When you visit Cape Town it is useful to know apartheid has been abolished because you might not notice immediately. The beachfront neighbourhoods remain almost all-white. The “Coloured” and black Cape Flats are outside of town, separated from the whites by highways and golf courses. Other blacks live in Langa township. “There are ghettoes in other parts of the world,” protests Essop Pahad, minister in the office of President Thabo Mbeki. But he admits: “South Africa is an extreme case because of the legacy of apartheid.”
It is hard, in fact, to think of a more divided country than the new South Africa. Apartheid managed to make separate peoples of whites, blacks, “Coloureds” (those of mixed race) and Indians. They have different maps of the country in their heads, die at different ages and play different sports.
Pahad has a second job: along with several other cabinet ministers, he sits on the local organising committee for the football World Cup that South Africa will host in 2010. More than just a football tournament, the World Cup is meant to teach inhabitants of the country’s ethnic ghettoes that they are all South Africans first.
Nations used to be forged on battlefields. Today, they increasingly try to make themselves on sports fields. South Africa is not alone. In older nations such as England and France, government officials have seen sport as a way to incorporate immigrants into their nations.
It’s natural that they should do so. In 1995, the authoritative International Social Survey Program measured national pride in 23 countries. Polling 28,456 people, it found that sport was the most commonly mentioned source of national pride, with 77 per cent of all respondents saying it made them proud of their countries.
For many people, the national football team in particular is the nation made flesh. “The imagined community of millions seems more real in the form of 11 named people,” wrote the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Nowadays, the only time you see Europeans waving national flags is during a World Cup. In most countries, sport is the greatest unifying activity. But can it bear a nation’s weight?
In the 19th century, the idea grew that a state should be composed of people who spoke the same language, shared historical memories, and whose ancestors had inhabited the same territory. Few founders of early nation-states thought of sport as a source of national pride. That was because international sport became popular in Europe and Latin America only in the 1930s, and in most of Asia and Africa only from the 1960s. Italy and Germany, for instance, achieved unification decades before they began fielding national sports teams.
It was different for the last wave of nations that emerged in the 1990s from the collapse of the USSR, Yugoslavia and apartheid South Africa. By then, international sport had grown into a behemoth. In many countries the most popular television programmes were matches of the national football team. Last year’s World Cup became the biggest media event in history, measured by television hours and viewer numbers.
In this climate, governments inevitably try to harness sport. When a black, white and brown French football team won the World Cup in 1998, then-President Jacques Chirac was among many eulogising “a tricoloured and multicoloured France”. France’s players, who before matches stood arm in arm singing at least bits of the “Marseillaise”, said much the same.
The great enemy of this idea of France was the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. He had opened hostilities in 1996 by saying it was “artificial that they let players come from abroad and baptise them the French team”. Most of the players, he complained, “don’t sing the ‘Marseillaise’ or ignore it”.
By 2000, when the team were European as well as world champions, the conception of France they represented seemed to have triumphed over his. Yet most experts agree that the team did nothing for integration in France. This became obvious long before the ethnic ghettoes erupted in riots in 2005. An annual survey of racist attitudes, published by the National Consultative Commission of Human Rights, showed no effect from the football triumphs. In 1999 and 2000, respondents expressed increased racism despite football. From 1999 a new question appeared in the survey: were there “too many players of foreign origin in the French football team?” In 2000, when the team was the best in the world, 36 per cent of respondents totally or mostly agreed there were.
So sport has its limits. Rather than building the nation, a sports team is best understood as a vehicle for debating what the nation is. That is what Le Pen was doing. The players have a voice in that debate but so do their critics, says Erik Bleich, an American expert on French racial politics at Middlebury College in Vermont.
People distinguish between ethnic minority sporting heroes such as Zinedine Zidane and ordinary members of that ethnic group. There is a fine example of this in Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing, when the racist character Pino is forced to confess that his favourite basketball player, movie star and pop star are all black: Michael Jordan, Eddie Murphy and Prince. But Pino explains: “It’s different. Magic, Eddie, Prince are not niggers, I mean, are not black. I mean, they’re black but not really black. They’re more than black. It’s different.”
Bleich explains: “You can think one thing about race in sports, but that can be radically disconnected from your opinions about race in society.” Thus, in France, where 30 per cent of adults identified themselves as racist in a 2006 survey for the National Consultative Commission of Human Rights, Zidane was voted most popular Frenchman in the Journal du dimanche newspaper’s poll in January.
Bleich says: “This is the same phenomenon as people saying, ‘I’m not racist. Some of my best friends are black.’” The success of athletes such as Zidane can even be used to castigate other immigrants for failing in France. Patrick Weil, political scientist at the university of Paris 1 – Sorbonne, laments: “Our racists say, ‘If only all Arabs could be like Zidane.’”
