African Football, Identity Politics and Global Media Narratives

The Legacy of the FIFA 2010 World Cup

Tendai Chari, Nhamo A. Mhiripiri

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349483235, 9781137392220
• eBook ISBN: 9781137392237
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited volume addresses key debates around African football, identity construction, fan cultures, and both African and global media narratives. Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a lens, it explores how football in Africa is intimately bound up with deeper social, cultural and political currents.

Part I

FIFA 2010 World Cup and Identity Construction

1

Nation-Building and the FIFA World Cup, South Africa 2010

Nathalie Hyde-Clarke,¹ Rune Ottosen² and Toby Miller³

Introduction

There is endless debate about the legitimacy of major global sporting events, most notably the summer Olympic Games and the World Cup of men’s football. At a symbolic level, they are heralded as grand opportunities for sport to express the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity. At a national level, they are regarded as a source of national pride in the face of world competition. At a commercial level, they are seen as a boost to economic development through infrastructural development and tourism. Conversely, these occasions are also and equally pilloried, for precisely the obverse of the positive claims made about them (Pellegrino et al., 2010; Carreño Lara, 2012; Ferreira & Boshoff, 2013).

At a symbolic level, these occasions are derided for glorifying competitiveness and humiliation to express hierarchy and pride. At a national level, they are criticized as chauvinistic and privileging a tiny sector of society. And at a commercial level, vast public subsidies are shown not to bring a return on investment, and the organizers are found to have favoured business interests that vend unhealthy products. These political–economic controversies are exacerbated by environmental concerns to do with massive international travel (Witt and Loots, 2010). Despite the weight of evidence on both sides, governments rush to compete for the privilege of hosting these events, buoyed by boosterish arguments and ignoring cultural critiques and cost–benefit analyses.

The reason why these acts of seeming public policy folly keep being repeated is that sport supposedly signifies something greater than itself, reflecting and reinforcing emotions about the nation as a whole. One view is that countries usually unable to compete in the international arena with other states that are economically stronger may briefly ‘escape and reverse the previous disadvantageous relations’ (Maguire, 1999: 19) through sporting success. International sport and national identity are intertwined (Keim, 2003: 176), and political figures use this relationship to build a sense of unity. Leaders such as former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and South African President Nelson Mandela have trumpeted sport’s capacity to counter discrimination through hope, merit, universality, peace, justice and tolerance, at the same time as they accept its corporate and governmental dominance (Donnelly, 2008: 382). Post-apartheid South African leaders have utilized major spectacles to construct a ‘rainbow’ nation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2011: 280). In 1995, the Rugby World Cup was deployed as a symbolic means of uniting a newly democratic society emerging from the minority privilege mentioned above. It was ‘seen as a political masterstroke’ (Keech, 2004: 105) when Mandela arrived at the Final wearing a Springbok rugby shirt. A sport once regarded as the acme of white male minority privilege was instantaneously heralded as a vehicle for transcending that heritage and representing national pride, honour and identity (Maguire, 1999: 177).

It has been argued that the FIFA World Cup has influenced attitudes towards national identity within hosting countries (Ismer, 2011), as well as perceptions of those nations in the global community (Vidacs, 2011). Of course, the process of nation-building is a complex one in a country such as South Africa, diverse in terms of ethnicities, languages and beliefs. However, there is general agreement that international sports events may obscure those divisions that would otherwise threaten national stability. As such, there is a growing interest in the relationship between sport and national identity – and, when literature on the relationship between nationalism, nation-building and football is studied, it is clear that Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ continue to play an influential role (Bairner, 2009). Ismer (2011) argues that mass football tournaments, such as the World Cup, create a national euphoria that enables people to move past individual differences and to construct a common ‘world’ that relies on collective emotion to reflect shared meanings and values. This results in social cohesion for the duration of that event.

In the international arena, the national team represent the nation symbolically, and so the population tend to be very supportive of their efforts, even if they did not support the side in the past due to either lack of interest in the sport or the team’s poor performance in previous games (Bairner, 2009). This aspect is clearly demonstrated in the 2010 World Cup, as the national side, Bafana Bafana,⁴ would not otherwise have qualified, due to a series of losing games leading up to the tournament. In addition to team allegiance, the nation is promoted through commercial products, tourism and political rhetoric – all of which place emphasis on the hosting country’s ‘unique’ attributes. It is, of course, ironic that many of these attributes are stereotypical renditions that would, under other circumstances, be challenged as offering too limiting a depiction. Regardless, the mechanisms in play make it easier to ‘imagine’ the nation, both locally and abroad. It is, therefore, not unusual to find that government intentions and the population’s reactions are complementary, ‘even if the population resented the government’s attempts to co-opt such sports achievements’ (Vidacs, 2011: 33).

