World Cup marks a milestone in S Africa’s evolution

It’s 1985, and I’m sitting on the veranda of my grandparents’ house in white Johannesburg. It’s a blazing December day, and I’ve just swum in their pool. Next to me my grandfather is listening to the cricket on the radio. Nesta, the black maid who has been working for my grandparents for decades, is cutting the chocolate cake. At the bottom of the garden, her grandchildren are playing in our old underpants from Europe. In 1985, apartheid is still going to last forever.

Back then, few of us foresaw that in 2010 a football World Cup would be kicking off in a mixed Johannesburg, in a democratic state. What makes this tournament unique is how far South Africa has travelled. But the emotional meaning is getting lost amid the shouting.

It’s clear now that the critics were right: the World Cup won’t help South Africa’s economy. So few foreign visitors are coming that the country’s hotels will be emptier than in a normal month. South Africa’s image, far from benefiting from the World Cup, has already been dented by all the foreign media reports about crime. Several new stadiums will become white elephants the day the tournament ends. Because those stadiums swallowed scarce funds, the World Cup will keep many South Africans in shacks.

And yet to talk only about economics is to miss the point. The story of this World Cup shouldn’t be “it’s the economy, stupid”. The tournament is not a device to pull in foreign investors. South African politicians keep saying that a smooth tournament in “world-class” stadiums will prove that South Africa is “world class”. But South Africa doesn’t need slick stadiums to be world class, says the writer Njabulo Ndebele. South Africa is world class, Ndebele told the London Book Fair this spring, because it talked its way out of civil war into democracy and has kept talking since. There’s a constant national conversation in which everyone forever disagrees with everyone else, but in which everyone of every colour is respectfully heard.

Nobody could have imagined this in 1985. Back then, this was a hermit republic where 90 per cent of the population was under orders to shut up. The world rarely entered the apartheid state. Before 1990 the World Cup was never even shown on television here. Until 1976, TV itself didn’t exist in South Africa.

This week South Africans are welcoming the world. For most of them, that’s still a new sensation. That’s why so many are filling airports to greet the most mediocre visiting teams, and wearing shirts and beanie hats that promote their own hapless Bafana Bafana national team. There may not be many visiting fans, but there is what South Africans call a “gees”, a spirit, around this event. My grandmother, in her widow’s flat in northern Johannesburg, and Nesta, up in the Drakensberg mountains, are both old ladies now, but when the football kicks off I suspect even they will be watching with pride. They know how far South Africa has come.

Years ago I interviewed Danny Jordaan, the World Cup’s organiser, in the business district of Sandton outside Johannesburg. I interrogated him about crime, about South Africa’s image, about the terrible Bafana. He parried with phrases he had recited hundreds of times before.

The former anti-apartheid activist was about to set off on his usual commute to the airport, but first there was something he wanted to say. “I think one is blessed. How many people have an opportunity to be part of the process to liberate their country? In 1976 and 1985, in those dark days, I was not sure that I would be sitting here today to talk to you. To see in 1990 Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, to see the elections go off peacefully in 1994, to see Bafana Bafana win the African Nations Cup in 1996, to be given the right to host this event – these are special events. Nobody decided for us to walk this road. We decided to walk this road.”

He had probably said it hundreds of times before, but it was true nonetheless.

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