Africa's World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space

An Aficionado's Perspectives on the Complexity and Contradictions of Rooting for a Team in the 2010 World Cup

119 An Aficionado’s Perspectives on the Complexity and Contradictions of Rooting for a Team in the 2010 World Cup SImoN AdeToNA AkINdeS I WAS boRN ANd gReW uP in Benin, West Africa. I have played and been an aficionado of the “beautiful game” for as long as I can remember . My love affair with the World Cup was lived through French magazines such as Le Miroir du Football, France Football, L’Equipe,Afrique Football, and Onze and occasionally through television. Although the desire to watch a live World Cup game in Europe or Latin America was burning, it remained pure imagination, a kind of fairy tale. At the time, it was financially too onerous for my dream to be realized. In 1994, I was studying at Ohio University when the United States hosted the World Cup. I was so close to the grandiose commercial mass ritual with which the world had grown infatuated, but despite my lifelong passion for football, I did not seriously think of attending any of the games. As a graduate student and teaching assistant, I had limited financial means, and perhaps oddly, I avoided catching the World Cup fever. Even after I started working as a full-time academic in the United States, I did not feel the urge to travel to the World Cup tournaments in France in 1998, South Korea and Japan in 2002, or Germany in 2006. Then came South Africa 2010. Experiencing it became a personal act of devotion and a historic obligation. This time around, I was not going to miss it. Travel from the United States would be expensive, but 120 • AFRICA’S WoRld CuP the occasion was monumental. South Africa, the former pariah state, had the privilege of hosting the World Cup and of representing Africa as a whole. In my consciousness and political landscape, South Africa represented many symbols, often contradictory ones. It was not a vacation destination like Cancún in Mexico, Copacabana in Brazil, or Varadero in Cuba. My link to South Africa was organic, almost umbilical . As an African, I grew up following intimately the struggle against apartheid. I read Dennis Brutus, Alex La Guma, André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Breyten Breytenbach , Sipho Sepamla, and many other great South African writers. I listened to musical giants like Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Mzwakhe Mbuli, Bayete, Vusi Mahlasela, and Johnny Clegg. Apartheid was a crime against humanity. It harshly affected black South Africans, of course, but it was also an insult and a traumatic assault on the psyche of all Africans. South African religious customs and beliefs, “traditional” political structures, and a shared past of colonial racism and exploitation meant that the struggle in South Africa echoed throughout Africa, the diaspora, and indeed much of the world.1 In short, for political and cultural reasons, although a native of Benin, I considered South Africa home. As the preparations for the 2010 tournament got under way, I cherished the hope that a home team would win the cup on liberated South African soil. Any victory by Cameroon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Algeria, or South Africa would also be mine. The way I saw it, it was time to add an African country to the list of past World Cup winners, which featured only European and South American nations: Brazil (five times), Italy (four), Germany (three), Argentina and Uruguay (two), and England and France (one). South Africa 2010 meant conflicted pride. It inspired hope for a new dawn, an “African Renaissance,” to use the phrase of former South African president Thabo Mbeki.2 South Africa offered the possibility and hope of imagining an alternative path of development, different from the one-dimensional, free-market-oriented dogma that has taken hold of the continent. A successful World Cup in South Africa could flatter and reawaken my Africanness. Yet my satisfaction with black South Africans wielding political power was partially countered by the knowledge that much of the country’s land and wealth still belonged to the white minority. As Nelson Mandela explained in his autobiography , Long Walk to Freedom, “The truth is that we are not yet free; we An Aficionado’s Perspectives • 121 have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed . . . .We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road.”3...