South Africans see themselves as a nation that loves sport, but with the World Cup in football imminent, there appears to be a sense of exhaustion both in the media and among the population. One important reason is that football does not dominate the public imagination of sport, as cricket and rugby do. The game is played and loved in the black townships, the fortunes of African football-playing nations are followed devotedly, and players such as Didier Drogba have a larger-than-life standing in the country. But football has not become a metaphor for the nation, as rugby and cricket have become. Whether this reflects a racial affiliation alone is hard to get at, because the local team, Bafana (which could be genially translated as “the boys”), are eighty-eighth in the FIFA rankings, without a ghost of a chance of winning the Cup, while at rugby and cricket, South Africa are world beaters.

The moment when South Africa won the World Cup in rugby in 1995 was a deeply emotional moment of racial reconciliation and a rainbow vision of the future, sentimentalized in Clint Eastwood's film Invictus (2009), which was based on John Carlin's book. Carlin's melancholy epigraph reflects the general mood now, with perceptions of a decline of political morals, the incapacity of the state to carry out projects, and the fraying of civil society. While mega-events such as the Beijing Olympics and the Commonwealth Games in Delhi this year overtly appeal to notions of national glory, it is a moot question what order of nationalism is being summoned in these contexts.

National pride is in short supply in South Africa. The international press continues with the general theme of Afro-pessimism, remarking on the high levels of crime, AIDS, and prostitution in the country. Local newspapers mirror these anxieties—they are replete with stories of corruption, lawlessness, and the absence of intellectual life in the public sphere. Very few across the racial spectrum mourned the murder this Easter of Eugene Terreblanche, the leader of the white supremacist party, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), by two of his farm workers. This act was preceded by the ratcheting up of racial rhetoric by the leader of the youth wing of the African National Congress, Julius Malema, who sang the struggle song “kill the Boer” on public platforms and called for the nationalization of the mining industry, dominated by white capital, and a rethinking of the legacy of Nelson Mandela.

While there may have been no direct connection between the singing of the “struggle” song and the act of murder, newspapers have returned to the fact that more than 1,500 murders of white farmers have taken place since 1994. The unasked question is whether the World Cup will bring people together in the declining political climate. Even as the daily countdown to the games proceeds apace, there is an air of crisis: Are the stadiums completed? Are transport arrangements in place? Why are there so many unsold tickets and unbooked hotel rooms?

It is in the public reaction to the authoritarian micro-management of the games by FIFA that nationalism is most evident. FIFA negotiates with the national government rather than the cities, quite unlike the earlier decentralization practiced in World Cups, strengthening perceptions of neo-imperialism and invoking submerged critiques of Western power. The Ministry of Industry is seen as having gone overboard in its attempt to prevent “ambush marketing” and unauthorized use of FIFA trademarks and words describing event venues by making words such as “World Cup” and the date “2010” prohibited marks under the special statute, the Second 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Special Measures Act 2006. One implication of this is that, in principle, if the words “World Cup” are applied to any goods on sale not authorized by the FIFA, the draconian terms of the Counterfeit Goods Act apply. Lawyers have argued that a party may become a criminal even in complete ignorance of its provisions.

Two cases brought by FIFA against errant parties are revealing. FIFA sued a popular pub near Loftus Versfeld (one of the venues) known as Eastwoods Tavern, which painted the words “World Cup 2010” on its roof and flew the flags of countries that would participate in the tournament. In March 2010, FIFA ordered the budget airline kulula.com to withdraw an advertisement that said it was the “Unofficial National Carrier of the You-Know-What,” objecting to the depiction of the Cape Town stadium, soccer balls, and the words “South Africa” in the advertisement. Kulula reissued its advertisement with the words “Not next year, not last year, but somewhere in between,” and won fans and travelers all around. Kendell Gears, who produced one of the official FIFA posters, titled it Free Balling, in an act of intellectual sabotage. He claimed in an interview that the word referred to the act of walking around without underwear with one's you-know-whats hanging in the breeze.

According to economists, the 2010 games are going to be 25 percent more profitable than the 2008 World Cup for FIFA, regardless of ticket sales. On the other hand, the expenditures for the Games have increased astronomically for a country that can ill afford such sums for a place in the sun for a month. The initial estimate in 2004, when South Africa won the bid for 2010, was that the cost would be US$300 million; the present estimate of expenditures is closer to $4 billion. So is this money going toward urban regeneration, the creation of employment and long-term infrastructural development?

In Cape Town, the city government wanted to build a stadium in Athlone to promote development in the lower-income parts of the city and to improve transport connections from low-income areas to employment centers. FIFA led officials away from Newlands Stadium, which would have fulfilled these objectives, to Green Point, a more aesthetically pleasing location. In Johannesburg, Ellis Park Stadium is an exception among the venues, as it is located to the east of the inner city in a derelict, low-income area with many migrants from other African countries living in slums. As critical social scientists have pointed out, once the area is developed, the poor may indeed become the first victims of displacement and eviction, as has been happening. A recent study quotes a local councilor's matter-of-fact evaluation: “We need to remove these people, allocate them somewhere else. If we develop this area we can't accommodate all of them: some of them are not working. In the city we only need people who are able to pay … That is good if they get removed … It is time to take the city back.”Footnote ¹

Elsewhere, a Mbombela municipality administrator, Jimmy Mohlala, was killed in February 2009 after becoming a whistle-blower on a land deal that saw 6,000 acres of land sold for 1 rand.Footnote ² The perceived solution to poverty and urban degeneration seems to consist here, as in Delhi, Beijing, and Vancouver, of a systematic removal of the poor from prime urban areas, carried on with little protest from a larger public that has been sold the rhetoric of national pride.Footnote ³

As two of the most vocal and incisive critics of the planning process for the 2010 World Cup have put it, this could have been an occasion for, first, improving the life conditions of the historically disadvantaged and, second, redesigning the apartheid city, even if through an integrated public transport system. It is not yet clear whether the Rea Vaya Bus Rapid Transit System, borrowed from the urban experience of Bogota and implemented in Delhi for the Commonwealth Games, will help connect a city where no public transport exists in a real sense. Transportation arguably helps bring in the migrant laborer and domestic servant to work, as under apartheid, and it is now controlled by private taxi operators. Moreover, here, as in Delhi and Shanghai, the idea of cities as “world class” and “globally competitive” has meant the adoption of a formulaic economic growth-centered model in which benefits to the poor, if any, will accrue through a dilatory trickle-down effect.Footnote ⁴ All existing studies show that it is not only the people in general, and the poor in particular, who lose out, but also host cities have never been known to make a profit.Footnote ⁵ Transient events do not generate permanent impacts for the economy, but their impact on the disadvantaged is rather more permanent. National pride sometimes obliterates citizens.