Worse, having black sporting heroes may merely confirm what racists already believe about black people. Claude Boli, a historian researching black sportsmen, says: “It sadly reinforces the stereotypes: that blacks are good in sport, in music. So football is not a force for integration. On the contrary, it’s a bitter success which hides many things.”
In England, it is widely believed that the national football team has helped fight racism. After black players were abused in Spain and Slovakia, their white teammates reacted with outrage. Racist chants have almost died out in English stadiums. Trevor Phillips, chair of the UK’s Commission for Equality and Human Rights, told me: “I have no doubt that David Beckham saying, ‘Look, I don’t do racism,’ is incredibly important. Football is the one thing that large numbers of people, particularly men, participate in.”
However, there is little evidence that football has helped change attitudes to race; rather, changing attitudes to race appear to have changed football. Piara Power, director of British football’s anti-racism campaign Kick It Out, says: “The success of our work is that it’s happened at the same time there have been other changes in society. You see far less racially abusive language in most households in Britain; jokes about black people and that sort of thing.” When Beckham attacked racism, even the tabloid newspaper The Sun cheered him on.
Significantly, several of the England internationals who are described as “black” have a white parent. West Indian immigrants have high rates of intermarriage with the white working classes – the ultimate mark of integration. This is less true of Asians, few of whom have ever penetrated the mostly white working-class world of football.
Power believes that football may have some effect on the racial attitudes of children – thought to be more malleable than those of adults – and his campaign focuses on schools. But research by Harvard psychologists Andrew Scott Baron and Mahzarin R. Banajifrom shows that children “achieve an adultlike concept of race”, often definable as racism, by age five.
Every new nation needs its founding myths. In the new South Africa, many of those are supplied by sport. A year after apartheid ended, the country hosted and won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. In a seminal moment in the country’s modern history, Nelson Mandela, dressed in the jersey of the Springboks’ white captain, Francois Pienaar, handed Pienaar the trophy. The gesture helped transform an almost all-white 15 into a national team. Piet Koornhof, once an apartheid minister of sport, told me: “I feel the new South Africa is really a miracle. It is predestined. The combination of caucasians and people from Africa is destined to make the world a better place.”
Pahad attended the final, and afterwards found himself in the black township of Soweto. “What was so remarkable,” he says, “was that people were celebrating in the team’s shirts in Soweto. I don’t think anybody plays rugby in Soweto.”
In 1996, South Africa’s football team, Bafana Bafana, became African champions. Leaving the stadium, Sandile Dikeni, a poet and broadcaster, got stuck in traffic. The police were no help, Dikeni recalls, because they were too busy celebrating: “There was this big Afrikaner guy standing on his car and shouting, ‘Bafana Bafana!’”
Sport certainly united South Africa during those moments of triumph – and the effect of those sporting moments may well have been lasting. When the International Social Survey Program measured national pride in 33 countries in 2003, it ranked South Africa fifth. (The US and Venezuela were joint first.) The South African experience suggests that athletes can enhance national pride. The question is: what use is that? South Africans still live in those segregated neighbourhoods and gun each other down in unprecedented numbers.
A minimum of national spirit is necessary to stop nations from falling apart. But Yugoslavia, the USSR and East Germany produced world-beating athletes, not all of them drugged, yet collapsed regardless. The Swedish writer Henning Mankell has argued of war-torn Angola: “If people play together on a soccer team they can hardly leave the game and wage war against each other.” Well, the former Yugoslavs managed.
If policymakers reviewed the evidence, they might conclude that harnessing sport to build nations is not worth the time. Though it might sometimes boost national pride, that doesn’t seem to do countries much good. Nor does sport appear to help integrate ethnic minorities, although it might provide visible evidence, as in England, that minorities have become more integrated.
Nonetheless, policymakers can’t seem to leave sport alone. Perhaps the reason is that sport is as much fun for governments as for athletes. Making a bid to host a World Cup means you appear on television and meet sporting heroes. That is more glamorous than trying to do something about HIV or run a decent train service. It is also easier: in sport almost everyone is on the same side. The Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s normally combative opposition party, is doing all it can to facilitate the World Cup because it is terrified of appearing critical of it.
When the issue is sport, everyone wants to help. Philippe Baudillon, chief executive of Paris’s doomed bid to host the 2012 Olympics, once told me the usual story about how the games would help regenerate rundown areas. I asked if Paris couldn’t regenerate them without spending nearly 20 years bidding for the games. “No,” said Baudillon. “Doing these bids has made people work together who otherwise wouldn’t have. This afternoon at three, I have a meeting with all the mayors of the western zone. These people never otherwise meet.”
Surely that was an indictment of French administration? “Yes, of course,” said Baudillon. But not just of French administration.
