An Ordinary Country

by professor Delip Menon

“South Africa has lost the epic singularity it had, for good or bad, and become an ordinary country”

John Carlin, author of Playing the Enemy in an interview to The Guardian , 12 June 2009 South Africans see themselves as a nation that loves sport, but, with the World Cup in football imminent, there appears to be a sense of exhaustion both in the media and among the population. One important reason is that football does not dominate the public imagination of sport as cricket and rugby do. The game is played and loved in the black townships, the fortunes of African football playing nations are followed devotedly, and players like Didier Drogba have a larger than life standing in the country. But football has not become a metaphor for the nation as rugby and cricket have become. Whether this reflects a racial affiliation alone is hard to get at since the local team Bafana (which could be genially translated as “the boys”) are 88 in the FIFA rankings without a ghost of a chance of winning the Cup while at rugby and cricket South Africa are world beaters. The moment when South Africa won the World Cup in rugby in 1995 was also a deeply emotional moment of racial reconciliation and a rainbow vision of the future, sentimentalized in Clint Eastwood’s film Invictus (2009), which was based on John Carlin’s book. Carlin’s melancholy epigraph reflects the general mood now with perceptions of a decline of political morals, the capacity of the state to carry out projects and the fraying of civil society. While mega-events like the Beijing Olympics and the Commonwealth Games in Delhi this year overtly appeal to notions of national glory, it is a moot question what order of nationalism is being summoned up in these contexts.

National pride is in short supply in South Africa. The international press continues with the general theme of Afro pessimism remarking on the high levels of crime, AIDS and prostitution in the country. Local newspapers mirror these anxieties and are replete with stories of corruption, lawlessness and the absence of intellectual life in the public sphere. Very few across the racial spectrum mourned the murder this Easter of Eugene Terreblanche, the leader of the white supremacist party, the AWB, by two of his farm workers. This act was preceded by the ratcheting up of racial rhetoric by the leader of the youth wing of the African National Congress, Julius Malema singing the struggle song “kill the Boer” on public platforms and calling for the nationalization of the mining industry, dominated by white capital, and a rethinking of the legacy of Nelson Mandela. While there may have been no direct connection between the singing of the “struggle” song and the act of murder, newspapers have returned to the fact that over 3000 murders of white farmers have taken place since 1994. The unasked question is will the World Cup bring people together in the lowering political climate. Even as the daily countdown to the games proceeds apace, there is an air of crisis: are the stadiums completed; are transport arrangements in place; why are there so many unsold tickets and unbooked hotel rooms?

It is in the public reaction to the authoritarian micro-management of the games by the FIFA that nationalism is most evident. FIFA negotiates with the national government rather than the cities, quite unlike the earlier decentralization practiced in world cups strengthening perceptions of neo- imperialism and invoking submerged critiques of Western power. The Ministry of Industry is seen as having gone overboard in its attempt to prevent “ambush marketing” and unauthorized use of FIFA trademarks and words describing event venues, by making words like “World Cup” and the date “2010” prohibited marks under the special statute, the Second 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Special Measures Act 2006. One implication of this is that, in principle, if the words World Cup are applied to any goods on sale not authorized by the FIFA, the draconian terms of the Counterfeit Goods Act apply. Lawyers have argued that a party may become a criminal even in complete ignorance of its provisions. Two cases brought by FIFA against errant parties are revealing. FIFA sued a popular pub near Loftus Versfeld (one of the venues) known as Eastwoods Tavern which painted the words “World Cup 2010” on its roof and flew the flags of countries that would participate in the tournament. In March 2010, the FIFA ordered budget airline kulula.com to withdraw an advert that said it was the “Unofficial National Carrier of the You-Know- What” objecting to the depiction of the Cape Town stadium, soccer balls and the words South Africa in the advertisement. Kulula reissued its advertisement with the words “Not next year, not last year, but somewhere in between” and won fans and travelers all around. Kendell Gears, who produced one of the official FIFA posters titled it Free Balling, in an act of intellectual sabotage. He claimed in an interview that the word referred to the act of walking without underwear with one’s you-know-whats hanging in the breeze.

