Burundian Women Supporters at CHAN 2014, Peter Mokaba Stadium, Polokwane, South Africa
Football like politics is a personal affair. Football
fans take to the game the way political party supporters take to the affairs of
their affiliations. I have heard stories of men in the townships who place
their homes and wives as bets in vouching for the victory of their favorite
soccer teams, while others battle for their sanity after the loss of their teams
in a soccer match. Here in Africa, soccer is not a game. It is a hope, a love,
a coming of a special chosen time and an event followers deem worth to pray to
their sovereignty for a win and victory of their members.
As a testimony from a lover of Africa, what CHAN 2014 provided
in the soccer stadiums It’s like cultures collapsing on each other and melting
away. Omens, spells, negative meditations, xenophobic mentalities and
diplomatic issues against one another as a people are taken away by the spirit of
football, capturing a picture of a promised Africa visible and rolling in each
of our eye balls in that moment. People literally breath the same air. No prejudice.
People come to such unity in the body of football that lines between strangers and
genders become undefined.
I may not be a devoted soccer follower but what I
witnessed in soccer matches is real and solid definition of what my Africa is
and is to become. FIFA, AFCON and now in the moment CHAN amongst others
are big moments, shadows of things to come, symbolic of a unified body of
Africans. A coming together of a body of believers, chanting for victory for teams
and victory for their nations.
We have hosted so many sporting moments here in South
Africa; the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the 1996 African Nations cup, 1996 World Cup
of Golf, 2003 Cricket World Cup, 2006 Paralympic Swimming World Championships,
the 2010 FIFA World Cup, 2012 Africa Cup of Nations and the current 2014 Africa
Nations Championship or Chan amongst others and time has arrived for us to
acknowledge and accept the grace with which these acts of sports wish to teach
us and show us. Perhaps to our expectations and hopes in certain areas of development
these events have left us labouring in vain, but in our character as South
Africans and Africans a little we have been transformed into knowing that we
are as a body, a people called Africa.
Though only 6307 occupied the 45 000 sitting capacity
of the Peter Mokaba stadium to support DR Congo versus Mauritania and Burundi versus Gabon. I saw a glimpse of a Africa I
know we sometimes silently know it can become. This is the revelation that
Mandela had long before the rest of us, about what this kind of gathering does
for a people. Seeing Sport for what it truly is, a unifier.
In the interests of his efforts in the struggle
against apartheid, Peter Mokaba if he was there to witness in the same lenses
what I saw, he would have smiled a rainbow smile for what his name was carrying
inside the open hands of the stadium.
Pictures: Rent Minds
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