You’ve seen the World Cup advert: A truck swathed in the red-and-white of Fifa’s official soft-drink partner trundles up to an African border post manned by two surly officials — both as dark as the heart imagined by Joseph Conrad.
The white truck-driver is about to enter a country ruled by an African Big Man: The obvious give-away, a gigantic Marshmallow Man-meets-Mao statue nearby.
The driver alights. The guards enter the truck. They spy the World Cup trophy inside and open bottles of the black gold, apparently rousing a stow-away pygmy deejay hidden amongst the cases.
The truck fills with the lyrics to Waving the Flag, the official World Cup anthem by K’naan and David Bisbal: “Give me freedom/ Give me fire, Give me reason/ Take me higher”. The guards laugh, dance, take photographs with the trophy and drink cola before eventually letting the truck across the border.
An advert as delicate as one of ANCYL president Julius Malema’s Kill poems: Africa is still a basket case where dictators rule over buffoons who can grin, sing and dance, but never liberate themselves.
But, watching football and drinking carbonated sugar water is going to free us from our miserable lives and the goons who usually run them. Well, for ninety minutes at least.
As refreshing as the dregs of last night’s brandy-and-coke.
One of the myriad positive changes South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup is supposed to usher in is a paradigm shift in considering Africa.
The World Cup, we are told, is an opportunity to dispel notions of continental dysfunction and showcase an African democracy with the infrastructure and ability to host a mega-event like the World Cup.
It is patently obvious that one of Fifa’s main sponsors — with distribution into almost every corner of this continent — does not agree. Rather, it kicks around lazy stereotypes of Africa that are both racially and politically offensive.
Not that Fifa executives lag in this regard. This week at a sports conference in Dubai, Fifa general secretary Jerome Valcke, was optimistic that the tournament will be sold out, noting that “people are finally waking up very late” to the World Cup.
A deft shimmy by Valcke that shifts focus and blame for initially slow ticket sales away from the hogging of tickets by Fifa and its operator Match and onto the lazy, ignorant natives.
But, we shouldn’t expect much from multi-national companies like Coca-Cola or Fifa — despite their platitudes and swish adverts with catchy pop-tunes. Their bottom line has always been financial.
Any lofty notions regarding the transformative powers of sport has always played second fiddle to flogging product, merchandise and tickets.
The only political nuance understood is when personal or financial power is threatened by, for example, Colombian bottlers unionizing against Coca-Cola or when Fifa president Sepp Blatter needs to consolidate African voting blocks by dropping in on the likes of Liberia’s Charles Taylor before an election.
What is increasingly apparent is that to move perceptions of Africa — from the veering extremes of emaciated starving children and bloated kleptocrats, of wars and disease, or of a single continental plain populated by wild-life and half-dressed grinning natives — South Africa will have to do more than just hold a successful kick-about in June and July.