ANALYSIS:The World Cup is almost upon South Africa. For the country, the occasion needs to be more than just a soccer festival, writes BILL CORCORAN
FOR THE 31 football teams travelling to the African continent’s southernmost country in June to compete in Fifa’s 2010 World Cup, their fortunes on the playing fields will define whether their nations have had a successful tournament or not.
But for hosts South Africa, success should be measured using a different yardstick given their limited national team is unlikely to do very well. How the country’s image is portrayed internationally and whether the expected economic spin-offs associated with the mass influx of football fans materialise or not will both be used as measurements of success.
However, it is arguably the impact the tournament can have on South Africa’s nation-building process that should be the ultimate measurement of success.
The murder of white supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche recently has brought to the fore just how poor race relations are in many parts of South Africa and how important it is to tackle this animosity before it gets completely out of control.
The World Cup presents those who want to build a rainbow nation with a genuine opportunity. If channelled correctly, the feel-good factor football can generate is capable of exerting some much needed positive influence on race relations here.
For that to occur local leaders need to take a page from Nelson Mandela’s book, the man who identified the 1995 Rugby World Cup as the perfect tool to manipulate the sports-mad nation’s collective psyche for the greater good.
Back then South Africa was on the brink of civil war and the country’s first democratically elected president spectacularly sought to harness sport’s powerful appeal to soothe his people’s deeply racist attitudes towards one another. History has shown that while Mandela’s efforts were not flawless, neither were they wasted, as the country has made significant progress since then.
Ask anyone in South Africa old enough to remember and they will tell you it was a time of unparalleled hope, which was partly down to the unifying effect of sport. Nevertheless, the struggle fully to actualise the great man’s dream of a rainbow nation in which there is equality and mutual respect has proved as difficult to achieve as sceptics and naysayers warned. Race relations in South Africa today may well be at their lowest ebb since that turbulent period of the mid-1990s.
For a minority, like Terre’Blanche and his supporters, the problem is prejudice, pure and simple. But for the majority – and this is where hope resides – their racist attitudes are rooted in the vast cultural differences that exist between black, white, Indian and coloured (people of mixed race). South Africans just don’t understand each other, and they fear that unknown. Such an affliction though, is far more treatable than a deeply ingrained prejudice. Who’s to say the unifying power of sport is not part of the antidote to this particular malaise?
But the question is, has the current crop of South African leaders got the ability to use the competition to inspire people to cross the racial divide? Only time will tell, but as the days to the June 11th opening game slowly count down, South Africans of different ethnic backgrounds are increasingly being cajoled by government ministers and multinationals to unite behind their football team as one nation.
At this stage there is little concern about South Africa’s technical ability to host the World Cup, but there is a real fear that as the world watches with a level of scrutiny not seen for more than a decade, the racial divisions on display during apartheid will be brought sharply into focus again.
The potential flash points are numerous.
Tensions between poor local blacks and African migrants in the townships have been growing because of the poverty many South Africans find themselves in.
Service delivery protests – which usually involve violence of some kind or another – by disgruntled informal settlement dwellers across the country are likely to increase dramatically, if residents who have been protesting over the past few months are to be believed.
The message they want to deliver is clear: why should we allow wealthy people from around the globe have an international party in our own backyard when we have been left to live in appalling conditions? Another potential embarrassment the nation hopes to avoid relates to the complete lack of interest shown by the majority of South Africa’s white community when it comes to supporting the national football team. White South Africans, in general, follow rugby, while football has always predominately been the preserve of the black community.
Although the latter group has supported the national rugby team in the past, it remains to be seen if the former group are willing to support a football team many see as the whipping boys of the tournament.
Recreating Mandela’s moment of magic in 1995, when he united a nation behind a team, albeit briefly, will be no easy task. But if sport has repeatedly proved one thing over the years, it is that anything can happen . . . and sometimes does.
Bill Corcoran reports for The Irish Timesfrom Johannesburg