South Africa

The head coach of Bafana Bafana, Alberto Parreira, has resigned to spend time with his sick wife. When officials from the South African Football Association (SAFA) announce Parreira’s successor on May 6, many expect that they will settle on another Brazilian, Joel Santana. Naturally SAFA and the country’s rabid fan base hope to ease the transition, as the next few years will be crucial in South African soccer circles, as th4e next coach will presumably lead Bafana Bafana into the 2010 World Cup, which the country is, of course, hosting. Recent years have been unkind to South African football, which has declined significantly since Bafana Bafana’s 1996-1997 heyday. Perhaps Santana will be the man to lead the team and thus the country to glory. The Springboks and Proteas seem to have garnered the bulk of media attention in recent years, both for their successes and their controversies, and yet in the end, the masses of South Africans love football and Bafana Bafana foremost.

There are those who say that there is no place for politics in sport, or for sport in politics, but such people are knaves or fools. Sports and politics have always been linked, and those who decry the politicization of sport tend to have their own political axes to grind. Opposing the global boycott of South African sport during the apartheid era, for example, was itself an insertion of politics into sport. The idea that somehow boycotting sport was political but that playing games against a pariah state’s segregated sports team– that allowing sport to go on amidst people’s clear opposition to a noxious racist regime — was not represents a form of intellectual chicanery that warrants little more than scorn.

Inevitably sport reflects the societies in which it is played. Not surprisingly, then, racial transformation in South African sport is and will continue to be a contentious issue as two fundamental sides face off: One arguing that issues of race and transformation have no place on the sports fields and one asserting that the days of protecting and privileging the white minority should be long over and that conscious efforts to transform the South African sporting scene are overdue.

My own take is that the most important progress will happen at the developmental level, where sport is about far more than “merit” and winning or losing. But at the highest level there still should be a conscious effort made to field competitive, world-class teams while still pushing for inclusiveness in sports that intentionally were exclusive for decades. All things being equal, in other words, give the edge to the person who would not have been allowed on the team in the bad old days.

This debate is all over the sports pages of South Africa these days, no matter how stubbornly some believe in building a wall between sport and the real world, as if these are different things rather than sports being a component of the real world. Thus race arouses controversy in questions over Springbok selection (present but also past, as if the two are separable in the context of South Africa),  the increasingly controversial composition of the Proteas, and among the chattering classes of the sports commentariat, who make arguments criticizing “short-sighted administrators who, 14 years into democracy, continue to confuse transformation with discrimination” as if fourteen years represents a long period of time and under the presupposition that the ongoing attempts at transformation represent prima facie cases of discrimination, the apparent belief being that whites are entitled to spots on the country’s national and professional teams unless black players can prove otherwise.

Transformation of sport in the country is not going to happen without both concerted effort and the ruffling of feathers of those who feel entitled to spots in the country’s sporting elite simply because they have always held those spots.  Cynical knee-jerk invocations of “discrimination” should not successfully prevent necessary changes from taking place. South African sport is strong enough to endure these necessary adjustments that will do nothing more than make the games South Africans play (and the society in which they play them) better.

Although the ICC One Day cricket World Championship does not carry with it the cache of a World Cup title, it still would represent a nice feather in the cap of the Proteas. The South Africans are within range of claiming that title if they can just muster up two more wins over Bangladesh. Given the recent crises within the sport, the One Day crown might salve at least a few wounds.

Meanwhile, fresh off of their more significant rugby world championship, South Africans hope to host the Rugby World Cup in 2015, twenty years after the Springboks’ epochal home triumph in 1995. That South Africa has successfully hosted the event before, the country’s status as a global rugby power, the tie-in with 1995, the fact that South Africa shares a time zone with European nation (which thus makes it appealing from a television perspective), and the 2010 FIFA World Cup being held in South Africa all would seem to point to reasons for optimism that the bid will succeed.

Finally, a new season of Super 14 rugby is well under way.

The sun will rise, the sun will set, and South African sport will exist in a perpetual case of turmoil. Or so it seems. Winning the Rugby World Cup last year does not seem to have provided a balm to SARU’s (usually self-inflicted) wounds and in many ways seems to have rubbed them raw. Even the hiring of the first black coach in Springbok history has not alleviated the racial pressures that threaten to tear apart South African rugby. And the national cricket team has been the target of finger pointing and accusatory words as the result of the Proteas’ racial composition. Race and sport are deeply intertwined in South Africa, and the country is going to have to continue to wrestle with these issues, which rarely have easy solutions even if some have facile answers.

