"You Have All the Reasons to Be Angry"
A mine massacre and the fight for South Africa's future
The liberation of South Africa was one of the great triumphs of the twentieth century. What happened next is one of the great disappointments of the twenty-first.
Giddy-Up!
Outjo, Namibia—Growing up in Namibia in the 1980s, Willem Bezuidenhout was alone with his cowboy dream. He wallpapered his father’s house in the capital of Windhoek with posters of Hopalong Cassidy and shunned play dates to watch The War Wagon again and again in his darkened bedroom, pausing the tape to trace John Wayne’s image onto pieces of translucent paper that he pressed up to the screen. His playmates—the sons of Namibia’s white farmers, doctors, or lawyers, like his father—made fun of him. But that was before the white communities of southern Africa went crazy for country.
Dreaming of Tripoli
Somewhere amid the burning oil pipelines and wrecked tanks, among the wounded filling the hospitals and the homeless winding out of their ruined cities, lies another potential casualty of the Libyan war: five and a half million olive trees the Italians planted in the desert in the 1930s. Few worldwide may be thinking of these trees as they watch the latest news. But, in South Africa, some people are praying for them.
Africa Is Dead, Long Live Holland
Lots of debate out there about soccer and national pride, and whether the expressions of nationalism the game provokes are good or bad. But I gotta say, down here in South Africa among the fans rather than the commentators, what they mainly look like is thin. I watched the Uruguay-Netherlands game last night in Cape Town, and it was funny to see how swiftly and totally the local fans had abandoned their undying loyalty to the black African teams and embraced their historical ties to the Dutch, the first South African colonists.
"Yes We Can"...Actually No, We Can't
I'm sitting in a solid block of Americans at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria watching Team USA play in the sandbox with the Algerians, and the one thing I notice is the total absence of "Yes We Can" chants. This time last year, even the South Africans were chanting Obama's campaign motto. In the teeming Johannesburg bar in which I watched Bafana Bafana take on Brazil in last June's Confederations Cup semis, "Yes We Can" was the favorite refrain, not to mention at the US-Brazil final. I haven't heard it once this year. My companion and I tried getting a round going in the stands here, but no dice.
Worse Than An Insect Noise
I hear vuvuzelas everywhere. On the streets, in the shopping malls, and of course in the stadiums, but I even hear them now when they aren't there. Last night, as I was trying to fall asleep in the little house where I'm staying in Melville, I was certain I heard a crowd of them, honking relentlessly somewhere far off. Then I realized the heater in my room happens to drone at a B flat, the same tone made by most vuvuzelas. Would you ever confuse a crowd of Mexican soccer fans shouting "Puto," or a group of Brits singing "Rule Brittania," with a home electrical appliance? No.
The Horrific Letdown in South Africa
So, how bad was that game? I was inside the frigid Loftus Versfeld stadium in Pretoria (you too, Zach?), and it was bad in the stands before it got bad on the pitch. South African fans have a strange, angsty relationship with Bafana Bafana. On the one hand, a Bafana triumph is held to have a sort of mystical, even quasi-political power.
The Healer
BLOEMFONTEIN, SOUTH AFRICA—It was as clear as the film’s most famous scene: The work of reconciliation in South Africa is not done yet. In February 2008, a video appeared online showing four white students from South Africa’s University of the Free State (UFS) hazing their black janitors as if they were new freshmen. There’s a beer-drinking contest, a footrace to “Chariots of Fire.” Near the end, the boys appear to pee into bowls of stew and urge the janitors to eat up. It was supposed to be an in-house joke, a protest against a plan to integrate their dorm, a student residence called Reitz.
The Healer
BLOEMFONTEIN, SOUTH AFRICA—It was as clear as the film’s most famous scene: The work of reconciliation in South Africa is not done yet. In February 2008, a video appeared online showing four white students from South Africa’s University of the Free State (UFS) hazing their black janitors as if they were new freshmen. There’s a beer-drinking contest, a footrace to “Chariots of Fire.” Near the end, the boys appear to pee into bowls of stew and urge the janitors to eat up. It was supposed to be an in-house joke, a protest against a plan to integrate their dorm, a student residence called Reitz.
Live From The Bush Pub in Afrikaner Country
In South Africa, soccer is black while rugby is white. That's what makes Invictus work—it's a shock, even a betrayal, for Nelson Mandela to trot out onto a rugby field sporting the Springbok jersey. I had a ticket to tonight's France-Uruguay opener in Cape Town, a city that sometimes seems to be populated primarily not with white nor black South Africans but unctuous Europeans surfing their generous unemployment, but an illness kept me stuck in Bloemfontein, a city in the historically Afrikaner farming plain in the center of the country.
