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By David Owen
Passion. Colour. Excitement. And, of course, cash.
The World Cup will bring all of these to South Africa next June, but will it change the lives of people like Cynthia in any meaningful way?
I met Cynthia in a church called Iziko Lobom in the heart of Imizamo Yethu township near Cape Town.
It is a setting of spectacular natural beauty, close to vineyards and shaded horse paddocks, not far from affluent Constantia and Hout Bay.
Yet Imizamo Yethu, a 38-hectare zone housing perhaps 20,000 people, consists largely of the sort of higgledy-piggledy corrugated iron shacks that are inhabited by urban poor all over the developing world.
Cynthia is sitting with a small group along one side of the church hall. Toddlers career around and there is a smell of cooked meat.
Yes, she acknowledges, she is excited to a certain extent by the approach of the World Cup, “but it doesn’t have much impact on our community”.
“We are still living in shacks.”
Moreover, she is “a bit worried” in case the tournament’s arrival triggers price increases.
“It caters for wealthy people,” she says. “We might not be able to afford [the prices they can pay].
“If you were struggling before” – apparently ‘Imizamo Yethu’ means ‘Our Struggle’ – “you might struggle even more.”
“If bread costs six rand now, it might cost 20 rand when foreigners with money come over.”
So would she rather see more new houses being built than a big stadium, I ask.
The answer is both succinct and unequivocal: “Exactly.”
As a blue Toyota pick-up truck roars around the narrow streets carrying a party of excited young men, my guide Patrick spells out his more nuanced reservations.
People are excited about the World Cup and will definitely be watching on TV or listening on their radio, he says.
“But people who live in such communities as ours are disappointed because there has not been enough progress.
“17 years is not a small amount of time.” (The township dates from the early 1990s.)
While the World Cup’s legacy will take the form of facilities and improved infrastructure – and a lot of people have been employed by World Cup-related projects – “everything,” he says, “is in process.”
“Hopefully in the next few months we will be seeing a lot of improvement.”
There are signs of hope for the future in the community.
As we wind our way up the hillside, we soon reach some of the compact houses built for shack-dwellers by the Niall Mellon Township Trust, a body set up by the Irish entrepreneur of the same name.
According to Patrick, British boxer Chris Eubank once spent three days in the township participating in the building programme.
One of the houses, I am surprised to see, is called Ty Cymru.
Patrick speculates that the volunteers who built it might have been Welsh.
The township has also spawned quite a number of businesses, be they bars, hairdressers, food shops, mechanics or telephone centres.
Patrick estimates that about 10 percent of Imizamo Yethu’s residents run their own businesses.
As we pass one green beaten iron structure called New York Shop – slogan: “You need it, we have got it” – he remarks that it is the most popular shop in the township.
Up ahead I can see the Kilimanjaro Ladys [sic] Hair Salon, while another corrugated iron shack – World of Meat – displays one of those ADT armed response signs that you see outside so many more affluent properties in this still divided society.
A sign outside one of the international call centres gives a strong hint of where many residents of the township come from: “Zambia, Nigeria, Zimb, Botshwana [sic], Congo, Malawi, DRC, Gabon, Kenya etc.” the sign reads; then right at bottom “Europe & America”.
“Guys from outside South Africa come here for a better life and a new challenge because of the hardship where they come from,” Patrick observes.
“It is closer to get here than Europe.”
Patrick says that 99 percent of the township’s youngsters go to school, even though it is a 15-20 minute walk away and costs R300-400 a year.
“It could be a good school, but not top-class,” he says when I ask about the quality of the education it provides.
“Facility-wise it is very poor; there are no sports facilities and it is very overcrowded.”
He estimates that there are 50 or more children per teacher.
Though the sun is blazing down, Patrick says that conditions get “miserable” in the southern-hemisphere winter, when there is a lot of rain.
“It turns ugly,” he says, indicating that July – the month of the World Cup final – and August are the worst months.
The last thing he shows me, across the road from the main settlement, is a rudimentary football pitch, consisting basically of dust and weeds.
What a fitting legacy it would be in World Cup year if this primitive pitch could be transformed into a sports field worthy of the name, capable of bringing a bit of fun into the lives of those who must live here and perhaps even of helping the most gifted one day to earn a living from their footballing skills.
David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year’s Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938
The Imizamo Yethu Sports Field Projectis the charity that is supported by insideworldfootball.biz. Norman Brook of Brook Sport and Leisure has created the Imizamo Yethu Sports Field Project. Norman has previously written a blog about Imizamo Yethu. You can read it here.
The ad carried on insideworldfootball.biz for the Imizamo Yethu Sports Field Project was created and donated by Andi Farr and designed by Sarah Bowron, Commercial Director of insideworldfootball.biz.