By Eusebius Mckaiser
Who could possibly say no to warm and fuzzy feelings smack bang in the middle of a cold South African winter? Only, one might guess, the most cynical, unreconstructed anti-nationalist. And even he – or she – will quietly smile when South Africa is put on colourful, cultural display when the biggest sporting event in the Milky Way, the Soccer World Cup, kicks off sooner than you can say “Afro-pessimism”. South Africans, who suffer from collective manic depression, will experience instantly delivered ecstasy. Thoughts about the high volumes of violent crime, near-endemic corruption within the state, the worst income inequality on earth or compromised service delivery that impair the quality of our lives, will all be forgotten. For a little while at least. Instead, we will be One Nation, as implored by an old Castle Lager advertisement with the pay-off line, “One Nation, One Beer”. The depression of yesterday will give way to the escapist preference for hedonistic joy. And, of all the bits of reality that we will temporarily forget in a fit of passionate nationalism, it is our amnesia about our differences as a diverse group of individuals and communities that will be the most spectacular.
Put most bluntly, South Africans will again pretend to be the Rainbow Nation that is a perfectly coherent and a multicultural dream. Why do we invent this “reality”? Is it honest? Does it play a useful, lasting utilitarian role in our lives? Or, did we not lear a lesson from the 1990s when we hosted – and won – the Rugby World Cup partly on the basis of a fake unity that turned out to be unsustainable in the years thereafter?
Let me be the party pooper, the one to keep it real. Yes, we will slide into nationalism-speak. Indeed, we will feel and be unified as One Nation. And, yes, yet another liberal political or sociological master’s thesis might be written off the back of the Soccer World Cup about the ability of sport to galvanise an otherwise divided society. But I think this is not a remedy for “dealing with” differences: we need to stop “dealing with” differences; rather, we should embrace diversity – and genuinely so. Differences are not things that should be feared. They should be understood, accepted, and explored. Around the world, human beings should cut down on the enormous and unrealistic faith they place in, and needless pressure they put on, giant sporting events to affect meaningful nation building. But, I had better fully explain these upsetting thoughts.
South African sport and nation building: an unglamorous history
South Africa is a fascinating case study for the relationship between sport and nationhood. As apartheid laws and policies became most deeply and most savagely entrenched during the twentieth century, so the international community expanded the various ways in which it sought to isolate the immoral apartheid state. One of the most effective, and most emotionally hard-hitting, tactics was to exclude national South African teams from participating in international sporting events. This was not just a general rebuttal of the apartheid state’s overall architecture, values and principles – all of which was regarded by the United Nations as morally odious; it was, on a more micro-level, also a rejection of the racial exclusivity of sporting codes in South Africa. Different race groups could not play against, and with, each other in the sporting arena, lest blacks started believing they had the same moral status as whites.
Despite having a black majority, therefore, the apartheid government laboured under the false belief that it could project a South African identity to the world that was lilly white. No one in the international community bought this lie. Domestically, most South Africans also boycotted the official national teams. And so, for example, if the so-called Springboks would be playing the New Zealand rugby team, then the All Blacks (a nickname that had multiple political meanings, and convenient evocative caches, for countless black South African supporters) could count on local (black) South African support. Sport became wholly political. It did not galvanise the country as One Nation. It did, however, galvanise a dispossessed and marginalised majority to fight against a national identity that was racially exclusive and whose racial exclusively was displayed with brazen nakedness on sports field across the world, until isolation became widespread.
These were not warm and fuzzy post-democratic feelings felt by blacks in relation to national sports teams; these were feelings of profound disconnection from the patriotic symbolism that national sporting teams are supposed to evoke in us when they participated in events like the Soccer World Cup.
This history of how our racist past infused the usually innocuous business of sport demonstrates that sport can both unite and divide. It can also be used for political subjugation. And, in a calculation often missed by perpetrators of prejudice, it can also whip up and sustain the desire for freedom among the very people who are supposed to be excluded from the perpetrator’s vision of who is South African – and so fit to play – and who is not South African – and so fit only to clean the locker-room. Sport, and black South Africa, had the last laugh, we now know with historic hindsight.
But we expected too much from sport ...
But, as much as sport triumphed over prejudice, that too was an exaggerated victory for sport itself. It is a victory which, we will soon see again, has had the consequence of putting undue pressure on events like the Soccer World Cup. What do I mean by an exaggerated victory? Well, in a sense South Africans, both black and white, were enormously relieved when sport became deracialised and (for the most part, though not entirely) depoliticised after 1990. We started having national teams that had greater moral and political legitimacy which made it easier for the majority of South Africans to feel they could own these teams as truly theirs. And so, for example, despite containing only one black player, the national South African rugby team that won the 1995 Rugby World Cup stole the hearts and minds of the vast majority of South Africans, black and white. Warm and fuzzy feelings were flowing both in the townships and in the suburbs. That iconic image of Nelson Mandela wearing a Springbok rugby jersey, standing next to Captain Francois Pienaar, represented as much of a break from our divisive past as the images of blacks standing in long voting queues the year before. It truly is very hard to exaggerate the effect that the Rugby World Cup had on the national mood and the psyche. The recent film Invictus relived those moments and one cannot but help to feel Castle Lager-goodness when watching that kind of docu-film.
It is also hard to understand what it is, psychologically, about sport that make it such an effective catalyst for this kind of nation building. One element, of course, is that the sheer euphoria of seeing one’s team do well is like popping a dose of Prozac. It is for the same reason that when teams do badly, supporters can become hooligans and, as one macabre study I once came across claimed, there is even a correlation between some men’s favourite team’s losing and the likelihood of them being involved in domestic violence afterwards. Tragically. So it is possible that it is not just sport per se that matters, but winning or doing well that matters too.
