Kilimanjaro? Sure. But I'm talking about the 2010 Soccer World Cup!
South Africa is on FIRE! This past week, the world’s biggest sporting spectacle descended on Africa for the very first time. I speak on behalf of a continent when I say we couldn’t be more excited. It is electric, inspiring, amazing and we have gone bananas. I am loving every second of it.
Having had the opportunity to participate in sport at many different levels – from playing with barefoot kids to competing internationally to watching professional games and Olympics, this World Cup reminds me again of sport’s unique value in the world. Sport is the only thing that brings the whole world together for good.
Sport in South Africa, like everything else under apartheid, was divided among colour lines: rugby for whites, soccer for blacks, and resources designated accordingly. My favourite story comes from my close friend who was South Africa’s top woman basketball player for years and comes from fabulously enlightened and educated mixed parents (at a time when it was illegal). While attending private school in Cape Town, she was banned from playing basketball during lunch hour. Not because the authorities disliked basketball, but because they were afraid it would spill-over into soccer and subsequently damage the reputation of the school!
Fast forward fifteen years and, like much else, that legacy remains; on both sides of the sporting fence. Despite efforts from leaders and fairytale moments turned blockbuster movies (Invictus) South African sport remains sharply divided and imbalanced. Across the country, barefoot children continue to kick balls of tape around the townships while Matt Damon look-alikes take to lush green stadium fields on Saturday mornings. Look at your screen the next time you watch a South African rugby game or catch Bafana Bafana as they take the field.
I am in love with South Africa as a country. Inexplicably, I have been since I was a kid. I was old enough to remember Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and to be confused by reports of a country so divided, but too young to understand the significance. Sixteen years after reading my first South African book and nine years after first setting foot on its red soil, I now call this storied nation home. I am drawn to a place where change is so imminent and you are challenged to stand outside yourself every single day and ask what you did to make it happen, for better or for worse. Most of all, I am inspired by my peers and friends who take their responsibility for change so personally. It makes for great people, I promise. But that doesn’t mean it's all inspiration all the time; like everywhere else on this great planet, progress is invariably frustrating and complex.
Come World Cup kick-off, I was released from the office to join friends and throngs of SA supporters painted, hollering and blowing their (now infamous) vuvuzelas. The city was unreal. I ended up in a watering hole stuffed fit to explode with mostly white South Africans. We partied through the Opening Ceremonies (SITers, please say you rocked out to Thandiswa Mazwai’s version of the Nqongqothwane?!) and waited excitedly for Bafana Bafana to take the field. The air was thick with spine tingling excitement, flags waved furiously and drunk people sang out of tune.
By the time the players arrived and the National Anthem came on, I needed to bite my lip.
It is just a game. They all are. Pointless, really. Running around a patch of grass trying to kick a ball through posts? But a bus full of 50 year old white men spilling onto the sidewalk decorated in their national colours to belt out a 15-year old National Anthem in 4 languages for a group of young black men playing a sport they may otherwise consider beneath them; I’ll take it any day.
And that’s to say very little of what this World Cup means to this remarkable country and this magical continent. I happened to be working in Ghana when they launched the World Cup and happily paid witness to a colourful parade un-like anything I have experienced. I was in Kenya three weeks ago when AFC Panthers played heated rivals Gor Mahia in the Kenyan Premier League in front of the rowdiest and most vibrant crowd I have ever danced with. Pride, passion and even hope came hand in hand to Africa in droves with this World Cup.
The Unofficial anthem of the 2010 World Cup ‘Waving Flag’ by K’Naan, a Somalian, was adopted by Canadian artists to pay tribute and raise funds for Haiti after the Earthquake. It gives me the chills every time:
‘Give me Freedom. Give me Fire. Give me Reason. Take me Higher’
It is so much more than a game. I am the first to admit a sporting spectacle provides a band aid for larger and more important issues, but we need inspiring moments to help believe in the impossible and to come together every once in awhile just for good.
I get the fortune of running rampant through streets shaped by the legacy of apartheid with people of all backgrounds and nationalities. I wish I could be there to capture the moment when a dream comes to life in a young person’s eyes this month; when they find their own reason, their own fire. Or to look back in time at Siphiwe Tshabalala (the first goal scorer of the 2010 World Cup) as a kid playing barefoot soccer with a ball of tape in Soweto. I think of all those kids in Haiti where soccer is the national obsession and wonder how many of them saw Tshabalala’s goal and now dream of scoring their own.
SHLF wasn’t built to produce World Cup athletes or unite divided countries. We believe in the inherent value of sport to educate and develop people in a positive manner and were built to provide these to as many kids as possible. But in a week like this, I feel validation for choosing sport as our vehicle to Make a Difference in the world and renewed inspiration to do it even bigger and better.
The bad news is that with 1 week to departure for Kili, the World Cup has me eating and drinking all the wrong things and ending up in all the wrong places at all the wrong hours (as well as missing tickets to TWO games while hiking, doh!). The good news is that it is soooo worth it!
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