What is wrong with the Moroccans and the Egyptians? You feel like just banging their heads together, because they let the soccer World Cup of 2010 slip through their fingers without a fight.
No doubt, with their effete, Anglo-Francophone colonial backgrounds, they thought that this was supposed to be a gentlemanly contest. They didn’t reckon with the innate tsotsi culture of South Africans, where gentlemanliness doesn’t come into it.
‘Hit below the belt and run with the ball” is the lesson learned on every rock-strewn soccer, rugby and hockey field from KwaMashu to Bonteheuwel. And when it came to bidding for the World Cup, the Beloved Country, and some of its finest citizens, did just that.
I don’t know about the Moroccans, but even Sepp Blatter, the ring- master and boss of the whole World Cup shenanigan, had to admit that the Egyptians gave the best presentation to the committee that was to decide which country would host this hotly contested tournament.
In the event, giving the most polished presentation had nothing to do with the final outcome.
The only thing that everyone was certain of was that, this time round, it had to be an African affair (which is an unfair advantage to begin with, but later for that). The only question that remained to be answered was: Which was the best African country to represent Africa? And of course, the subsidiary question to that was: What is an African?
This is what the rest of the world, and indeed Africa itself, had to decide. The whole affair swung on these two points. Everything else was a done deal.
There was always this unspoken murmur in the background from sub-Saharan Africa, as they call it, which said that Moroccans and Egyptians are merely dark-skinned whites from the Mediterranean, and not Africans at all. Psychologically, this put them beyond the pale (excuse the pun).
But they still made a half-hearted attempt to fight back. ‘We are Africans,” they whined. ‘We always have been. We live here. We’ve always lived here. Look at the Pyramids and stuff like that.”
Which was entirely fair game. We brown-skinned, flat-nosed, round-buttocked sub-Saharans are all too ready to claim Hannibal, Carthage, the Sphinx and the Pyramids as part of the African renaissance when it suits us. It’s just the people who live there who try to take over our traditional game of soccer that we don’t like.
Yet the North Africans could still have put themselves in there with a fighting chance if they could have bothered to try. Heck, Moroccan history goes back as far as you can imagine, and Egyptian history goes back even further than that. What did they do about it?
The Moroccans had every right to haul out the embalmed remains of the late King Hassan II (who only died in 1999, after all, and must still be fairly warm in his grave), a man who could claim direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed and the Queen of Sheba.
The Egyptians could, and should, have showed up in Zurich with the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh Cheops, the geezer who ordered the building of the Pyramids themselves. This alone would have proven their right to host the World Cup. ‘This is who we are!” they should have cried. ‘Give us a chance!”
In the event, they didn’t even have the sense to send their respective kings and presidents to lobby for the honours. They left it to a bunch of self-appointed bureaucrats to argue in their favour, believing, as I have said, that this was a gentlemanly sport, and rational argument would win the day.
South Africa, on the other hand, pulled out all the stops. Not only did we descend on the cowering selection panel with the state president, the minister of foreign affairs, various other ministers, the cream of black empowerment moguls and the former archbishop of Cape Town. We pulled the Madiba card.
Yes, ma’am. The Egyptians can keep their pharaohs. We’ve got Nelson Mandela. And no one says ‘no” to Madiba. Hy’s die main ou van die outfit, after all.
So the Egyptians and the Moroccans sat on their hands. We used ours to come out fighting, township style.
It was a little bit of overkill. But it worked.
And just to rub it in, we had a rowdy bunch of township thugs on hand to blast the blazes out of the gentle lobby of the elegant Dolder Grand hotel, Zurich, where all the high-flying delegates were staying, with flatulent, bum-bolting roars from their plastic vuvuzela trumpets, sounding Bafana Bafana discords into the small hours of the morning once the inevitable outcome had been announced.
And keeping the sedate neighbourhood awake, like it was Zondi or Guguletu or Limpopo. Just in case someone didn’t get the message.
The message is clear. 1) The African Union is not really an African union when our own personal interests are at stake — especially when there are Arabs involved. 2) History is bunk.
We South Africans might only have entered ‘history” a mere 10 years ago, but, by Bob, we sure are on top of it. What’s 5 000 years of dusty ruins compared to 10 years of rainbowism and the Reconstruction and Development Programme?
Yes, after all, we deserve the World Cup.
The question now is, how do we keep the hangover alive for the next six years? What will it mean when we wake up tomorrow, with our plastic vuvuzelas wilting in our hands, and have to get out there and make this all some kind of concrete reality?
Is the World Cup really our salvation? Is this really the shortcut to creating Jobs for All, as the ruling party’s manifesto would suggest? When the vuvuzelas have stopped blasting, what is left in the deafening silence? Work? Dignity? Patience? Arrogance? Or more agonising?
Has Madiba kicked the ball past the fumbling Pharaoh and straight into the net on our behalf?
Or do we, like the children of Israel, still have a terrible, terrible long way to go?