The more I read Rory Carroll’s piece (“Why I never quite fell for South Africa“, August 18) the more I was reminded of a recent letter from the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP) to Fifa, explaining to world football’s governing body why it had made a mistake by letting South Africa host the soccer World Cup in 2010.
Carroll says there is no need for alarm, yet he is nothing short of alarmist.
On the evidence of this and other articles, Carroll abhors easy racial profiling, and is likely to be devastated by any association of his views with those of the whites-only HNP. But in this case the similarities are striking. Both the HNP and Carroll rely on the HIV/Aids and crime statistics to conclude that South Africa is a country at war with itself.
The HNP’s language is more dramatic. He asks in the letter: “Are you prepared to expose your soccer stars and countrymen to a situation where law and order is seriously in jeopardy? Are you prepared to expose them to violent crimes such as robbery, battery, assault, rape and possibly murder?”
Carroll dispenses with the hyperbole, but lets it slip that South Africa’s crime situation has challenged his opposition to capital punishment.
As Sepp Blatter proclaimed in astonishment at the bad-mouthing of this country: “Mamma Mia.”
So what do we say about our man in Johannesburg? That he at least, unlike the HNP, was not motivated by racism, but was just penning his objective feelings about South Africa based on his experiences?
Carroll’s anguished outpouring coincided with a conference in Nairobi last week that discussed how the world media covers Africa. The overwhelming feeling from African journalists was disgust at how, at a stroke of a pen, international correspondents misrepresent the continent and consign it to the realm of stereotype.
Carroll makes bold, sweeping statements about this country that appear to stem more from his generalised opinions about Africa. Reading his piece you are likely to get a picture of a country on the precipice of collapse. Save for the qualifications about South Africa’s unique race relations, he could have been describing the European or North American journalist’s stereotypical Africa.