According to economists, the 2010 games are going to be 25 per cent more profitable than the 2008 World Cup for FIFA, regardless of ticket sales. On the other hand the expenditure for the Games has increased astronomically for a country which can ill afford such sums for a place in the sun for a month. The initial estimate in 2004 when South Africa won the bid for 2010 was that the cost would be $ 300 million; the present estimate of expenditure is closer to $ 4 billion. So is this money going towards urban regeneration, creation of employment and long term infrastructural development? In Cape Town, the city government wanted a stadium in Athlone to promote development in the lower income parts of the city and improve transport connections from low income areas to employment centres. FIFA led them away from Newlands Stadium which would have fulfilled these objectives to Green Point a more aesthetically pleasing location. In Johannesburg, Ellis Park Stadium, is an exception among the venues, being located to the east of the inner city in a derelict, low income area with many migrants from other African countries living in slums. As critical social scientists have pointed out, once the area is developed the poor may indeed become the first victims of displacement and eviction, as has been happening. A recent study quotes a local councillor’s matter of fact evaluation: “We need to remove these people, allocate them somewhere else. If we develop this area we can’t accommodate all of them: some of them are not working. In the city we only need people who are able to pay…That is good if they get removed…It is time to take the city back” (Benit-Gbaffou: 2009, 209). Elsewhere, a Mbombela municipality administrator Jimmy Mohlala was killed in February 2009 after becoming a  whistleblower on a land deal which saw 6000 acres of land sold for 1 Rand (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/7812113.stm) The perceived solution to poverty and urban degeneration seems to consist here, as in Delhi, Beijing and Vancouver, in a systematic removal of the poor from prime urban areas, carried on with little protest from a larger public that is sold the rhetoric of national pride (Porter, Jaconelli, Cheyne, Eby, Wagenaar: 2009; COHRE, 2007).

As two of the most vocal and incisive critics of the planning process for the 2010 World Cup have put it, this could have been an occasion for improving the life conditions of the historically disadvantaged and second, redesigning the apartheid city, even if through an integrated public transport system. It is as yet not clear whether the Rea Vaya BRT (Bus Rapid Transit System), borrowed from the urban experience of Bogota, and implemented in Delhi as well for the Commonwealth Games, will help connect a city where no public transport exists in a real sense. Transportation, arguably, helps bring in the migrant labourer and domestic servant to work as under apartheid and is now controlled by private taxi operators. Moreover, here as in Delhi and Shanghai, the idea of cities as “world class” and “globally competitive” has meant the adoption of a formulaic economic growth centred model in which benefits to the poor, if any, will accrue through a dilatory trickle-down effect. (Pillay and Bass: 2008, 335). All existing studies show that it is not only the people in general, and the poor in particular who lose out, host cities have never been known to make a profit. (Cornelissen: 2007; Cornelissen and Swart: 2006; Matheson and Baade: 2004). Transient events do not generate permanent impacts for the economy, but their impact on the disadvantaged is rather more permanent. National pride sometimes obliterates citizens.

Bibliography Benit-Gbaffou, Clare. (2009) In the shadow of 2010: Democracy and displacement in the Greater Ellis Park Development Project. In Udesh Pillay, Richard Tomlinson and Orli Bass ed. Development and Dreams: the urban legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup (Capetown, HSRC Press), 200-222.

COHRE (Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions) (2007) Fair Play for Housing Rights: Mega- Events, Olympic Games and Housing Rights, available at http://www.cohre.org/mega-events-report

Cornelissen, S. (2007) China and the 2008 Beijing Olympics: the dynamics and implications of sport mega-events in the semi-periphery. The China Monitor, 18, 4-5.

Cornelissen, S and Swart, K. (2006). The 2010 Football Cup as a political construct: the challenge of making good on an African promise. In J. Horne and W. Manzenreiter (Eds.), Sports Mega – Events; social scientific analyses of a global phenomenon. (Malden, USA: Blackwell/The Socilological Review), 108-123.

Matheson, V.A. and Baade, R.A. (2004). Mega-sporting events in developing nations: playing the way to prosperity? The South African Journal of Economics, 72 (5), 1085-1096.

Pillay, Udesh and Bass, O. (2008). Mega-events as a Response to Poverty Reduction: the 2010 FIFA World Cup and its Urban Development Implications. Urban Forum, 19, 329-346.

Porter, L, Jaconelli, M, Cheyne, J, Eby, D and Wagenaar, H (2009). Planning displacement: The Real Legacy of Major Sporting Events “Just a person in a wee flat”: Being displaced by the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow’s East End; Olympian Masterplanning in London; Closing Ceremonies: How Law, Policy and the Winter Olympics are Displacing an Inconveniently Located Low-Income Community in Vancouver; Commentary: Recovering Public Ethos: Crtical Analysis for Policy and Planning (2009). Planning Theory and Practice, 10 (3), 395-418 Porter, L, Jaconelli, M, Cheyne, J, Eby, D and Wagenaar, H (2009). Planning displacement: The Real Legacy of Major Sporting Events “Just a person in a wee flat”: Being displaced by the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow’s East End; Olympian Masterplanning in London; Closing Ceremonies: How Law, Policy and the Winter Olympics are Displacing an Inconveniently Located Low-Income Community in Vancouver; Commentary: Recovering Public Ethos: Crtical Analysis for Policy and Planning (2009). Planning Theory and Practice, 10 (3), 395-418

Dilip Menon is Professor of History and Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, School of Literature and Language Studies, Wits University

article first published in Asian Studies