight Over Statues Never Stands Still