Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
June 11, 2010
South Africa in the World Cup
Joao Silva for The New York Times
The World Cup is the most-watched event on earth, and South Africa is eager to be seen, especially if the cameras ignore the shacks of the poor and focus instead on the beautiful new stadiums, the panoramic view from Cape Town’s Table Mountain and the wild animals flourishing in the bush.
Much is expected from the monthlong tournament: global recognition for an international up-and-comer; a pie in the face for pessimists who believed that the stadiums would never be completed on time; a jolt of good feeling in a nation with a dangerously dwindled supply of inspiration.
Sixteen years ago, as Nelson Mandela took the presidential oath and apartheid slipped further into ignominy, he declared that South Africa was no longer “the skunk of the world” but rather a “rainbow nation” where people of all colors could live in harmony. A year later, he urged his countrymen — black and white — to support their national rugby team, the sports obsession of the nation’s Afrikaner population. The squad won the world championship, a feel-good story retold last year in the movie “Invictus.”
South Africans now hope for a similar transcendent moment, this time from soccer, the favorite sport of the nation’s blacks. People here may not expect their country to win the tournament, but they believe it will throw a winning party. The host team faces Mexico in the opening match on Friday.
“We were once the rainbow nation, the world’s greatest fairy tale, and we want to be so again,” the writer Mark Gevisser said. “We need the world to love us again, sometimes it seems, before we can love ourselves.”
Read the full article here.
Leave a Reply
To help prevent spam, comments will be submitted to a moderator before publishing.
