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

Three Lions Ate My Shirt: England Fans in South Africa

159 Three lions Ate my Shirt England Fans in South Africa mARk PeRRYmAN The bANTeR AbouT SouTh AFRICA began the moment that Wayne Rooney put the final goal past the opposition keeper to complete England ’s 5–1 rout of Croatia and clinch “our” World Cup qualification. British newspaper clichés would shortly be joined by murkier tales of spiraling murder and armed robbery rates, uncompleted stadiums, the risk of contracting HIV and AIDS, and the grinding poverty that would leave the local population resentful at best and vengeful at worst. This was a land where those of us who wear the three lions on our chest might catch a glimpse of the threesome in the wild instead. But the wildlife, the landscape, the people, and the cultures we would be experiencing scarcely earned a mention. Nor did the fact that South Africa hosted the World Cup of rugby and cricket (in 1995 and 2003, respectively ), as well as thirty-five thousand fans following the other Lions (the egg-chasing variety), all with great success. Steve Bloomfield was one of the few Western journalists to go against this flow of bad-news stories and to try to analyze why they were being written. “Like so much coverage of South Africa, stereotypes can easily take over,” he wrote in the Independent. “Wars and humanitarian crises get far more exposure than stories about economic growth, technological advances and stability. The West’s view of Africa is still seen through the prism of tragedy, meaning the story of Africa’s first World Cup is read with a certain amount of cynicism. How could 160 • AFRICA’S WoRld CuP a continent that cannot feed itself, is ruled by despots and always at war host one of the world’s largest events?”1 When the South African far right-winger Eugène Terre’Blanche was murdered in April 2010, the Daily Star front page screamed, “World Cup Fans Face Bloodbath—Race War Declared in South Africa.” The group Terre’Blanche had led, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, or AWB), is a small white-supremacist outfit. The idea that the AWB could threaten the security of the World Cup was a sensationalist fantasy, yet the serious press followed the tabloids , giving the AWB threats a credibility they did not deserve. The fans who followed England to South Africa were in the main experienced away travelers. We’d visited Belarus, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan in the course of the 2010 World Cup qualifying campaign. Belarus remains Europe’s last communist dictatorship; Dniepropetrovsk , where the game against the Ukraine was played, usually receives only a handful of tourists from England a year; what Kazakhstan had previously meant to most of us came from its make-believe ambassador, Borat. These are places fans visit with a mixture of eager excitement and careful caution. So why should South Africa be so different for us? A month or so before the World Cup, I invited a panel of South Africans to address a fans’ World Cup travel forum. Perhaps inevitably, the issue of the AWB came up. Audrey Brown, a South African journalist currently working for the BBC World Service, took a look around our crowd of mainly white faces: “I don’t think any of you are going to be victims of a white supremacist race war, are you?” As the grin spread across Audrey’s face, we could not for the life of us think why we and the media had taken the threats seriously in the first place. In addition to these popular misconceptions about “darkest Africa,” fans had to contend with FIFA’s corporate vision. For FIFA, our World Cup is all about serving the association’s financial interests and those of its multinational sponsors. FIFA’s mission is to persuade us to travel to the other side of the world to drink Budweiser, eat Big Macs, and watch Shakira on the big screen while staying within the officially sanctioned fan parks and fenced exclusion zones around World Cup stadiums. As a small yet conscious act of resistance to FIFA-style corporate football, we organized a send-off party in London where we drank South African beer, ate South African food, and immersed ourselves in a night of South African music, comedy, and dance. And when we ar- Three Lions Ate My Shirt • 161 rived in South Africa and declared at every opportunity that...