The Philippi Angels Baseball Club

This 4' film portrays the story of the Philippi Angels Baseball Club from Philippi Township, Cape Town, South Africa.

The Angels are the only team of Black South African youth competing in the Baseball Association of Western Province, the largest youth and adult baseball league in the country.

The Angels practice in a rocky drainage that serves as a pedestrian thoroughfare to the bus and train station across the road. Amid broken glass, discarded matresses, and grazing cows, they practice a sport they had previously never seen. The field conditions are too dangerous and the neighborhood too questionable to play home games against their more priviledged opponents. This requires them to travel across the Cape Town metro-area to play every one of their scheduled matches, even when they are listed as the home team.

Despite the challenges, both the Under-12-year-old and Under-14-year-old teams finished strong in their respective divisions in their very first season of play in 2005/2006. The Under-14 team placed 2nd in the B-division out of 9 teams and the Under-12 team won the B-division, losing only 2 of 18 games.

The Angels are seeking financial support to purchase uniforms and equipment and to fund the construction of a proper baseball playing field.

Inquiries can be directed to Ian Edelstein, e-mail: ian@oz.net or Nyameko Gabada, e-mail: ngabada@pgwc.gov.za

Category:

Sports

Tags:

• africa
• baseball
• township
• social
• upliftment
• human
• interest
• story
• South
• Africa
• ghetto

[jaxdemocrat]

why do they seem to have trouble speaking english, do they originally speak afrikaans?

[tshimegaproductions]

Their first language is Xhosa.

[ChanaYah100]

Good boys, please keep up the good work my little brothers.

[krriekman]

I like it

[jonathanreese]

And the subtiltes are just there to help you understand through the Xhosa accent. Oh, and black Africans don't speak Afrikaans, not as a native tongue anyway. Most in the Cape Town area speak Xhosa, which is from the Eastern Cape. In Jo'burg and Durban, you hear mostly Zulu. Afrikaans is spoken as a native tongue by white South Africans of Afrikaner (Dutch) extraction and some Coloureds (i.e. Cape Malays, Khoisan, mixed race, lots of others).

[jonathanreese]

As someone who studied at UCT and worked in Khayelitsha, I can say this.

Xhosa adds an adverb before the noun. So you'll often here a "the" before a noun, as in "the baseball" or "the Phillipi". Incedentally, Phillipi is one of the closer townships to the city bowl, but is very very poor and composed mostly of "informals" which are more like squatter camps than established neighborhoods, and often lack utility lines.

[DuelistKING]

Why the subtitles? We can hear just fine