‘He’s back!” the paper trumpeted on the front page. Above the caption there was a full-colour picture of a man with popping eyes and a moustache. That was supposed to be me.
Even though I didn’t think the picture bore any resemblance to the real me, strangers and old acquaintances alike would stop me in the street in the annoyingly familiar manner that South Africans have, interrupting me in mid conversation if they felt like it.
“So you’re back,” they said. “I didn’t know you’d
gone. Where’ve you been?”
It’s none of your business, I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “Africa.”
The information didn’t elicit much interest. Africa is still an imaginary place far, far away for most of our people. Hollywood, Disneyland, Manchester United and now the hideously Hunnish Germany are far more real in the South African imagination than that dubious collection of tribes, wild animals and peculiar customs called Africa.
I had been gone for perhaps a month. After Cameroon and Senegal, it was strange indeed to be walking the streets of home again. It was hard to explain what it felt like to all these inquisitive strangers. (Even my old friends, like Yao-Man, Fat Baf and Dubai Debbie, have become strangers since I have adapted to the quiet accents of West Africa. I had forgotten how loud everyone is in Johannesburg.)
I would be returning to that other Africa – to the forests and deserts, the charm, the curious encounters and the occasional sense of dismay. That had become my reality. But now I was back in South Africa.
I walked into a frisson of anticipation. The whole nation was involved in the countdown to the announcement of the successful bid for the staging of the 2006 soccer World Cup. Racially inspired farm murders were still going on, soldiers were killing their superior officers in military camps, well-meaning European volunteers who had come to help wash the oil-stricken penguins of Dassen Island were being held up at gunpoint in the Mother City and taxi drivers were shooting up Golden Arrow buses at random.
And yet, somehow, the whole nation was united in anticipation of the country’s winning the bid hands down. It was like the image of a man and wife beating the hell out of each other, but pausing, hands still gripping each other by the throat, to sit down on the sofa to watch The Bold and the Beautiful when it came up on the TV screen at the appointed hour.
When it came to the crunch, and South Africa was not granted victory, we showed once again what ungracious losers we can be. The words “Athens se ma se poes“, elegantly referring to Cape Town’s unsuccessful bid to host the Olympic Games, had hardly died on the lips of thousands of patriotic Cape bergies when new epithets in even stronger language were delivered nationwide on the subject of the perfidious Germans, and the even more perfidious behaviour of a certain old man from the Pacific rim who seemed to have lost his marbles anyway and shouldn’t have been allowed out of doors by himself, let alone given the onerous task of casting the deciding vote.
I don’t know. The wrangling around who would win the bid sounded like a lot of intense skulduggery to me, with professional negotiators walking around with loaded briefcases making deals with friends and enemies alike, promising who knows what favours in exchange for supporting votes. Money, as ever, seems to have swung a lot of votes. So what does this have to do with sport?
Money, or the need for it, is also one of the justifications uttered plaintively by the shocked rainbow masses of South Africa. If “we” had won, say the people of the AmaBokoboko, urgently needed billions of hard currency would have poured into our country, enabling us to surge forward towards national development.
How does this follow? Has soccer become the answer to all our problems? Would a world soccer event have brought wisdom and enlightenment to our people?
Are we talking about soccer merely boosting the infrastructure of the major cities where the tournaments would have taken place, or is it possible that this jamboree would somehow have also broken the poverty deadlock in the Northern and Eastern Cape, not to mention rural KwaZulu-Natal and the Cape Flats?
As a last resort, the Germany debacle was cited as yet another slap in the face to the pride of the African continent as a whole. And yet, when Africa Cup champions Cameroon (my home team now, by the way) dropped out at an early stage, South Africans did not cry histori-cal foul. Nor did they look apologetic when they themselves, as fellow Africans, were active in squeezing the plucky Moroccan bid out of the picture. It was only when the noble, home-grown philosophy of Bafanabafanism collapsed at the final hurdle that these pious, neo-pan-Africanist sentiments came to the fore.
They say that jingoism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Far be it from me to imply that any of my erstwhile and future country persons down here are scoundrels, but this reaction does make me wonder just a little.
Did the “best man” win the 2006 bid? Who knows – it’s all smoke and mirrors, greased with a lot of dollars and a fat smidgen of dubious national pride all round.
What we do know is that it had very little to do with sport, or with Africa, or with national development.
From our side, it had to do with a country that is still looking for the quick fix – the “‘n Boer maak ‘n plan” mentality (and we’re all starting to act like Boers these days), if only someone would give us the means to make our plan work.
The question is (as I gird up for the chicken run again to get the hell out of here and back into actual Africa): what is the actual plan? It can’t just be soccer, soccer, soccer till the cows come home. Where’s the beef?
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza