Game Changer

In December of last year, dozens of workmen spent a scorching Johannesburg afternoon on an unusual project. They hitched an enormous facsimile of a soccer ball up the concrete length of the Hillbrow broadcast tower, the city’s signature architectural landmark. The tower, a menacing relic of the apartheid regime, is a manifestation of Johannesburg’s soul. In the context of the skyline, it appears as if the seething city is flipping the bird at the rest of humanity.

This extended index finger now wears a vast soccer ball as a ring.

I can’t speak for the rest of Johannesburg, but for me, the ball quickly transmogrified from a cheesy marketing campaign into an evocative piece of urban sculpture.

It was nothing more than the result of a scheme between FIFA — the organization running our planet for the next month — and the cellphone company that now owns the tower. Yet for me, it might as well have been the world’s largest Rodin. What, I wondered, was the secret behind its power?

Johannesburg — mining town, ground zero for colonial-era rapacity and post-colonial vicissitude–is an emblematic city. It is Africa in precis, the developed nestled uncomfortably against the developing. By way of example, the inner city — a once proud, late Victorian-era downtown–is now a squat for immigrants from the rest of Africa. Yet even this contested space is being invaded by so-called Black Diamond arrivistes, who enjoy downtown for its proximity to both the townships and the ‘burbs, and for its African vibrancy. Joburg, you see, makes no sense, which is perhaps the only sensible statement an apres-apartheid city can make.

As I negotiated the streets of my hometown last summer (also known as Canada’s winter), the ball followed me everywhere. The Hillbrow tower, ever Orwellian, has an uncanny ability to appear behind every hillock and around every corner. Four months before kick-off, despite the omniscient ball and FIFA-approved advertising miscellany, South Africa seemed stunned by the enormity of the looming party. Like the tower, the tournament was a looming, ghostly presence. Finishing touches were put on stadiums and infrastructure, but folks were more concerned with President Jacob Zuma’s indefatigable sex drive (he had knocked up the daughter of the head of the country’s soccer federation — one of the men behind that glabrous addendum to the Hillbrow tower — a month or so after his fifth wedding) and other, more urgent issues.

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Whenever one forgot the Cup entirely, the ball popped up as a reminder. Catching sight of it, I’d get a hitch in my chest, a small infarction that was, literally, a breaking of the heart. I’m Johannesburg born, white of skin and one of apartheid’s beneficiaries. “My God,” I’d think, lump firmly lodged in throat, “can the country possibly have come this far?” I harbour fewer illusions than most regarding the post-apartheid era — after all, I spend a portion of my year in Johannesburg chasing if-it-bleeds-it-leads stories — but South Africa, Africa’s America, is a place where optimism dies hard.