Africa Is a Country

Who will get rich

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Who will get rich

By
Sean Jacobs

The fantasy that local people - small businesspeople, informal traders, especially black people - will make money or get jobs during the 2010 World Cup.

South Africa's national football team training at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wiki Commons).

Just as the football at the 2010 World Cup will be great, someone will make lots of money. It is not going to be local businesses for sure. This excellent 13 minute short documentary (“Trademark 2010“) for Dutch TV public TV channel, VPRO, takes on the fantasy that local people – small businesspeople, informal traders, especially black people – will make money or get jobs during the tournament (Ht: Tom Devriendt).

Mainly filmed in Cape Town, the tightly structured short film consists of interviews with, among others, a young informal tour operator (who wants to corner the visiting Spanish-speaking market), a construction worker at the stadium (who contemplates the fact that he won’t have work after the stadium is completed), a former sports administrator (who laments FIFA’s greed), the leader of a group of informal traders in downtown Cape Town (who will be prevented from trading during the World Cup), sociologist Ari Sitas and campaigner Eddie Cottle of the group Campaign for Decent Work 2010. And then there’s the city official who sells jargon.

Only discordant note: Why does the film end by legitimizing former councilor, Arthur Weinburg, who represents the Cape Town Environmental Protection Association, a front for rich whites in the neighborhood where the stadium is located and have no other reasons to oppose it other than it is being built in their neighborhood and not somewhere else?

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.