Sport and Peace-Building in Divided Societies: Playing With Enemies by John Sugden & Alan Tomlinson

Author:John Sugden & Alan Tomlinson [Sugden, John & Tomlinson, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural & Social Aspects, Sports & Recreation, Peace, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136292347
Google: lGBQDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35738482
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

State interests and governmental and educational issues

From the areas around the Gautrain the lived reality of neo-liberal South Africa is visible. Johannesburg is an urban sprawl with no obvious centre. Located in the North of the City, Sandton City is Johannesburg’s, South Africa’s and Africa’s commercial financial hub, with sky-scraping corporate headquarters vying for space with four- and five-star hotels and opulent shopping malls. In the Summer of the 2010 World Cup its smartest hotels were monopolised by the FIFA elite – past and present – and the business dealmakers of the global football industry. Deals were still being struck, or sought, with the decision-makers who, as members of the FIFA Executive Committee (ExCo), had the votes that would at the end of the year hand the men’s World Cup Finals to the Russian Federation (2018) and Qatar (2022). Not all members of the ExCo would make it through from Johannesburg or Durban (the favoured bases for the FIFArati) to Zurich in December; several would by then have been suspended for breaches of the FIFA ethics code, for making it known, for instance, what level or kind of offer they might listen to in exchange for a (secretly) declared commitment to vote for one of the candidates.

In Sandton City in June 2010 though it was business as usual for much of the football world, luxuriating in a first-world city in a third-world country, the urban centre of which looks and feels like many US city centres with suited businessmen scurrying between offices along heavily secured walk-ways and squares while the daily influx of township workers and street traders mills about in a parallel universe in the streets below. There was obviously no shortage of money here, an impression reinforced by a stroll through the opulent gated residential neighbourhoods surrounding Sand-ton. This remains a world away from Johannesburg’s sprawling townships where the vast majority of the city’s black population people lives, eking out a living, cheek by jowl in ramshackle, makeshift homes. While sold as generic improvement in the city’s otherwise inefficient/non-existent public transport system in the build-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it was plain to see that a primary purpose of the Gautrain is to facilitate the speedy passage of international travellers, corporate executives and civil servants to South Africa’s capital and centre of government 30 kilometres north in Pretoria.

In Pretoria, Bernardus Van Der Spuy, then Chief Director, Strategic and Executive Support in the National Department of Sport and Recreation (NDSR) provided a government perspective on sport in the Rainbow Nation. A former Olympic weightlifter, he occupies a distinctive vantage point from which to comment upon the topic at hand. Unable for many years to compete on the world stage, he felt the impact of South Africa’s sporting isolation during the anti-apartheid era and has been a senior government sports administrator for more than two decades. He has been involved in the disestablishment of apartheid-style sport and its democratic reform from the earliest days of the new South Africa and is one of the few senior white administrators to hold and keep a position in government.

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