This June’s FIFA World Cup Final South Africa represents a risky bet that, like many wagers, poses itself as a question: Can an African nation successfully host a massive sports tournament without descending into chaos? FIFA, soccer’s international organizing body, has smartly hedged. In choosing South Africa, they can ostensibly tap into the best of both worlds — an industrialized democratic African nation not currently undergoing a civil war, and a first class African country brimming with the continent’s possibilities.
The previous Olympics were, of course, also held in a developing nation, but that event was a breeze by comparison. In Beijing, the regime used an iron hand to tamp down potential flare-ups, especially regarding the key issues of infrastructure and security. The Chinese, however, had one city to deal with, while the 2010 World Cup organizers must manage nine. What’s more, there is no iron hand in South Africa, which is in part what made the country so appealing in the first place. But with horrendous violent crime statistics, Stygian transportation problems and an angry underclass that cannot be controlled by the state, the FIFA showcase could explode like a French striker facing an Italian midfielder.
How shall it all pan out? FIFA — a powerful extra-governmental organization sometimes compared to the pre-Renaissance Vatican — is holding thumbs, to say nothing of the South African authorities. Regardless, World Cup preparations are altering the country — arguably Africa’s most important — and it seems appropriate to document these changes. In this, the first of a series of posts leading up to the 2010 tournament, we shall kick off at centre field, as it were — in the newly refurbished FNB Stadium, now called Soccer City.
It’s a good place to start for several reasons, foremost among them that fact that the grounds are the very place where the new South Africa became a genuine possibility: Nelson Mandela, two days after his release from prison in February 1990, addressed 120,000 people packed into the FNB stands and ushered in the post-apartheid-era. The stadium’s sports history is no less impressive: Countless South African soccer league games have been played at FNB, ferocious battles between Kaiser Chiefs and the Orlando Pirates — the local Manchester United and Chelsea. It is close enough to Coca-Cola Stadium, the site of the epic 1995 Rugby World Cup win recently dramatized by Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, to be sprinkled with some of that event’s nation-building fairy dust. But FNB, a concrete relic of the apartheid years, was too small for a FIFA World Cup final. Enter the trowels, the backhoes, and an impressive $308 million (CDN) — a figure not without controversy in a country where 35 million people live south of the poverty line.
Soccer City lies on a nodal point between Johannesburg proper and its largest, most important township — Soweto. It was here, in this strip of no-man’s land, that the mechanics of apartheid, and more specifically the Group Areas Act, were so perfectly iterated. Millions of blacks were forced to live in informal settlements on the fringes of the city, in order to provide South Africa’s financial heart with a ready supply of labour. Soweto was the flashpoint for the resistance movement; apartheid suffered the first of its interminable death throes after riots tore through the township in 1976. In the late eighties, when apartheid was all but dead, ethnic violence stoked by the regime turned the township into a de facto war zone. Now, Soweto has regained its rightful place as the articulation of the South African paradox: Staggeringly rich, astonishingly poor, vibrant, violent, and pregnant with future possibility.
The township is linked to the city’s northern suburbs by the M2 highway, and to drive this route is to parse Johannesburg’s essential character. This is, and always has been, a mining town. The air is particulate with red dust; there is a taste of metal on the tongue. Slanted roofs of corrugated iron flash with sun; mine dumps striated with red and gold mark the land like tribal scars. As always, the Highveld afternoon is febrile with a coming storm. This is a journey through Johannesburg’s DNA. To the right, the site of Langlaagte farm, where — as all Jo’burg children are taught — a man named George Harrison stumbled over a rich vein of gold on an afternoon in 1886. A week later, a city of tents, picks, shovels and rapacity was born. It spread virus-like into Booysens, Doornfontein and beyond — up the reef, devouring precious metal and people alike.
Only ten years after Mr. Harrison’s fortuitous discovery, Johannesburg was 100,000 strong and delivering 27 percent of the world’s gold supply. Twenty years after incorporation it was — and has remained — the richest and most industrialized city in Africa. As R.V. Selope Thema, editor of the Black Nationalist, once wrote: “There can be no doubt that the historian…will point to the period between the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand and the establishment of the city of Johannesburg as a turning point in the history not only of South Africa, but of the whole continent.”
This history follows the driver as he takes the Nasrec exhibition grounds off-ramp, once home to the Rand Easter Show, the apartheid-era mega funfair that survived the regime for twelve years before being terminated by a violent taxi drivers’ strike. Like an apparition, Soccer City reveals itself through the red dust. The stadium looks as if it has always been here; there are no harsh angles, no sharp edges. What strikes one in this age of architectural ostentation is its modesty, which itself must count as an act of audacity. Officially completed in October of 2009, it is still very much a construction zone, but it is a question of final touches. Four months old, and Soccer City is already an iconic, inviolable part of the Johannesburg landscape.
It is roughly circular, as if fashioned by a hand. (The press materials insist that it takes the form of a calabash, the African clay pot used all over the continent.) Mismatched slats the colour of Johannesburg’s rich earth form the shell. From one angle, the Brixton and Hillbrow towers — landmarks that have always defined the city’s priapic, masculine Id. From another, a flayed mine dump the colour of polished gold. The slats are gently reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project in Seattle, but Soccer City is less whimsical, more reverent. On first glance, one allows that it will stand up against Sir Norman Foster’s refurbished Wembley, and the coming Barcelona FC Camp Nou. North American stadium builders, resolutely Scrooge-like with both space and ingenuity, could learn much here.
The architects, Boogertman Urban Edge + Partners, were commissioned to build a structure accommodating 94,000, with no obstructed sightlines and all the trimmings. The guts of the place are designed to resemble the crisscross of mine shafts that form the innards of the city. There is a vast loading dock, offices, a theatre, and that reflect complicated player hierarchies. On the north side, there is an artifact of the old apartheid-era FNB stadium, which shall function as the holding cell for hooligans visiting from previous colonial powers.
Standing on the field where more than a billion people will watch two nations play for the greatest prize in sports, one can’t help but reflect on how far South Africa has come since the first democratic elections in 1994. Rows of black chairs among the standard orange point to the nine other stadiums dotted across the country — all of them in troubled, vital southern African cities, all of them essential to the future of the continent. For a soccer fan — and really, who isn’t during Cup Final? — this is akin to sitting on God’s lap. That it smells like the playing fields that a Jo’burg boy spent his youth on, that the breeze blowing through the open roof is tinged with sweet-smelling Jo’burg dust, is so profoundly moving that it feels as if the bet FIFA has taken on this wounded country shall make winners of them yet. In the middle of the Soccer City pitch, it’s difficult to imagine anything other than the extended cheers of an ecstatic crowd.
(Photographs by Richard Poplak)
