22 Jul 2010(Thu)

For a special Football Japan Minutecast recorded earlier this month, I spoke to Marc Fletcher – a PhD researcher from Edinburgh University who has spent almost two years following club and international football in Johannesburg. During the interview, Marc talked about how the World Cup experience has affected South Africa, and why local fans were so keen to support Ghana after the host nation were eliminated in the first round.

 

 

When we spoke last year, a lot of the conversation involved stadium preparations, safety in South Africa, and – in particular – Western perceptions and critical articles in UK newspapers. Twelve months on, these articles seem to have largely disappeared.

 

Yes, they have. I felt that a lot of the media coverage – back in the UK at least – was very under-researched. A lot of people were writing from their armchairs back home rather than coming out here. They’ve come out here now and seen some amazing, world-class stadiums – Soccer City especially. But also, there haven’t been the crime stories, or the bloodbath that the Daily Star for example had predicted. It hasn’t come true. There have been some issues of crime happening, but this would happen anywhere. It’s not just Johannesburg – it could happen in London, it could happen in Tokyo, it could happen anywhere.

 

Having been away from South Africa for a year and then returned again just before the World Cup, how has the city of Johannesburg has changed in this time?

 

Firstly, they have literally cleaned up the tourist sections and given them a fresh coat of paint! I’m being cynical there – there have been some major infrastructural changes. They have finished a lot of the road works and the stadiums as well. All the advertising billboards are far more colourful and really celebrating the World Cup. But also, it’s not just Johannesburg but the people themselves. I have never seen so many Bafana Bafana jerseys worn by so many people. It’s the flags – national flags everywhere. This just wasn’t happening last year before the Confederations Cup.

 

You have spent time with local supporters at fan parks and at a number of World Cup matches – how do you think South Africans have enjoyed this tournament, and has their enjoyment been affected by Bafana Bafana’s early elimination?

 

Bafana Bafana’s elimination has probably affected the volume of the vuvuzelas. In the build-up, and especially on the morning of the opening game, people were blowing vuvuzelas at five o’clock – it just didn’t stop. You can’t hear anything outside this room now, whereas then I had people literally standing outside my office all day. But I think that the South African fans have really taken to this World Cup. The majority of fans at these games have been South African. For the Paraguay versus Japan game that I was at, there weren’t actually many people from either Paraguay or Japan, but everyone got dressed up with the two countries’ national flags and costumes. Now, it’s just waiting for the World Cup to finish and the hangover to kick in…

 

Finally, it seemed as if the last remaining African representatives this year, Ghana, had the whole of South Africa behind them as they took on Uruguay in the quarter-finals.

 

Broadly speaking, yes they did. African football is very unique globally in the sense that, generally speaking, a fan in Angola would want Egypt to beat, say, Denmark – whereas this wouldn’t happen in Europe, Asia, North America, or wherever. There is this strange, unique sense of continental identity that we don’t get anywhere else really in the world. If you’re English, you wouldn’t necessarily want Italy to win against Argentina just because they’re European. But I’m not quite sure yet exactly why this happens – this sense of pan-African identity. I think it is a relic, or a consequence, of colonialism and struggling against colonial powers. After independence, they used football as a way to galvanise both a sense of national identity as well as an African identity.