Africa Is a Country

The Final Countdown

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

The Final Countdown

By
Sean Jacobs

For those doubting South African can host a successful World Cup, the country has a long history of successfully hosting big tournaments.

At least one year before the tournament, English fans get ready to the World Cup in South Africa (Some Driftwood / Flickr CC).

With less than 50 days to go before the start of the 2010 World Cup, Kenya-based journalist and author Steve Bloomfield has done a decent piece for the UK’s “The Independent” on the countdown to the tournament. My judgment is of course not clouded by him asking me for my opinion:

‘… So far, the expected boost to tourism and foreign investment has yet to materialise, in part because influential football figures and journalists in Europe still have strong doubts that South Africa can host a successful tournament. Few of those concerns are valid, says Sean Jacobs, a South African professor of international relations and an avid football fan who writes a blog on culture and Africa (africasacountry.com). “South Africa has a long history of successfully hosting big tournaments. The Rugby World Cup was one year after the 1994 elections when things were much more tenuous. Whites were still waving the old flag, some were still armed and threatening war.” Since then, South Africa has successfully hosted the cricket World Cup, British Lions rugby tours and football’s Africa Cup of Nations. Last year, it hosted cricket’s Indian Premier League after the organisers decided it wasn’t safe enough to host it in India …’

Read the piece – which also quotes Peter Alegi, the football historian and my partner in the blog Football is Coming Home, – here.

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.