It will therefore be interesting to see how long our warm and fuzzy feelings will last during the Soccer World Cup should Bafana Bafana not reach the second round. At any event, whatever the sociological or psychological drivers underpinning mass hysteria, there can be little doubt about the visible relationship between a national team participating in an international competition and a diverse group of people momentarily putting aside differences and becoming one. That, in a nutshell, is what happened in South Africa in 1995. Democracy has unburdened national sport, and now we can get on with enjoying the jingoistic benefits of supporting a team that is a truly South African – as opposed to an apartheid – creation.
Oops, wait .... there are dangers!
Sadly, it is not all smooth sailing. The problem is that the notions of nationhood and national identity that underpin the collective feelings of oneness during these sporting events are fake notions. 1995 is an excellent example. South Africans emerged from the Rugby World Cup with a recalcitrant belief that the Rainbow Nation – a phrase popularised by Archbishop Desmond Tutu – was real and would last forever. In other words, black and white and blue and brown, and all other colours in between, would hold hands and get along until Jesus comes. Racial tensions were no more. And intergroup differences, if any, are benign. Indeed, a non-racist and non-racial society had thus been born. The Population Registration Act of 1950 which created race groups in the face of biological impossibility was dead and buried. This motif of a Rainbow Nation was boosted by the escapism induced by the hosting of the Rugby World Cup and was sustained, for a little while longer than one might have expected, by the victory in the final. A sport crazy society was the perfect template on which to demonstrate the kind of dizzying impact that sport can have.
However, this socially constructed Nirvana cost us. The basic problem was that reality was neither colour nor class-blind. And it is still not so. You cannot wipe out deep distrust and prejudicial attitudes and beliefs across various linguistic, cultural and political groups overnight, just because someone kicks a ball over a set of rugby poles in the dying seconds of a match. We mistook catchy phrases – Rainbow Nation, “democratic miracle” – and iconic images – Mandela and Pienaar – for national identity and nationhood. The boring truth was that we did not even know each others’ names as ordinary South Africans, let alone were in the enviable position of being able to start a conversation about overlapping values, principles and the like which could form the basis of a meaningful national identity and so a more enduring sense of nationhood.
The irony, of course, is that Mbeki – who was to be squashed in between Mandela’s Rainbow Nation and now Zuma’s attempted revival of that nation (not that citizens are playing along with him) – re-racialised political discourse and debate on nationhood in a way that was, in a rather macabre terms, laced with honesty. Mbeki deserves blame for not doing his bit as national leader to build social cohesion across different groups, but he himself, and what he stood for, actually symbolised and evidenced the reality that Mandela’s and Tutu’s Rainbow Nation was never really genuine.
It is not that a big sporting event cannot occasion a sense of national identity and nationhood. It can. But it cannot constitute national identity and it cannot create national identity.
The BIGGEST mistake to watch out for, however, is to assume that just because we feel united, the feeling is underpinned by genuine national identity and nationhood. That need not be the case. As a scientist might put it with more clinical precision, the feelings of nationhood we experienced in the mid 1990s were a simple instance of a “false positive”. In reality, there was no nation.
Are we condemned to difference?
The good news is that it does not matter. Really. Instead of panicking about whether the Soccer World Cup will (again) deliver us a sense of national identity, we should happily reject that expectation as unnecessary. We should do so because we recognise that differences are not inherently divisive. It is perfectly understandable that in a pluralistic society individuals and communities will have a variety of values, principles, tastes, etc. Yet, there is senseless pressure on us to conform and fake oneness – again. Why? We should have learnt in the 1990s that the day after the foreign press and international players and fans leave, divisions that were swept under the carpet come back to haunt you. So faking unity is counter-productive, dishonest and unnecessary. I suspect that what fuels this dishonesty is not so much an overriding conviction we all have about the positivity of global sporting events. Instead, it is driven by a correlative fear about what happens when you dare to acknowledge to each other that you have divergent views, tastes, and beliefs. What happens, in other words, when Jane says to Sipho, “Bru, I have a confession to make. I HATE the vuvuzela!” Well, quite frankly, if sixteen years after democracy we cannot safely declare innocent preferences to each other, then our democracy is much more fragile than a sporting event of any magnitude would be able to repair. Fortunately, it is not that fragile. Rather, it is up to South Africans to be comfortable with the possibility that no overarching, substantive sense of national identity and nationhood will ever emerge, let alone one that can be truthfully expressed during the 2010 World Cup. The best we can do is to fake unity just because warm and fuzzy feelings, whether real or fake, are useful in the middle of winter, in the shadow of a recession and as a break from the stresses of day-to-day living in a still developing democracy.
So there’s nothing for “the nation” in the Soccer World Cup then?
None of this implies that we should not have braais, practise our vuvuzelas, drink gallons of beer and be excessively friendly to foreigners in displaying our multicultural melting pot. Just because something is a construction rather than reality does not mean it cannot be useful. And so, if we can engineer feelings of nationhood for a few weeks, and doing so can help us as a country to rally behind our team, promote South Africa as a fun tourist destination, begin some positive conversations about who we are and where we are headed, as a society, then the World Cup would have served us very well.
The point of the reflections in this essay should therefore not be seen as an ode to depression. Rather, my central point really boils down to this: we must simply scale down our expectations about what will happen the morning after. And, more importantly, we need to be aware that we are inventing a national identity rather than expressing a real one. That is not to say one could not, maybe, find or develop a national identity somehow or somewhere, but that is a conversation we have never had as a country precisely because we have got into the habit of faking it. It’s time to keep it real.