Robben Island is as good a place as any for outsiders to grapple with the contradictions of the tournament's host nation, where, as the contest draws to a close, the voices of protest will begin to ask if it was all worth it
THE MOST famous football pitch in South Africa is a barren stretch of grass on Robben Island. When it was in use it was immaculately tended by the prisoners of the apartheid system, who ran a league in fastidious observance of Fifa rules. Years later, after the prison and island became a living museum, the pitch offered a symbolic location at which to celebrate Africa's upcoming hosting of the World Cup and Nelson Mandela's birthday. On July 18th, 2007, Pele, Ruud Gullit and George Weah were among the footballers who took shots into the rickety goalposts, each of the 89 kicks marking a year of Mandela's life.
The daily tours to Robben Island have been booked out during the World Cup by the thousands of fans visiting Cape Town for the tournament, and by some of the teams. On a gorgeous Saturday at lunchtime a young man in an England shirt stood at the ticket desk on the waterfront wanting to know if his team had shown up yet. The ferry was already full, and the restaurants and craft stores outside were in carnival mode. The man was convinced the England team would materialise at any moment. "They are definitely coming," he told the sceptical staff. "I know for sure." But the heroes never turned up.
The island, a forlorn five-square-kilometre patch with one of the most impressive views on Earth - Cape Town cradled by Table Mountain - was home to three centuries' worth of misery. There is, inevitably, an Irishtown on Robben Island and a church built in 1841 by Irish missionaries. A guest compound, used to house visiting dignitaries, is where Fifa discussed the fallout from Ireland's play-off against France in 2009.
Robben Island has become South Africa's international symbol, a more solemn and troubling equivalent of Liberty Island. The wretched years of hard labour and boredom have been translated into a slick enterprise: Mandela's image adorns every kind of gift-shop gimmick. Former prisoners conduct the tours; they are fiercely articulate and honest as they recount how the days here rolled into years. Even a few hours on the island is enough to appreciate the claustrophobia and loneliness. The distraction of soccer was the major concession they won from the wardens, and it became the system through which they pursued collective spirit and physical fitness and discipline and everything that goes with team sports.
"We needed football," said one former prisoner, 'Terror' Lekota, in More Than Just a Game, a 2008 book on the subject. "Without it there would have been so much depression. It made you feel free in an unfree status."
So this summer the best teams in the world paid homage. The Netherlands team, who will play in the World Cup final against Spain tomorrow evening, cancelled a training session to visit. The outside of Mandela's cramped, austere cell has become the crucial photographic location for tourists.
Mandela holds a peculiar place in South Africa. He remains mortal, but his influence and spirit have become mythical. Age and the death of his granddaughter Zanani on the eve of the opening ceremony meant he remained largely out of sight for the tournament. But his has been the name on all lips for the past month.
Outside the metal door of the room where he spent 18 years in solitude, outsiders grapple with the contradictory appeal of South Africa. The World Cup presented the country with the challenge of hosting a prestige event. The organisers have now reached the final with none of the alarming forecasts having come to pass. The darkest fears of tourists - gunpoint robberies, carjackings, rapes - did not materialise. The infrastructure of Johannesburg creaked but did not stall during the rapid-fire round of matches in the first two weeks of the tournament. The stadiums were reasonably full. Bafana Bafana, the national team, generated a frisson of national pride for their three World Cup outings, including a valedictory performance against France.
That night some of us watched the match in Giles, a suburban bar named after the celebrated Daily Telegraphcartoonist. His old sketches decorate the walls. The crowd was uniformly white. Most wore Bafana Bafana shirts, and it was easy to see this Bafana business was a novelty for them.
Someone said if South Africa went 3-0 up, they would all produce Springboks jerseys - the traditional brand of South African sporting pre-eminence. But they were like European football fans. They lived the match. It might have been a temporary thing, but they bought into the spirit of the thing. Whether their enthusiasm remains after the glow of a boozy afternoon match has departed and stadiums fall silent, and all that remains of the World Cup adventure is the final cost of $3.5 billion, is a different matter.
Voices of protest were constant throughout the tournament, but they were drowned out by the vuvuzelas and general high spirits. The questions will persist, however: was such a lavish exercise in prestige morally justifiable in a country where unemployment is at 40 per cent? What is the point of spending $1.2 billion on stadiums when in Pretoria the only recourse more than 2,000 homeless people had to South Africa's game against Uruguay was in a local church? How can the South African government stand by while Fifa pockets an estimated €1 billion from the tournament from a country where the housing waiting list can stretch to a decade? Why did they not fight the toss for local street traders instead of bowing to Fifa stipulations that only official sponsors could trade near the stadiums? These questions will grow louder again after tomorrow's final.