In fact, the hiring of Peter De Villiers may simply have exposed some of the uglier politics in South African rugby’s seemingly atavistically racist culture. Jake White, who led Amabokoboko to the world championship last year, believes that the politics that always threaten to tear apart what should be a thriving rugby infrastructure may cost De Villiers his job sooner than anyone imagines. A  t almost the same time as White was making his ominous prediction, Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile had some strong words of his own, warning that the government will not sit idly by if it perceives that South Africa’s sporting community is rife with racism. 

South Africa will be dealing with the turmoil of transformation, racial and otherwise, for some time yet to come. And that transformation will not always be easy. Sport carries such symbolic and cultural resonance in South Africa that it should not come as a surprise that the national teams are a flashpoint for political issues. Romantics and fools might argue that politics has no place in sport and vice versa, but sports history, in South Africa and worldwide, have always played a political role. Sports sometimes lead societal debates, sometimes follow them, but are almost never exempt from them. Some might wish that sport existed in a hermetically sealed universe. It does not, and wishing for something different will not make it so.

Let’s forget, if at all possible, the power outages, political debates, Robert Mugabe’s destabilizing jackassery, and all of the other mundane grimness that afflicts South African public life these days. For the world of sport provides two of the saddest stories of all. The first is the fact that Bafana Bafana appears set to bow out of the African Nations Cup with barely a peep barring some sort of freak miracle involving St. Jude smiling upon their boots (and frowning upon some others). It seems like a long way from the rarefied air South African football seemed to occupy in the period from 1996 to 1998 or so.  If the possibility of a flameout from the country’s footballers isn’t enough to arouse paroxysms of frustration (and drinking) then the impending retirement of Protea Shaun Pollack will push most fans of South Africa’s sporting scene over the edge.

South Africa is a sport-mad society and 2007 was a year to fuel the country’s passions. The Proteas’ participation in the cricket World Cup and the run-up to South Africa’s hosting the 2010 World Cup would ordinarily have been the stories of the year, but by winning the Rugby World Cup the Springboks became the biggest story in South Africa’ s sporting scene in 2007 and one of the biggest stories period.

 IOL has a number of yearly wrap-up stories on rugby, including here, here, here, here, here, and here.

And for some of the year’s most memorable international sports quotations, see here.

Finally, as with just about every other facet of South African life, sports and politics often merge. The Mail & Guardian ran an interview this week with Sport and Recreation Minister Makhenkesi Stofile about the new Sports Amendment Act, which allows the government to intervene in matters related to sports, and about transformation in sport in general.
 

A number of stories caught my attention this weekend. Here are a few of them, with brief commentary as appropriate:

The Makana Football Association, which operated surreptitiously on Robben Island among the political prisoners has achieved recognition from FIFA, the sport’s governing body. A feature film, More Than Just a Game, starring Tsotsi’s Presley Chweneyagae, is to be released in South Africa in the next few weeks.

Thabo Mbeki recently has been stepping up his advocacy of a trilateral free trade area between South Africa, India, and Brazil. Mbeki believes that this trade bloc will give these leading nations in the developing world a stronger hand in trades with the World Trade Organization and will focus on addressing poverty and underdevelopment in the three countries and within the regional spheres that they dominate.

The Mail & Guardian’s “ZA @ Play” has an interview with Mark Gevisser, the respected observer of South African politics whose forthcoming book Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is highly anticipated. The interview is fairly anodyne, truth be told, but the book should stand as a definitive early treatment of Thabo Mbeki’s life if it can avoid the pitfalls of polemicism and advocacy to which virtually all of the books on Mbeki up to now have succumbed. 

Finally, a bit of a controversy has enveloped one of my old stomping grounds, Rhodes University. Last year Anne Warmenhoven submitted a doctoral thesis to Rhodes’ psychology department, which approved the dissertation and granted Warmenhoven the PhD. Her topic is the late disgraced former Proteas captain Hansie Cronje. But the dissertation apparently is nowhere to be found, apparently because members of Cronje’s family only agreed to speak with Warmwnhoven under conditions of secrecy. Obviously this goes against every principle of academic freedom and openness, not to mention ideals of transparency that are supposed to be a hallmark of the New South Africa.

