The Republic of Dissent

The allusory and illusory African World Cup

Interesting and informative words from Sanza Tshabalala (first quote) and Ann Berstein (second) on the South African World Cup, the obsession with race and the horrendously stupid and anti-intellectual notion that it was the African World Cup:

The more the African teams were going down, the more I started getting worried about our race relations. I thought, we [Africans] are not doing well otherwise and I thought we would do well in football and it would maybe do something with our pride.
I’m obsessed with race issues. South Africans should be behind African teams. Then I went to see the Argentina-Nigeria game, at Ellis Park. And I see young Indian professionals, white people, all dressed up in Lionel Messi jerseys, and the few of us [who] are supporting Nigeria – probably 2 per cent of the stadium. I sat there thinking, ‘What’s this society going to?’ Because we’re meant to be supporting an African team, aren’t we?

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Why? Why should we support an African team? There isn’t a black view, nor is there a white view. What’s striking to me, going to a Soccer City game, was that you were seeing very large numbers of this emerging black lower middle class. They could afford to come to the game, they had all the right clothes and they were there. Class is more important now.

This World Cup confirmed my belief  that Africanity/Africanness  is a concept created by those who refuse to acknowledge the complexities and the diversity of the African continent either because it challenges their prejudices and received ideas or because it is more convenient for them to believe that the populations of the African continent, as Conrad's cannibals, are the same and therefore have the same views, the same needs, and the same identity. It would be too inconvenient for Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the football international governing body, to accept the idea that the South African World Cup was solely the one of a country not of a continent because it would mean taking the risk to have another country on the same continent host the World Cup sooner than in a decade or two. In short, africanity/africanness is about anything but reality for it is an attempt to take short cuts to avoid acknowledging unsettling realities and to be content with bienfaisant paternalism or simply paternalistic humanism.

The South African World Cup and its potential unwanted guests

Predictable difficulties to the beginning of the World Cup in South Africa:

(...)at the last African Union summit Zuma declared that this was not South Africa’s World Cup but Africa’s and that all African heads of state were welcome. It now emerges that 50 out of 52 are said to be coming plus their considerable retinues. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, may be among them, although there is a warrant out for his arrest from the International Criminal Court, and legally South Africa would be compelled to detain him. Another difficult case will be Robert Mugabe, since Biden and many others will wish to avoid having to meet the Zimbabwean president or shake his hand.

My guess is that both Mugabe and al-Bashir will act as if their most ardent desire is to participate  to what they will claim to be an 'African' party until the last minute. The goal will be to play, as usual, the role of victims, but neither of them will show up. Omar al-Bashir will be too afraid to get arrested and Mugabe won't dare to embarrass Zuma who is a key ally.

However, there is another 'colorful' character that will certainly show up and do everything he can to attract the spotlight: Gaddafi. He will wear his usual pin of Africa and act as if he is the 'African president.'

Jacob Zuma year I

Roger Southall offers this assessment of Jacob Zuma's one year as South Africa's president, which I believe, is on point:

The coalition of the left and the politically aggrieved that brought Jacob Zuma to power is now openly fragmenting, and Zuma seems at a total loss at how to deal with the process. As a result, there is a widespread sense of a vacuum at the centre of his government, with important policy matters drifting and the different tendencies fighting.The present struggle is a vitally important one. The left is divided from fiscal conservatives on matters of economic policy, yet they share a common interest in confronting the dangers of growing patronage and corruption. Whether they can bury their differences sufficiently to confront a common enemy is a question without an answer. An alarming prospect is that they will knock each other out in battle, leaving the third tendency to march South Africa along the road to Zimbabwe.

The problem is that for South Africa and South Africans,  there is, for now, no alternative to Jacob Zuma and to the ANC.

Freedom, gender, and the fear of rape

Sugary excerpt of the morning from Jennifer Thorpe:

The saga around the gender testing of Caster Semenya rocked our foundations last year. Suddenly we weren’t sure what the boundaries for man and women were. We were forced to reconsider the nature nurture debate, but it remained a theoretical one as the protections for her dignity prevented us from knowing the results of these “gender tests”. The result would not have been able to answer the question though. Caster Semenya might not tell us whether her test revealed that she was female, or male, but she might be able to tell us what it means to be a woman, having been subject to such scrutiny herself.
Perhaps she might tell us that women in South Africa don’t have it easy. It’s hard to feel free when you must constantly evaluate your surroundings waiting for a rapist to strike. It’s hard to be free when the crime of rape is one of the only crimes where the burden of proof is on the survivor because of a problematic definition of rape that talks about consent, rather than coercive circumstances.