When South Africa hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup of men’s football, the rhetoric of both the state and the bourgeois media was that the event united the nation under the banner of sport, creating a platform for further nation-building based on patriotic fervour. There was a related, more pragmatic claim: that urban development would follow (Steinbrink et al., 2011). This chapter investigates the manifestation of these desires among spectators during the World Cup, and whether the putative nationalism generated by the event still maintained its momentum a year later.

The destructiveness of chauvinistic nationalism, as well as its productivity as a source of subaltern struggle, make our project and its terms of measurement ambiguous and ambivalent (Czegledy, 2009). Such research provides a means of studying the success of nationalism as both a contingent and a prevailing discourse in popular culture. Nationalism is a popular logic that is at the same time open to the nativist, the imperialist and the subaltern under particular circumstances. A liberatory rhetoric in terms of democratization can quickly become a repressive rule that denies difference. As a late entrant to post-colonialism, South Africa is a fascinating way in to this complexity (Alegi & Bolsmann, 2010).

South Africa was unusual among the white settler colonies of European imperialism in that its invading populations never became majorities demographically, and hence relied more than most on generations of physical repression and nationalistic supremacism as cornerstones of domestic security. Sport symbolized this dual material and cultural hegemony (Ismer, 2011). The apartheid nation’s most rhetorically prized recreational activities, cricket in summer and rugby in winter, were coded as white yet truly national (Swart et al., 2011).

Football was introduced to the region by colonial settlers, teachers and missionaries in 1860. Today, it is the most popular sport across Africa (Luginaah & Otiso, 2010: 5). Under apartheid, football was the province of the oppressed black majority and coded as sectarian by white hegemony. As a subaltern subculture, football strengthened morale among black South Africans in the fight against apartheid. On Robben Island, for instance, the prisoners held football tournaments every Saturday with different clubs, creating their own team identity, in many cases across political differences:

Saturday’s football became the greatest escape from the routine of the prison. What struck many of the prisoners was the ‘sheer happiness’ of being out, either playing or watching. Even the harshest football weather was remembered as the ‘brightness’ of Saturday morning. Playing or watching football felt so natural to the men at the times they had to remind themselves of the bizarre setting in which the matches were taking place.

(Korr & Close, 2008: 212)

The importance of sport was recognized in an international struggle to highlight the horror of apartheid. From the late 1960s on, thanks to global campaigns, sport became a crucial means of isolating South Africa through the Gleneagles Agreement and associated bans. The state’s transformation in the mid-1990s into a democracy ushered the nation back into the pantheon of global sporting competition, from which it had been isolated for over 20 years. Sport immediately became a key part of foreign policy and cultural diplomacy in post-apartheid society.

Because FIFA had expelled the then all-white South African team in 1976, it had a high standing among black football fans, who mostly supported South Africa’s application to host the 2010 World Cup (Ndlovu, 2010: ix). There was also a pan-African dimension to the choice of South Africa as host (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2011). Many African leaders favoured the selection of an African country. One top player, the Cameroonian striker Samuel Eto’o, said: ‘I’d like my country to win but I am first an African before being a Cameroonian’ (Ndlovu, 2010: 150). This regional and cultural identification was also visible in the Cup logo, which featured a player kicking a ball, and a stylized background abstraction of the African continent in different colours (Czeglédy, 2009: 284).

Awarding the World Cup of football to a previously pariah state indexed its welcome into the world of states and emphasized that a sport coded as black was, ironically, the universalist key to this re-emergence. And, indeed, we are told that one in every two living people across the globe watched some part of the 2010 men’s World Cup on television (fifa.com).

None of this is to deny the complex diversity and ongoing fissures and pressure points of South African society, which is home to rich and sometimes conflicting cultures and ethnic groups with varying levels of incorporation into the ideological state apparatus. For example, the government recognizes 11 languages, and the national anthem includes four of them. Less pluralistically, two decades into democracy, the legacy of apartheid can still be seen, as ‘different population groups continue to inhabit different residential areas; the majority of (Black) Africans still live in the same townships as under apartheid; often under equally difficult conditions’ (Keim, 2003: 175). Unease continues to surround discussion of national identity (Keech, 2004: 119), and one frequently encounters tensions that articulate to race and socio-economic status, with wealth and power frequently structured in dominance through skin colour. The notion of the ‘rainbow nation’ – a collective that prides itself on cohesion through diversity – is a riposte to the cultural correlatives of ongoing socio-economic sectarianism. South Africans supposedly share a love of sport. That said, the choice of sport still varies along racial lines. The majority of blacks prefer football, while whites favour rugby (Keim, 2003: 204), in accordance with the racialization and differential coding of these sports under apartheid.