I’m back from a week in England and am still absolutely buried with email and work and deadlines. But here are a lot of links on some of the crucial issues facing Africa and Africans:

The online news editor of The Economist is in Zimbabwe trying to get a feel for things there, to stay out of jail, and to report what he sees from a “Correspondent’s Diary”-cum-Blog called “Robert Mugabe, Man Or Monster?” Meanwhile, it probably should come as no surprise that Mugabe is “not losing sleep” over the prospect of western universities stripping him of honorary degrees they thrust upon him in a bygone era. I should think not.

Nigeria’s presidential election was a nightmare just as were the local and state elections that preceded it. As expected, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has declared Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Governor of Katsina State, the winner of last Saturday’s presidential election. Equally predictably, international observers scoff at the credibility of the polls, the opposition parties continue to press for protests and resistance, and The New York Times similarly laments the recent farce, though it is tough to discern what real “democratic legacy” they find in Nigeria’s history. J. Peter Pham had an astute pre-election assessment in the World Defense Review (courtesy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, for which I have been a fellow).

World Politics Watch shows how the April 11 terrorist bombings in Algiers fit into al Qaeda’s larger global plan. Of course the implication of the article is that the real concern is the potential for future attacks in Europe, which reveals a remarkable willingness to pass off African suffering as of secondary significance. Maybe someone should , say, the Somalians that their suffering only serves as a prelude to something more important. 

Closer to the putative focus of this blog (I’ve said all along that while my focus would be South Africa, I would try to place the country within its larger continental context) the Proteas advanced to the semi-final round of the cricket World Cup, but unfortunately barring some sort of miracle, the South Africans, who put up a pathetic 149 all out , their worst total ever in a World Cup and every bit as embarrassing as what they did to England last week, the Aussies are likely to reach the necessary 150 by somewhere around the 25th over. We should know soon enough. As I type this the Aussie juggernaut is at 27-1. South Africans should probably start to turn their attentions toward Amabokkobokko.

It doesn’t all have to be grim, though. Just imagine yourself isolated from it all, travelling along the Skeleton Coast, free of the cares of the world. There the bad news fades amidst the splendour of Africa.  

Your faithful scribe is leaving the country for about a week and as a consequence I may not be able to blog. I thus want to leave you with a lot of links from South Africa and Africa generally to take you to the weekend. I’ll be back next week.

According to The New York Times “A confidential United Nations report says the government of Sudan is flying arms and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and painting Sudanese military planes white to disguise them as United Nations or African Union aircraft.” I am baffled as to why this would come as a surprise to anyone. This has been Khartoum’s pattern from the outset — say whatever it takes to get loose of criticism and what always prove to be empty threats. A few days later back away and forge onward with the tyranny.

South Africans are feeling pretty good about their pasting of England to advance to the semi-final round of the Cricket World Cup. The Brits? Somewhat less thrilled. (And South Africa’s Baby Boks advance to the Under-19 World Championships Finals.) Sports do not mean everything but they surely mean something, and South Africa has reason to feel good about the state of sport in the country and what it means for South Africans.

Zimbabwe’s Independence Day celebrations leave some wondering what, precisely, there is to celebrate. It’s a pretty trenchant question.

The Nigerian elections are in danger of succumbing to chaos. This weekend’s presidential elections will go forward as planned even as violence breaks out and some seek postponement. 2007 seems a long way from the generally positive tone that surrounded the 1999 elections that seemed to indicate the emergence of some semblence of sanity to Nigerian politics. It seems that this election has been mishandled at nearly every turn, possibly out of a sense of misplaced confidence that the country was on the right track. maybe the presidential election will turn out ok, but as a general rule, elections with this much chaos in the run-up tend not to go well, and the perception, in any case, will be that it was corrupt from the outset.

Foreign shores beckon. I will post as I can.

The cricket World Cup is underway. Among the African entrants: Kenya won its first match against Canada by seven wickets. Zimbabwe will face Ireland later today. South Africa will start things off against the Netherlands in a match they should win handily. The Proteas are one of the favorites, so most South African fans are torn between bombastic nationalistic pride and a sense of impending doom. You can find full coverage here.