WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Great footballers seldom visit South Africa, but during apartheid Bobby Charlton once led a tour there. “We played Kaizer Chiefs in Soweto and it was one of the nicest days I’ve ever had,” he reminisced years later. “There were only, say, 20 white people in Soweto that day, and the people were so pleased to see us. In fact, at the end they took us on their shoulders and tried to carry us off home with them. We had to fight to get our lot back on the bus.”
It may be a little like that when the Confederations Cup – featuring the champion countries of each continent – kicks off in South Africa on June 14. The tournament is not just a dry run for next year’s World Cup in the country. It is also the biggest breach yet in South Africa’s footballing isolation. This is thrilling for South Africans, but it is also disturbing. Isolation helped make South African football – and indeed South Africa itself – what it is today.
As a child visiting my grandparents in Johannesburg, I was always amazed that the country did not have television. Only in 1976 did the white government permit the dangerous device. South Africa under apartheid was not quite as isolated as the moon, but it wasn’t far off.
Black South Africans were triply cut off from the world, by distance, poverty and sanctions. As soccer was a largely black game, it was particularly isolated. Foreign football was known to exist, but rarely glimpsed. Fifa didn’t permit its World Cup to be shown in the apartheid state until 1990. At most, a black South African might catch a foreign match in the cinema years after it had been played.
Many South Africans under apartheid felt the sadness of being at the end of the earth, cut off. The Sowetans who tried to carry Charlton home were yearning to touch the world. But isolation also offers safety. If you are alone, nobody can challenge you. So South Africa cultivated an ornate style of football that went extinct everywhere else. The style has various names – such as “piano and shoeshine”, or “ticky-ticky” – but it essentially means doing tricks on the ball while standing around. Many South Africans still fondly imagine that this is Brazilian football, if perhaps done better.
“South Africans played on their own. We thought we were so smart,” says Danny Jordaan, chief executive of next year’s World Cup, recalling the country’s return to international football in 1992. “When we played our first international match against Zimbabwe, every South African knew we were going to hammer Zimbabwe.” Instead they lost 4-1.
South African rugby and cricket had suffered isolation too. But they were mostly white sports. The country’s whites were so rich that even during apartheid they remained connected to global networks. After apartheid fell, they quickly learned the new best practice in their sports. By contrast, South African football stayed quite isolated. When the national team, the Bafana Bafana, travelled to their first World Cup in 1998, many South Africans imagined they would win it playing ticky-ticky. That didn’t happen.
Nowadays South African television shows ample foreign football. Yet the isolationist mindset persists, as does ticky-ticky. The typical foreign coach lands in South Africa saying that the players there already have great technique, and that he will teach them discipline. It never quite works. The fans and players don’t want discipline. They want ticky-ticky, players who can do special South African tricks like the “tsamaya” or the “shibobo”. A foreign coach might drop a player just because he is drunk, when the whole stadium has come to watch the guy do tricks.
So South Africa’s encounters with foreign football have mostly been disappointing. Bafana Bafana rank 72nd in the world, behind Panama and Gambia. No wonder it has been so hard to sell tickets to the Confederations Cup: only a late, expensive advertising campaign has made sales respectable. With hindsight, there was something wonderful about purveying tsamaya and shibobo in glorious isolation.
