Ubuntu: where dreams take root

The recent mass exodus of Zimbabweans to the far-flung corners of the earth, has meant that millions of these hardy, thrifty creatures have started to employ our nation’s creativity for the benefit of other communities in foreign lands.

This dispersion begs the nostalgic question, “What could have been, if the land we love best had held us all a little more gently?” The Ubuntu Football Academy is one of many stories of Zimbabweans making their mark far from home, but read on as the final chapter of this story may just be a homecoming…

In 2010 the Ubuntu Football Academy was formed in Cape Town South Africa, founded by two alien football fanatics. Michael Jenkins, born and raised in Zimbabwe had recently relocated to Cape Town and took with him a dream of decades, to use football as a context to mentor, educate and develop the next generation of society-transforming leaders from the dusty poverty of Africa’s township communities.

Shortly after arriving in Cape Town, he befriended an American soccer coach and former pro-player, Casey Prince, and this unlikely team in an even unlikelier setting, launched the Ubuntu Football Academy. Ubuntu started with a ragged group of twelve and thirteen year-olds in January of 2011, drawn from all three of Cape Town’s major communities – black, coloured and white.

The one thing they all had in common was an immense passion for the world’s favourite game, and the ability to play it beautifully. From the very outset, Jenkins and Prince were determined to be different.

While they threw down an audacious challenge for themselves – to become Africa’s most effective junior football development program – they were adamant that Ubuntu’s first priority was to see their players become great men and future leaders, so that their investment in these young lives would yield an exponential return for years to come. Football drills segued into counselling sessions, and road-trips to away matches became moral and ethical debates, goal-setting workshops and dream factories.

Unlike boys at other “professional” academies around South Africa, Ubuntu players know that when they are invited into the academy at 13, they will never be discarded just because a shinier new star has been discovered. Ubuntu makes a six-year commitment to each young player, which Prince explains,

“For starters, as much as we hope and expect to see some of our kids playing in World Cups, and standing shoulder to shoulder with the very best, it’s far more important to us that they become great men and go on to leave a legacy in their families and communities. We’re also all about developing – not discovering – talent. We back ourselves to identify the right technical, mental and athletic attributes in 12-year-olds, and then after that, we take the focus completely off talent, and instead try to instill and model a culture of hard work, fun and determination.

Kids all develop at such different rates, and we’ve seen countless examples of a big club picking a kid up at 12, telling him he’s not good enough at 14, and then bringing him in again a few years later because he’s suddenly shot up six inches.”

By 2011 Ubuntu had taken a further step beyond the football field, and raised support to send their academy players to an exceptional school. Their daily investment leaped from two hours of football to nearly 12 hours, including transport to school, classes, tutored homework sessions, and finally daily football practices. Jenkins explains the decision to make Ubuntu a fully-educational programme: “The more we worked with our players, visited their homes and spent time in their communities, the more we realized how badly at risk many of them were to the hazards of gangs, drugs and all the other symptoms of hopeless youth.

I remember driving into one particular community where military police were out in a visible display of heavily-armed force, in response to a series of gang shoot-outs. Our vision for these boys is not just to survive their communities long enough to escape; we want to equip them with the ability, skills, character and motivation to come back as an adult and be a force for good.

To achieve this goal, we knew that we had to make education a priority, and especially to provide a safe, positive learning environment that is as free as possible from the destructive distractions that these kids faced every day.”

In just two years, Ubuntu has become a much-talked about addition to the Cape Town football scene. Ubuntu partnered with the Fish Hoek AFC club, so that their players could play in the same divisions as most of the best sides in the Cape. Over the past two seasons they’ve beaten most of the established academy sides, including Ajax Cape Town, Old Mutual and the Mr Price Academy.

A year ago, a small cluster of Ubuntu players arrived for their first day at a new school, a nervous group of black and coloured kids in a school that had previously been almost entirely white, but in just 12 short months, they’ve made Silvermine Academy High School their home and become a vibrant and much-loved part of the school family. Recently, Chelsea, Juventus and Italy legend, Gianluca Vialli, visited an Ubuntu training session in Cape Town and apart from being impressed with the ability of the boys with a football, he commented on the warmth and spirit of the whole environment. It’s this spirit that is the essence of Ubuntu. A place where young men are built up, not torn down and where dreams take root rather than being dashed.

So with all these exciting developments so far south of his homeland, has Michael forgotten the football-mad children of Zimbabwe?

“The dream of Ubuntu was born in Zimbabwe and for Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a place where the development structures just don’t deserve the incredible talent at their disposal, and I’ve promised myself that the next Ubuntu Football Academy location will be in Zimbabwe. We’ve already found a partner school to help us lay the same educational foundations there that we have here, and now it’s just a matter of the time we need to find, train and put in place the right people. I can’t wait for the day when we take a team from Zimbabwe to play their Ubuntu-brothers in Cape Town or vice versa, and I don’t think that day is so very far away.”