Why those who say the World Cup made no difference to ordinary South Africans are just plain wrong

By Oliver Holt

Published 23:03 13/07/10

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An hour or so into the retreat from Bloemfontein and close to midnight, we thought we saw the lights of a city in the distance to the north west.

It was too close to be Kimberley, the city of diamonds, and way too near to be the southern outskirts of the conurbation around Johannesburg.

We drove further north. The lights grew brighter and soon it became clear it was not a city at all. The lights were alive. A grass fire with a front line extending several miles was sweeping across the veld, purging the ground and making it ready for spring.

Some time further on, at the point we estimated to be the half-way mark of the drive back to Johannesburg, we asked Jerry, our driver, to stop at a service station so we could grab a couple of beers for the rest of the journey.

The garage did not sell alcohol but the shop assistants pointed to a ramshackle kind of roadhouse a few hundred yards away in the shadows near the truck stop.

A group of three policemen saw us weighing up our options. They took us over to buy our beers and stood with us while we paid, talking about the World Cup the whole time.

They weren’t armed, even though some of the people milling around us looked like they might be. They said they hadn’t been issued with bullet-proofs.

It was a rough place and it was late. There was a taxi stand nearby, emptying out drunk passengers. We might have been in trouble without our guides.

As they walked back to the mini-van with us, they told us they weren’t policemen at all. They were World Cup volunteers. They had been manning this hostile outpost in the middle of nowhere for three weeks already, unpaid, purely to help people like us.

Before we drove away, they asked us what we thought of their country. We said we loved it. We said we thought South Africa had done a brilliant job of staging the World Cup. They smiled and waved us off.

The memory of those few minutes and those three volunteers is part of the reason why I don’t listen when I hear people talking about how the World Cup made no difference to ordinary people in South Africa.

It’s part of the reason why I don’t listen when people say it was a bad World Cup because Adidas made the players try to express themselves with a supermarket beach ball.

And why I don’t listen when the same people say it was a bad World Cup because there weren’t enough classic matches or great free kicks.

The criticisms are accurate but the conclusion is not. It was a great World Cup, in spite of the football. It changed the image of a country and a continent. It brought Africa closer to the rest of the world.

Maybe you think I’m being patronising and trite and over-sentimental. Fine. But if you can’t accept it from me, listen to my friend, Matshelane Mamabolo.

Matshelane is the editor of the Shoot sports supplement in The Star newspaper in Johannesburg. He is also training to be a pastor. He works with children from Tembisa, one of the poorest townships in the country. He knows what he’s talking about.

“South Africa may not have won the World Cup or got out of its group,” he said, “but it is not for the ignominy of being the first host to fail to go to the knockout phase that the world will remember us.

“The World Cup has made us humane to the outside world, it has also re-united us - black, coloured, white, Indian, Asian - and given credence to our nickname, the Rainbow Nation.

“What I loved though, is that even if it was just for a month, there were many South Africans who got some kind of dignity to their life through working as volunteers.

“People who generally have nothing to look forward to were given a reason to wake up in the morning. And for once, we were all equal. On the buses en route to matches, in the queues to get into the stadium and in the stands inside the stadium.

“There was no rich or poor in the way our country generally is divided. We were all the same. And I hope that the volunteers will take the pride in what they did into their lives after the World Cup.”

So if people say this World Cup changed nothing for the ordinary South African, don’t believe them.

Each time I went to Tembisa or Soweto, I met people brimming with pride about the prestige that hosting the tournament had brought their country.

It had not brought any of them any financial gain but, like Matshelane said, it meant more to them than money.

Perhaps that’s a difficult concept for us to understand. Perhaps we’re conditioned to think that unless you make money from something, it’s worthless.

The pride of ordinary South Africans in hosting a football tournament struck at the heart of that assumption and lit up the World Cup like a fire racing across the veld.

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