This chapter draws on this symbolic and political–economic background and the empirical research of two surveys to measure nationalism through verbal and non-verbal expressions of patriotism and national symbols (Alegi, 2004; Calland et al., 2011). A quantitative survey was conducted during June 2010, with 778 participants, and a qualitative one on 24 May 2011, with 55 respondents. We use these instruments to determine whether the South African public perceived immediate and ongoing benefits from hosting the World Cup in terms of nation-building, and how that sense was communicated to the larger population. The study does not assume such forms of nationalism are desirable or undesirable; merely that they form a core part of the claims made for the Cup and are hence worth investigating.

Results of a survey conducted in Johannesburg, June 2010

This instrument gauged fan culture across countries via the display of national symbols through supporter apparel as signs of allegiance to the various international football teams. The 877 questionnaires distributed derive from a non-probability convenience sample of the population living in or visiting the Greater Johannesburg Area between 11 June and 11 July 2010. In some cases, respondents were so enthusiastic about their participation in the survey that they added comments to the requested responses, a few of which are included in the discussion below.

The vast majority of respondents were South African (66.7%), followed by visitors from Ghana (2.5%), Mexico (2.3%) and the USA (2.2%). The range of international visitors was influenced by the match schedule and the allocation of specific locations to the four groups in the first round. There was a relatively equal split between male (54.3%) and female (45.7%) respondents. Most fell between the ages of 20 and 35 (60.6%), although ages 15 and up were represented. Of the sample population, 29% identified as black, 37.2% white and 23% coloured.⁵ The first two racial categories were relatively evenly split between South Africans and those from other countries of origin. This is similar to the findings of a separate research team (Swart et al., 2011).

Of the respondents in our study, 61.5% agreed that ‘Football is my favourite sport to watch’. Men opted more frequently for ‘strongly agree’, whereas women tended to ‘agree’. The South African contingent accounted for the majority of these favourable responses, with 43% (mostly women) indicating that hosting the World Cup in South Africa had heightened their interest in the sport.

Fan culture

For 89% of respondents, 2010 was their first time attending a World Cup. Most (66.8%) had never even attended an international football match prior to the event. This was notably the case among South Africans, 90% of whom had never left the country to watch football. By contrast, almost half of those from other countries, mostly men, had been to previous World Cups. The overall study also supported the fact that men seemed more determined to attend a match (40.8%) than women (17.2%), who preferred to watch on TV (for an account of the gendered implications of the Finals, see Pillay & Salo, 2010).

These numbers partly reflect a culture of affluent male football fans keen to see as many matches in person as possible. For example, a Swedish father (aged 70) and son (aged 41) were among the respondents. They had been to every World Cup Final since 1990. This was part of their lifestyle: they were football fans at home, supporting a local team, but the trip abroad to combine the World Cup with tourism was the highlight for them as fans. Their wives, sisters and grandchildren stayed home. This was a ‘guy thing’.⁶

As many as 93.5% of our respondents indicated they would support a specific team during the Cup – with 37.7% favouring the home team, Bafana Bafana, a nickname that worked to encompass and at the same time transcend national identification and endorse fan speech as well as official speech (Awad, 2012). Other frequently mentioned teams were Brazil (9.7%), Spain (6.7%), England (5.2%), Ghana (5.1%) and the Netherlands (4.9%).

Many people surveyed were concerned that ticket costs would diminish attendance (41.7%). This perspective was especially apparent among the home crowd: almost half the South Africans indicated they could not afford the price of admission. Of these, 67.9% preferred to watch on television, with 55.5% citing ‘comfort’ as their principal reason. Of those able to purchase tickets (50.6%), the ‘bringing the nation together’ slogan seemed to hide the class aspect. One of the respondents was ‘Mark’, a white University teacher. He attended his first-ever football fixture when he entered the ‘Soccer City stadium’ for the opening match, South Africa versus Mexico.⁷ Jacob, a black engineer on his way to the match against Uruguay in Pretoria, explained that he was an old Kaizer Chief fan and had attended many matches through the years. (Across the continent, club fixtures have long engendered great passion; Luginaah & Otiso, 2010). After turning 60, he mainly watched on television, but was excited to take part in an historic event and wanted to experience it live.⁸ The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Towards an Epistemology of African Football – The Symbolic Significance of the 2010 FIFA World Cup
• Part I: FIFA 2010 World Cup and Identity Construction
• Part II: African Fan Cultures
• Part III: African Media Narratives
• Part IV: Global Media Narratives
• Index