S Africa dream of a thorough restructuring

An event of this magnitude and cost, so demanding on the resources of the host nation, was unimaginable in Africa until now. And in South Africa, which 20 years ago was still barred from international sports because of its racist apartheid policies, this would have been unthinkable while Nelson Mandela was still behind bars.

Mandela said 20 years ago that soccer was the game of the townships, the game some of his fellow prisoners on Robben Island played to keep themselves sane. And it’s the game he wanted to see on his soil in its grandest form — the World Cup — before he died.

Indeed, he begged for it. He went to Zurich not once but twice to use his influence and his legacy to persuade FIFA, to bring its gargantuan, 32-nation, 64-game circus to South Africa.

Trust us, he told the officials, we have the human resources, even in this once-broken land, to safely host the month-long global soccer showpiece.

There is hope that he will attend the opening match on Friday and the final on July 11. That, given Mandela’s frail health, might require him to summon every last ounce of fortitude in his 91-year-old body.

What history that would make. Both games are at Soccer City, the same giant stadium between Soweto and Johannesburg where Mandela, prisoner 46664, made his first public speech after his release following 27 years as a political prisoner. An estimated 85,000 people filled the stadium that day, on February 13, 1990. On Friday, there will be an expected 94,700 in the renovated stadium to watch South Africa kick off the tournament against Mexico. This dwarfs the magnitude of the rugby union World Cup in 1995, soccer’s African Cup of Nations in 1996 and the cricket World Cup in 2003, which all were part of Mandela’s use of sports as a tool of reconciliation.

The soccer World Cup will strain every facet of South African life, test every aspect of co-operation between the public and private sectors to keep this show running and to keep it safe. It goes far beyond who wins and who loses, and beyond our fascination with whether Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, or possibly this time an African — Samuel Eto’o or Didier Drogba, if he plays despite injury — shows himself to be the finest player in a team game.

Get the next 31 days right, and it will add to Mandela’s already great legacy. The sentiment is commendable, yet there is an implicit contradiction. The world has come to play in a land where unparalleled beauty coexists with unspeakable poverty, and where 50 human beings are murdered daily.  There are 10 new or newly renovated stadiums that might soon be obsolete, overpriced white elephants towering over teeming township slums. But there are also highways, high-speed trains and modern airports built to cope with 400,000 World Cup visitors and to carry longed-for tourism into the future.

So perhaps soccer is driving hope, working as a catalyst toward restructuring the new South Africa? Bidding for the World Cup outlasted Mandela’s span as the country’s president. In fact, three heads of state — Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and now Jacob Zuma — have seen the process through to reality. One man, however, has driven the bid from beginning to end: Danny Jordaan. “I have no doubt,” he said last month, “this will be the most unifying moment in South African history. We did not have walls or wars like East and West Germany had, but we had separation of people, black and white.”

The dream in South Africa is not, and never was, that the host nation would win this World Cup, or even progress far enough in the competition to lift the nation’s spirit.  The Netherlands, too, might get a harmonious following. For it was decades ago, when South Africans had less hope than they have now, that a young Dutch player, Ruud Gullit, made a sporting gesture to a man left to rot in jail.  Gullit, of Surinamese origin and proud of his African descent, won the 1987 European Player of the Year trophy. He dedicated it to Mandela, then still a prisoner regarded by his government as an enemy of the state.
“Mandela’s case is incredible,” Gullit said at the time. “Everybody should be treated like a human being, and he is not. There is no freedom without equality.”

Some people criticised Gullit then for mixing sports and politics. Today, it is possible that the player and the former prisoner who became president will sit in the same stadium, seeking joy from a game that should have no barriers.