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21 World Cup Finale on long Street dANIel heRWITz IT IS JulY 11, 2010, the moment of victory for the Spanish team. Spain has put unrelenting pressure on the Dutch goal with elegant passing across midfield and shot after shot on goal until 116 minutes into the game, Andres Iniesta scores. It is a victory of decency over roughhouse . The Dutch have played a kick-bite game, with seven players earning yellow cards and Heitinga sent off; they have clawed their way to possession, but Spain has retained civility on the field and won. The game has been a parable about clean versus brutal. The best team has won out by holding the high moral ground and proving themselves. In an event replete with contingency, disappointment, mistakes, accidents, yellow cards, and other disasters, the finale has the feel of a storybook ending. By midnight, twenty thousand youths are dancing down Long Street in central Cape Town, glowing in the illumination of moon, stars, and flat-screen TV. They spill from bars, cafés, and restaurants in a river of unfurled flags and vuvuzelas. The street that has hosted the fan walk, part of the ritual approach to Green Point Stadium from the (Dutch East India) Company Gardens prefacing World Cup matches in Cape Town, is tonight medieval; its mosques, government buildings, clothing shops, old bookstores have disappeared behind courtiers draped in the red and yellow colors of Spain. French hug Ghanaians who down beer with English who carouse with Mexicans who sing with Senegalese . South Africans of every color are merged into the crowd, for an instant reveling in this international suspension of human division as a metaphor of themselves. Tonight, social strife and division have been 22 • AFRICA’S WoRld CuP red-carded. There is only the shared splendor of success, the euphoria that the country has pulled it off, neither glass nor bones have been broken, tourists have not been assaulted, the games have proceeded like clockwork in beautiful stadiums—the best World Cup ever, some announcers have said.1 South Africa has announced itself as safe as Britain, as orderly as Germany. It profiled itself as capable of pulling off a major signature event, branded itself for the global marketplace.2 By some irony, it has taken the gaze of the world and a global congregation in stadium and city to get South Africans to dance together. The last time South Africans occupied a unified space with this degree of pleasure was when the entire country stood in line to vote in the first democratic election of 1994. The World Cup has offered a second chance at the miraculous. They are happy to fall into a dreamlike belief that their feeling of fellowship is sustainable and their future assured. A taste of the Cape and every European will want to invest in property and tourism , even if it has been raining during many of the games and the glorious Table Mountain has been invisible through the fog.After a ten-year hiatus, the World Cup has reactivated South Africa’s national narrative, which the country inhabited as if in a trance during the 1990s. Cut to 1994, to the first “miracle,” which this World Cup reactivated in spirit, a “negotiated revolution” that took place out of a spiral of economic collapse and increasing violence that had accompanied the demise of the apartheid state.3 South Africa’s transition to democracy between 1990 (when Nelson Mandela was released from prison) and 1994 proved the so-called miracle that nobody believed could happen, even while it was happening.4 In December 1991, Mandela and state president F. W. De Klerk began formal negotiations to hammer out the terms for a new state. The Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) Talks between them and their parties were fraught with instability but continued on. These talks took place in a climate of fear and conflagration: Zulu nationalists of Inkatha aiming for provincial autonomy, aided and abetted by a shadowy “Third Force” made up of elements of the South African security establishment, fought the African National Congress, resulting in more than twelve thousand dead in the area today known as KwaZulu-Natal. And yet the talks led to the interim constitution (1993). That interim constitution, with its preamble about reconciliation, mandated the first free and democratic elections in the country’s history, the terms of the Truth and Reconcili- [3.133.79.70] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 00:47 GMT...

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