By the middle Sunday of the tournament, Danny Jordaan, the chief executive of the South Africa committee, felt confident enough to pen a newspaper piece declaring the tournament a success. "It is about uniting a nation once again," he wrote of the World Cup legacy. "It is about changing the perceptions that Africa and Africans cannot succeed where our global peers have succeeded."
A more ephemeral question preoccupies South Africans of every ethnic persuasion and class: they are desperately curious to know what World Cup visitors think of their country. And there is no pat response. It is beautiful and edgy. Johannesburg, which has traded under the "Murder Capital of the World" banner, is hugely friendly and energetic but utterly strange. Few visitors readily come to terms with the ghettoised city centre or the gated, high-walled compounds where the privileged dwell.
On the afternoon we went down to the city centre, white faces became fewer and then vanished altogether on the long cab journey. White flights are not unique to Johannesburg, but in this case a natural apartheid has asserted itself. White suburban Johannesburg folk speak of downtown "Jozi" as a place that no longer exists. But it does, vibrantly in some streets, in utter poverty along others. The city centre, which looks pristine from the distance, is oddly free from global retail logos.
In Thatha Mavusana, a restaurant and pool bar on the corner of Kruis, the ownerbeckoned us in. Everyone was watching Uruguay play South Korea in the second round. He brought seats, offered food and could not have been more hospitable. Come back with friends, he urged. It will be fine. Fear - the scare stories and the real violence - means few tourists visit the original city.
Lightning courts and enhanced policing and the "relocation" of homeless people radically reduced the incidence of violent crime during the World Cup, but the reputation for violence cannot be erased in one short month. "You steal a toothbrush, you get 15 years. That will make them think," a lawyer said to me one evening. And it will. But it won't change the fact that tens of thousands of South Africans have nothing, and little to lose by stealing. Stay on track - the guided tours of the townships, the recommended taxi firms, the main streets - and you will be fine. But wander off hoping to get a snap of authenticity on your expensive camera and don't be surprised if you get into trouble. "If you are looking for a bad experience in Johannesburg, you will find it," was the constant refrain. But for the World Cup at least, you had to search it out.
The international glare caused by the World Cup may have inspired an introspective pause for reflection on post-apartheid race relations. Certainly, nobody was shy about giving their opinion about "how things are now". One resident in a shebeen in Greenside, who offered a gnarled hand and a set of false gnashers as exhibits of a robust rugby past, described himself as "liberal" and had this to say about contemporary South Africa: "Don't believe what you hear. We love each other here. This is the greatest country in the world." He would not hear of anyone buying a drink. "You visit my country, you don't pay for a facking thing."
But you did. Taxi firms went charging €20 for a two-mile journey. The cheapest fare anyone got was for the equivalent of €5, from the new Guateng train station to Mandela Square. It wasn't an official taxi, just a kid in a bust-up Mercedes trying to make a few quid, He spent a long time fussing over the heating, asking if the temperature was good before leaving the underground car park, turning right and driving the 45 metres to Mandela Square. The journey took about 15 seconds. It was such a perfect sting he deserved a tip.
Elsewhere, hotels in the city asked for the limit and often got it. All reason went out the window for June. But by and large the tourists wrapped up well for what must stand as the coldest World Cup, sang and made merry and generally had a time of it.
The tournament will feel incomplete if Mandela does not attend tomorrow night's final. Mandela's public engagements have become infrequent, but if he were to rise, frail and bright-eyed, from his seat in Soccer City the point of the whole billion-rand extravaganza would become clear again.
Back when Mandela was locked up in isolation in the ANC leader's wing of Robben Island, the most popular book in the prison library was Karl Marx's Das Kapital. But the other book the prisoners all wanted to read was written by Denis Howell, a Labour MP for Birmingham Small Heath who, in 1968, wrote definitively on an obscure subject. It was called Soccer Refereeing. The Robben Island football players wanted to imagine their private league could aspire to the rules and regulations of the world beyond that island. They wanted to abide by the same rules as Pele and Charlton and Cryuff, as the best in the world, wherever they were. Tomorrow night the best of the world will play in their city, in their stadium and before their eyes. For all the flaws and waste of the World Cup, that is surely worth cheering.
