South Africa pays tribute to Clive Barker, its 1st post-apartheid national soccer team coach

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Clive Barker lifted the hopes of a nation still damaged by apartheid when he brought a team of Black and white players together to win the 1996 African Cup of Nations title, South Africa’s minister of sport said Monday in a tribute to the former national soccer team coach who died this weekend.

Barker, South Africa’s first post-apartheid coach, died Saturday at the age of 78 after being diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, his family said in a statement.

Minister of Sport Zizi Kodwa, South African Football Association president Danny Jordaan and Neil Tovey, the captain of the 1996 team, were part of a delegation that visited Barker’s family home in the eastern city of Durban to pay their respects.

Kodwa also said that it was his hope that Barker would be granted an official funeral, either by the national or provincial government.

“It’s one person who must be celebrated,” Kodwa said, recalling how Barker took a little-known and inexperienced South Africa team to the African title two years after the end of apartheid. “It was just at the dawn of our democracy. The hopes of our people were lifted high in ’95 and ’96.”

Barker was appointed South Africa coach about two months before Nelson Mandela was elected president in South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994, which marked the official end of apartheid.

And while South Africa’s rugby team also provided an inspirational moment for the newly-democratic country by winning the 1995 Rugby World Cup, that Springboks rugby team was all-white for most of that tournament.

Barker’s South Africa soccer team captured the nation’s multiracial makeup much better, with white players like Tovey, Mark Fish and Eric Tinkler combining with Black stars Lucas Radebe, Doctor Khumalo, John Moshoeu and Phil Masinga.

“He had a team that truly reflected South Africa’s diversity,” Kodwa said.

South Africa’s 2-0 win over Tunisia in the 1996 African Cup final, a game attended by Mandela wearing a Bafana Bafana team shirt, brought South Africa its first and still only Cup of Nations title.

Barker was a promising player himself, only for his career to be cut short by injury.

Coaching was not an automatic career choice for him, though. He said in an interview on the FIFA website in 1997 that he fell into coaching after he struggled to make ends meet after his playing career ended with a serious knee injury.

“I worked during the day and drove taxis at night and I thought to myself, there has got to be something that is a little easier and less demanding than working day and night,” Barker said. “So I decided the only other thing that I had some talent at — besides singing — was to become a football coach. So I started out with that in 1974.”

It was the right choice. Barker had a 42-year coaching career in South Africa, starting in the days of apartheid and leading him to break the regime’s racist laws by traveling for games to Black townships where whites weren’t meant to go.

Barker’s history of disregarding those apartheid laws endeared him to the majority of South Africans.

“Your Father was a Godsend,” Irvin Khoza, South Africa’s Premier Soccer League chairman, said in a condolence message to Barker’s son Gavin.

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