The World Cup may be six months away, but soccer fans in some African countries may already be playing the match of their lives against fear and prejudice. These days, unfortunately, it’s hard to tell which side will win. After a series of xenophobic attacks erupted in South Africa in May 2008, the country’s ability to convince its continental brethren that this is, indeed, not just South Africa’s, but “Africa’s World Cup” suddenly got all the more difficult. The image of the burning Mozambican man and those of hundreds of immigrants fleeing their neighborhoods tend to linger on the brain.
The authorities in South Africa will, of course, argue that they are doing more than talk to bring healing and turn the page. Resettlement programs and national soul-searching are ongoing. In the spirit of true African brotherhood, the legendary Cameroonian footballer, Roger Milla, was in the spotlight during Friday’s draws in Johannesburg. (Cameroon is among the handful of African countries to qualify for this year’s 32-nation tournament, along with Nigeria, Ghana, Algeria, and Cote d’Ivoire.) When the competition finally gets under way, thousands of policemen will be deployed to make the streets safer, while special event visas will be available to cope with the influx of an estimated 480,000 fans.
But a star-guest appearance and more policing will not necessarily make the event a continental celebration. The feeling outside South Africa that those responsible for the xenophobic attacks were handled with kid gloves—when punished at all—leaves many with a sense of foreboding. The attacks, which left over 62 foreigners dead and thousands homeless, sparked concern among ordinary Africans as to whether there is, indeed, such a thing as African unity. Those who think that soccer offers any hope of brotherly redemption must have been shocked during the qualifying rounds in November when violent clashes between Egyptian and Algerian supporters in Zamalek, Cairo, left 35 people seriously wounded.
As sports often imitates politics, the search for unity may be just be as elusive to fans in Cairo as it is to the Beninese trader who has to cross at least 63 checkpoints before he arrives in neighboring Nigeria to sell a basket of fruit. As for the Nigerian who wants to travel to South Africa for the World Cup, she might have better luck reaching Aburdistan than securing a bona fide South African visa. Only last month, a Nigerian traveler to South Africa set a Nigerian-based discussion forum ablaze with tales of his “woeful” experience at the hands of immigration officials in Johannesburg. The officials, he said, seemed more interested in preventing him from crossing the border than in whether or not he had the correct entry papers. It reminded me of an incident a few years back, in July 2005, when Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka was detained for nearly eight hours by immigration officials who didn’t seem to care one bit about the difference between a laureate and a loony.
Nigeria, in many ways, is an interesting test case for the limits of South African appeals to continental unity through sport. As Nigerian columnist and editor Joseph Adeyeye recently put it, “South Africa is not very welcoming of Nigerians. Much effort, including a few scholarly ones, has been devoted to examining the factors responsible for this. The biggest reason, often adduced by South Africans, is that foreigners (read Nigerians, Zimbabweans, and Malawians) are responsible for South Africa’s intractable crime problems.”
But for some Nigerians at least, the legendary tensions and rivalries between Nigeria and South Africa can, for now, be set aside at the joy of qualifying for the tournament. Nigeria, a regional power with continental aspirations, has spent the last four years—after a World Cup in Germany for which it failed to qualify—mired in a morass of murky politics, corruption, and trouble in the Niger Delta. At a time when the country appears to be on auto-pilot because President Umaru Yar’Adua spends more time in the hospital than in his office, it was a big deal that the national team qualified for the Cup. Regardless of the troublesome visa issues that many Nigerians will no doubt face, tens of thousands of fans will at least try to make their way south in June.
A former Nigerian national team coach, Adegboye Onigbinde, took a pan-Africanist view of the competition: “Africans will be all out to impress visitors that Africa is a good place to be. Security is key, but we expect that everyone will do their bit to make the continent proud.” With three FIFA tournaments coming to Africa, back-to-back, and the continental pride at Ghana’s historic defeat of Brazil in the U-20 tournament in Egypt, it is hoped that the same kindred spirit will extend to the World Cup.
Yet, whether the competition will elicit temporary solidarity among African fans could depend on how well the South African team plays, and how long brothers from other parts of the continent decide to hang around after the tournament ends. An early tournament exit for the host nation may not only lead to low crowd turn-out, but could once again inflame the social tensions that fueled the bloody riots of 2008. With an illegal immigrant population of about four million (in a country of 47 million) and the underlying causes of last year’s riots still unattended (from high unemployment to poor infrastructure), visitors to South Africa who overstay their welcome—whether Nigerians, Zimbabweans, or those from Ubuntuland—may find that when survival is at stake, brotherhood is only skin-deep.
Azu Ishiekwene, a member of the editorial board of World Policy Journal, has been an investigative reporter, a features writer, a member of the editorial board, and the editor of Punch Titles, Nigeria’s highest selling newspapers. He is currently the executive publications director of Punch and writes a weekly Tuesday column. He is the author of Nuhu Ribadu, a book on Nigeria’s stalled anti-corruption war.