by Sanjena Sathian:
I was fortunate enough to spend part of my time this summer in South Africa for the first two weeks of the World Cup. It was… more African than I expected. It was more than the vuvuzelas – it was the slum tours every tourist agency made you go on, claiming they were “the heart of Africa” or the markets set up on street corners in Johannesburg, half the stalls selling flags of countries in the cup and the other half selling Nigerian masks and Kenyan artwork.
“Africa sells,” one of the artists told me. “You’re all so excited the cup is in Africa. I’ve never been outside Johannesburg but I gotta sell you Africa, not South Africa.”
I know it’s late to return back to musings on the cup, and that the soccer fad has died back down in the U.S. for the next four years, but being in Africa this summer was like being at the center of the forces of globalization – and seeing the trickle-down in unimaginable ways. I’ve chosen to write about African soccer as my first post on this Globalist blog beat because my goal in writing this blog is to investigate cultural artifacts of globalization.
African countries are a prime example of who got left behind in the race to integrate the world. Plenty of developing countries have made their way into the globalized economic markets – India and China are obvious examples – and have been able to keep up at least somewhat with the quickened pace of international trade and with major geopolitical affairs like multilateral treaties and major international negotiations. But African countries have been left in the dust.
Perhaps the scariest thing about leaving South Africa behind this summer was seeing the bright yellow billboards on the way to the Johannesburg airport that showed the best players on each African team – Ivory Coast’s Drogba, Cameroon’s Eto’o, and a host of Bafana Bafana players – each wearing jerseys labeled “United for Africa.” Just before leaving, at a large mall in Capetown, I’d seen a confrontation between Ivory Coast fans and Brazilians – each decked out in their own country’s flags and colors, they ran into each other the day before the two teams were due to play in the group stage and jokingly taunted one another, blowing vuvuzelas and dancing in one another’s faces. As a major Brazil (aka Kaka) fan, I was wearing a Brazil jacket and surreptitiously slipped it off, realizing that in Africa, my alliance had to lie with the home team. But why were they the home team? That kind of logic would never have flown in a European, Latin American, or even Asian Cup.
The Pan-Africanism the World Cup highlighted may already be gone – and that’s because it might not have been as real as we thought in the first place. South Africa is not, as many of the immigrants I spoke to told me, representative of the continent – nor has it even historically been the friendliest country to outsiders. Over the past years, South Africa has even gained attention for violence towards immigrants from other African countries within its own borders. So why did the World Cup allow for a continent to come together – and can this be the face of a future Africa, brought together in transnationalism the way the most idealistic supporters of the EU have hoped for?
The answer lies in what globalization has left behind: Africa. The cup made it to the too-often forgotten continent by 2010, but the world chose to see picking South Africa as picking Africa. And in response, they became Africa before our eyes. We are vaguely aware that our constantly forward moving, re-integrating economy has left some parts of the world behind, but we easily lump that world into simply digestible categories.
I have a cab driver friend in New Haven from Somalia, whom I told about my summer in AFRICA! – yes finally, I made it there! – when I returned to Yale. He laughed at me.
“You saw Africa? Honey, you saw the Africa Coke wanted you to see. You didn’t see nothin’ African yet.”