A contemporaneous reflection on South Africa during the 2010 FIFA World Cup from a former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria.
True Colours.’The Rainbow Nation’ showing its colourful side.
Amongst the hundreds of thousands of visitors to South Africa during the 2010 Football World Cup was Israel’s former ambassador to that country, Dr. Alon Liel. The attraction was not so much the sport itself, but rather to score how the host nation was performing – generally – in the international spotlight. The result was an illuminating book which Liel, poignantly titles:
“The Equalizer ” – Written by Alon Liel
Liel was the Israeli ambassador to South Africa during the tumultuous period 1992-1994, when the nation switched from ‘Apartheid pariah’ to a free and democratic society. That the transition – defying expectations – occurred peacefully, intrigued this Israeli intellectual, diplomat, academician and author.
His return for the 2010 World Cup, led to him spending a month in the country – and besides watching “a fair amount of soccer” – he interviewed a wide range of people from all sectors of “The Rainbow Nation”. The book is not about football. Rather, the World Cup provided “a framework to explore the gap between alleged misery and exuberant morale.”
“I arrived in the country early because I wanted to at least catch South Africa playing a few games,” says Liel. In common with most football cognoscenti, Liel was not alone in hardly expecting the host-country’s national squad to survive beyond the qualifying round.
Blowing their Own Trumpet. South Africans introducing the world to the vuvuzela.
But what interested Liel, “was that it also was not expected” that the World Cup event would emerge such a spectacular success. “People, locally and abroad, had such low expectations that South Africa would pull it off. The feeling was that the stadiums and the transport infrastructure would fail to be ready on time, there would be insufficient hotel accommodation and that rampant crime would prevail. These fears droned on persistently, featuring as frequent news items in the world media. And the result? Everything was ready, there was no crime and the atmosphere was electric.” The nation was ignited, not only in support of their team but in support of itself “as a people, as a nation – and this was the performance that really mattered, and what I explore in my book.”
Didn’t the exuberant enthusiasm, so metaphorically blasted by the vuvuzela, colour your observations and conclusions?
“South Africa’s success was no coincidence. This plucky nation defied the skeptics again. You may recall how people doubted that the political transition in the early 1990s would be peaceful, and yet they pulled it off with such moral aplomb providing in the process one of the most liberal constitutions in the world. And so too with the World Cup! The consensus is that the South African World Cup was the best ever. They raised the bar. It’s no longer a case for the lagging South Africans to catch up but for others to catch up to them.”
Hosting the World Cup was hugely costly. Was it worth it?
“Assessment cannot be measured simply by income and expenditure. The phenomenal success of the World Cup – Africa’s first – gave the nation a feeling of collective self confidence. It is now far more psychologically equipped to take on greater responsibility in global affairs. It affirmed the nation as a player – not on soccer fields – but in the arena of world affairs.
Furthermore, there were instructive lessons to learn from this World Cup.”
Such as?
“Sure, South Africa has many problems, particularly the low standard of living for much of the population, who suffer from a lack of housing, adequate health care and so on. Nevertheless, this is a society that puts a smile on its face and not just for the World Cup.
It’s part of its make-up.
The Right Moves. Visiting a school near Cape Town, Alon Liel meets with kids during an exercise class.
From my interviews, covering both the black and the white narratives, South African’s – by and large – are optimistic. When I spoke to the former and last white state president of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, he described to me that while South Africa is not short of problems there is one huge difference to when he was president. “When I was president, we had problems we could not solve without changing South Africa. Today, the problems of the nation are similar to those encountered elsewhere in the world. They are problems with solutions. We can solve them and we will – It’s only a question of time”.
You speak of South Africa’s human face. However, it was absent with a display of unsettling xenophobia shortly before the World Cup when African foreigners lived in fear?
“Don’t only look at the aberrations. If South Africa wanted to remove these foreigners it could. It chooses not to and so I was puzzled how they were integrated into the economy. To find out more I interviewed two Jewish brothers, Mark and Brett Levy whose company, Blue Label Telcoms, come to the rescue. It is a multi-billion-dollar company offering a wide variety of pre-paid electronic services, notably for utility services. Now, with the illegal immigrants unable to open bank accounts, and no financial facility to make payments for rent, electricity, water and telephone, the foreigners register with Blue Label, deposit their salaries in machines stationed all over the country, and the company pays their bills. In this way, illegal immigrants in their millions are integrated into the South African economy. There are certainly lessons here for Europe on how to absorb a large influx of foreigner workers.”
You mention the white narrative? How have the Afrikaners adjusted?
“I interviewed Dr. Pieter Mulder, the son of the late Dr. Connie Mulder, a stalwart of the old apartheid Nationalist Party. The son today is head of the Freedom Front, a political party that aims to protect Afrikaner interests. He explained to me the despair within his community, that well-educated white Afrikaners cannot get jobs in the public service – a sector they once dominated – and that this has impacted psychologically on their youth who display a declining incentive to excel.”
How is this being addressed?
Taste of a Township. Engaging with the people, Alon Liel samples local cuisine at a small restaurant in Mfuleni, near Cape Town.
“The prevailing view is that these people will be ‘The Lost Generation’ just as the black students in the 1976 uprising sacrificed their studies for the cause, and are today paying the price due to a lack of education. It will take a generation to correct – again it’s a problem that time will heal.
However, it’s sobering that Dr. Mulder, even with his sectarian ‘white Afrikaner’ agenda, was nevertheless the Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (2009-2014) in an ANC government!!”
The book too covers a wide range of interviews within the Jewish community. There are the recognizable names such as the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ Michael Katz, a tax advisor at the time to the Ministry of Finance and who sat on the Board of Directors of the 2010 FIFA World Cup; Anne Harris, the wife of the late Chief Rabbi, the late Bertie Lubner, who took Liel on a tour of the township of Mfuleni forty kilometres outside of Cape Town to see first-hand the projects of Ma’AfrikaTikun, and a host of lower profile individuals, who furnish a broad and balanced perspective of the South Africa of today, and the prospects of the South Africa of tomorrow.
Conclusions? Read it – it makes fascinating reading.
Despite the pessimists and the skeptics, Liel’s ‘Equalizer’ scores South Africa favourably. The country may still have a long way to go to reach a quarter or semi-final of a World Cup, but in the field of human relations and reconciliation, they clearly make the finals.
