Abstract:
The oldest recorded football match in South Africa was played in Port Elizabeth on
24 May 1862. This article explores the available evidence for this match before
moving on to a more general discussion of three broader contexts in which the
match was played. These contexts are contemporary football developments in
colonial Britain, the emergence of 'carrying codes' in the Cape Colony and the midnineteenth
century development of sport in Port Elizabeth. Very little is known about
the 1862 match in Port Elizabeth. The discussion of the match therefore serves as a
pretext for a situated exploration of the 19'h century codification of jootball' -
which produced, inter alia, the dominant South African codes of 'rugby' and
'soccer.' Here, 'codification' involves more than the establishment of rules and
clubs; it includes the association of sporting practices with other soCial 'codes' -
notably those associated with class, gender and race. In this article particular
attention is given to the association of 'football' with a particular public school
mediated model of masculinity. The author argues that the reason the Port Elizabeth
game has gone largely unnoticed in most sporting histories is because it cannot
easily be classified as 'a code' and thereby slotted into prevailing South African
code historiographies.
