South Africa kicks around controversy over the FIFA World Cup.
Story by Kelsey Ivey
For one month this year, the country at the end of the world will be at the front and center of global soccer. Beginning June 11, hundreds of thousands of devoted soccer fans will stream into South Africa for the 19th annual FIFA World Cup Tournament.
The World Cup “will be one of our most important defining moments . . . a moment where the attention of the world will be nowhere but right here in South Africa,” says chief executive officer of the 2010 FIFA World Cup Organising Committee South Africa, Dr. Danny Jordaan, on the fifty-day countdown to the beginning of the games.
Thirty-two teams qualified for the first ever World Cup to be held on the African Continent. South Africa competed against Egypt, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia for the coveted title. FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, deemed South Africa the most prepared African nation to host the games.
Yet this is not the first time South Africa has dominated the headlines around a mega- sporting event.
On August 18, 1964, South Africa was banned from competing in the Tokyo Olympics because of the nation’s apartheid regime. Over three-dozen countries threatened to boycott the games if South Africa played, so the International Olympic Committee banned the country until its government desegregated and granted basic human rights to all citizens. For twenty-eight years, South Africa was isolated from the global games for its social and political policy enforced by the white minority that segregated public areas and schools, and denied non-whites from positions in government. Not until the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics, two years before the apartheid government dismantled, did a South African athlete compete in the Olympic games.
During this time, soccer in the rainbow nation was painted in monochrome. From 1961 to 1992, South Africa was suspended from participating in FIFA’s World Cup because of the government’s insistence on segregating sporting teams.
South Africa’s racially divided past doesn’t seem to be a hindrance to FIFA’s standards today, but a possibility for further social development and cultural acceptance.
According to FIFA’s Big Count 2006 campaign, over 270 million people across the globe play soccer. The organization is devoted not only to hosting mega-sporting events like the World Cup, but also to aiding social and political change around the world through soccer.
For South Africa’s World Cup, FIFA established the social campaign, “20 centers for 2010.” The aim of the movement is to promote social change and public health through sports and youth education across Africa.
The first Center for Hope opened in December 5, 2009, in Khayelitsha, one of the poorest townships on the edge of Cape Town. Not only does 65 percent of the township’s population make less than 200 Rand a month (less than $1 a day), but the crime and HIV/ AIDS rates are also some of the highest in the country. Through soccer programs hosted by the Center for Hope, FIFA and its community partners are teaching the youth—who make up a quarter of Khayelitsha’s population—life skills and HIV/AIDS prevention.
Even with the grassroots campaigns supported by FIFA’s mission to strive for cultural tolerance and social improvements in South Africa, FIFA programs and government-supported projects have come under fire by international and local organizations in recent months.
In particular, Temporary Relocation Areas (TRAs) set up by the government to house homeless and evicted residents have sparked local and international controversy.
Stark white sand surrounds rows of perfectly aligned corrugated iron shacks where thousands of homeless and evicted residents from around Cape Town now call home. The 1,600 temporary houses located about 25 miles from the city center make up the township block called Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area, better known as Blikkiesdorp, an Afrikaans word meaning “tin can town.” While the city says residents move to Blikkiesdorp voluntarily, some claim to be forced from their homes as a part of a street “clean-up” for the World Cup.
“If you are homeless in [South Africa], you are seen as part of the crime and grime that must be removed from the city centers and tourism areas before any big event,” says Linzi Thomas, founder of MyLife, a charity and nonprofit organization based in Cape Town that rehabilitates street youth at risk. “There are no effective strategies to take the homeless off the streets in a holistic manner so they can reintegrate with support.”
The media and local non-governmental organizations have criticized Blikkiesdorp for its strict curfew, unsafe living conditions, and unsanitary facilities for its residents.
According to the national newspaper Sowetan, some residents have even dubbed Blikkiesdorp a “concentration camp,” and compared the TRA to the run-down, crime-ridden compounds seen in the recent blockbuster movie District 9.
“Billions have been spent on the stadiums when there are people dying of hunger, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, crime, suicide, and addictions,” Thomas says. “There is no balance in what has been spent and what should be invested in the social dynamics of the country.”
However, the city claims the TRA was not established in preparation for the FIFA World Cup.
Temporary housing “is provided for residents in emergency situations . . . These include, amongst many others, victims of xenophobic attacks; evicted people for which the city has been named responsible; people living on the streets, in atrocious conditions in backyards, in road reserves, in pipes, on pavements; or those living in condemned buildings,” says Kylie Hatton, Cape Town’s media manager. “Blikkiesdorp represents a significant improvement to their previous living environment.”
The greatest concern with Blikkiesdorp is safety for the residents, the city states in a recent press release. The TRA is fenced-off and Informal Settlement Management Department officers regularly patrol the area to ensure a safe environment and prevent the inflow of unauthorized occupiers. But vandalism of the structures and toilet facilities continues to be an ongoing problem.
“The city is not covering up its social realities,” Hatton says. “Residents have not been displaced nor housing demolished for any of the infrastructural upgrades in the metropolitan area linked to the staging of the World Cup.”
The United Nations predicts a 78 percent increase of traffic into the nine South African cities hosting games. The biggest concern for those cities leading up to the kickoff of the World Cup is their presentation to the thousands of economy-boosting international tourists. While the fans’ eyes may be focused on the grass field, they may not notice what they don’t see — the homeless and hawkers — and the lingering influence that South Africa’s segregated past has left on the population.
Across the bay from where boisterous fans from all over the globe will cheer on their favorite teams at the World Cup semi-finals in Cape Town, a dusty field surrounded by barbed wire and chains at the Robben Island Prison is contrastingly quiet. The prison notoriously held political prisoners of the apartheid era. This is a field that knows soccer and FIFA regulation as well as the strict rules that governed its players and South Africa’s segregated past.
Just outside where the former president of South Africa Nelson Mandela hunkered in solitude, political prisoners spent their free time passing a makeshift soccer ball, not only for entertainment, but spirit and survival. Now the dried and hardened field that encouraged the feet of political change to play soccer represents an era of racial and social inequalities. And as a haunting tribute to both South Africa’s past and present, it too will be watching as all eyes turn to South Africa once again.
