The Cape Town 2004 Olympic Bid’s attempts to `Africanise’ its programme may be too little, too late, argues Julian Drew
DEPUTY Foreign Affairs Minister Essop Pahad has shared a vital fact with Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, a fact that has so far eluded the bid company: the first known records of organised sport are from Africa.
With just eight weeks remaining before the vote in Lausanne, Cape Town is at last moving with some urgency to align Africa behind its bid for the 2004 Olympic Games. While this alliance alone will not ensure a South African victory, without a strong African identity and the support of the whole continent the bid is doomed to failure.
Recently the International Olympic Committee (IOC) member for Cote d’Ivoire, Louis Guirandou N’Diaye, pointed out that the bid company was too white, precipitating the formation of a Cabinet sub-committee to help promote the bid.
Although the bid company produced sound technical and financial proposals which won Cape Town a place on the five-city shortlist, most of the upper echelons of management are white, forming the core of the IOC lobby team. N’Diaye’s comments merely confirmed what had long been a concern both inside and outside the bid.
The question that should be asked, however, is why it took so long to address what was obviously a fundamental flaw for a bid whose main selling point is that it is one for all Africa – the only continent yet to stage the games.
Perhaps the answer lies in a comment from Jean-Claude Ganga, president of the Association of National Olympic Committees of Africa and IOC member for Congo- Brazzaville. “I think what is important is not whether they are white or black. It’s what they have in their minds.”
This sentiment was echoed by N’Diaye: “We want to see blacks and whites together. We don’t want to give you numbers, but let us feel that you are together. It’s not a question of colour. It’s a question of the mind.”
Technically competent the bid team may be, but do they have what it takes to reach out to Africa? It is a question which faces many South Africans who have yet to accept that their future and that of this country is inextricably bound with that of Africa.
If the exemplar is bid chief executive Chris Ball, the signs have not been encouraging. The appointment of white “peers” to priority jobs and a lack of commitment to black empowerment are common criticisms of his leadership that indicate a lingering Eurocentrism.
While it is easy to say that there were no suitably qualified black people to fill many key positions, and in some instances this is true, in the final analysis it is these outward perceptions which create the real impressions of the bid.
The Olympic bid is a clarion call to unite South Africa behind something which can provide hope for all Africans and act as a catalyst for what Mbeki calls the African renaissance.
Fine rhetoric you might say, but what does Cape Town do now with so little time left? As the government and bid company quite rightly point out, the emphasis must be on lobbying IOC members – for it is they who will vote – and fine-tuning the final presentation for Lausanne in September.
Communicating with Africa is not easy, but many members of the African media have been to Cape Town recently and they will now begin to inform people about Cape Town’s bid – and hopefully that it is for Africa.
Keeping them updated with new developments is difficult, however, owing to poor technology. Few have fax machines and even fewer have e-mail. Television too has an extremely limited audience, although many opinion-makers in urban centres have access to television.
According to the bid’s media director, Ameen Akhalwaya, it is radio which has proved to be a godsend. “Our strategic target for Africa was always through radio more than anything else because we thought that would be the most effective medium.
“We have also started to use our embassies in Africa to distribute information and monitor the situation which is working reasonably well,” said Akhalwaya. But will it be a case of too little too late?
“I just came from a tour of West Africa and I can tell you that nobody thinks of this bid as their bid. They think about Cape Town at the same level as Stockholm or Athens,” said Ganga.
The involvement of the government will help, but what is more essential is a beefed-up marketing campaign, requiring people with their finger on the pulse of Africa – and there seem to be few of them in the bid company. You get the feeling that those behind marketing strategy wouldn’t know whether to dunk Petit Pays into Koffi Olomide or get down and boogie to them.
Pauline Carstens, who heads the bid’s marketing team, agrees that this is a valid criticism but says her company, Ogilvy and Mather, “has offices in Africa and we are working with them to help us spread the word”.
If the historians and archaeologists of the 19th century hadn’t practised a narrow Eurocentrism that for so long kept Africa and the Third World on the outside, ancient Egypt and not Greece might have provided the inspiration for Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s revival of a global sporting festival that now goes by the name of the Olympic Games.
Sport in the Egypt of the pharaohs may have been overshadowed by sport in ancient Greece, but recent research shows that the Egyptians held regular sporting contests over a period of 2 700 years from the beginning of the third millennium BC – far longer than the 1 200 years of the ancient Olympics and predating them by more than 2 000 years.
Surely then if Africa is so central to the origins of known sport and the African diaspora increasingly dominant in modern sport, is it not time to stage the Olympic Games in Africa?
De Coubertin himself was a strong campaigner for the development of sport in Africa – it was his motivation at the 1923 IOC session in Rome which led to the organisation of the 1929 All Africa Games in Alexandria, cancelled at the last minute by the colonial powers.
While the IOC of today may have moved far away from the original ideals of De Coubertin in an increasingly commercial age, it will not be before time if De Coubertin’s games finally come to Africa.