Last Saturday,  a rugby playoff match in South Africa was switched from the white suburbs of Pretoria to a stadium in Soweto. The move was required because the stadium in Pretoria was needed for the soccer World Cup. Organizers FIFA would not allow the pitch to be turned into a swamp by hard running rugby players.  So the truth is the game and the white fans would not have gone to Soweto for the match if the venue change was not required.  Not surprisingly, everything went of well and thousands of white fans were ferried to Soweto for the match. Some fans did take their reprehensible views with them to Soweto. For an example, see in this New York Times video at the 0:53 mark. Then most of them went home again.

Anyway, if you read and watch the news, you’d thought something else happened.

Apparently the anchor of the South African TV news station, ETV, announced after the match:  “Nelson Mandela’s dream of a nonracial South Africa was starting to be realized.”  For real.  The New York Times announced on its front page this morning:  “Rugby Helps Bridge South Africa’s Racial Divide.”   The 1995 Rugby World Cup is being evoked.  You know the bollocks story about how rugby then united “the nation.”  Invictus gets inserted into reports again.  Like in 1995 and when the movie came out, Nelson Mandela’s name gets thrown around indiscriminately.

The correspondent of the Canadian Globe and Mail writes: “Rugby conquers racism.” What?  Even the normally level-headed and perceptive Guardian correspondent, David Smith got swept up by this chimera. (Smith even made a false equivalence between race in rugby as well as in football.)

This is what I find so infuriating about South Africa’s media (and often the ‘foreign correspondents’) reporting about it.

Whites get special prizes for occasionally doing very ordinary things. And for doing it way pass its sell by date.  Black people never do anything for the “rainbow.”  Of course, this is all easier than all the hard work needed to transform South Africa. (BTW, an important side issue is that the World Cup stadiums will be used by rugby teams once the tournament is over.)

And what is even worse are the mood swings exposed by this kind of reporting. As a friend of mine–a very senior South African journalist–opined:

“… When ET [Eugene Terreblanche] was killed we were told SA [South Africa] was on the verge of a race war, now we told Madiba’s [that’s Nelson Mandela] dream of a rainbow nation is back on track cause white people went to Soweto to play rugby!”

Bipolar.

— Sean Jacobs