Coffee With The World Cup And Inherited Divisions
If you were having coffee with me I would welcome you to my tangle of words. Come, let’s bask in some winter sun.
Did you know that the FIFA World Cup is the single most-watched sporting event in the world? Every four years, something remarkable happens football manages to do what summits, treaties, and diplomatic handshakes cannot: turn the world into one enormous, improbable family. Billions of us, scattered across time zones, cheering at the beautiful game.
It is a reminder that beneath all our borders and grievances and identity politics, we can still be brought together. For a few weeks, the world feels smaller and more connected.
When African countries make it onto the global stage, the rest of the continent often rallies behind them. It less about nationality and more about representation, one of us is there. We wear their colours, sing their songs, and claim their victories as our own. And if they lose, we cry together.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that this year has been different. African nations still united, but in protest against South Africa and Morocco, supporting whichever team happened to be playing against them. It would have been interesting to see what would have unfolded had South Africa and Morocco met each other on the pitch.
The World Cup stage became a platform for protest against South Africa’s xenophobia. People cheered when they lost and celebrated when they were knocked out.
South Africa has been gripped by an illegal immigration crisis, something many nations grapple with. There are protests ostensibly targeted at undocumented immigrants. But in practice, the anger does not stop at documentation status; it spills over, catching anyone who looks or sounds “other.” There have been cases where South African nationals have reportedly had to flee violent crowds because they were mistaken for foreigners.
The state’s language has been procedural, bureaucratic and almost clinical and could be interpreted as tacit approval. It is in their interest to give socio-economic anxiety the face of the illegal immigrant than to point the finger at governance and corruption.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that people have genuine grievances on unemployment, inequality, crime, and service delivery. Those are real and the anger has a legitimate source. But a sober reflection reveals something else, the blame has been conveniently and squarely placed on the visible immigrant, rather than interrogating the systems, structures, and leadership failures that created the conditions in the first place.
As the 30 June deadline looms, thousands of foreigners are trying to leave South Africa ahead of the planned protests with African country governments working hard to repatriate their citizens.
But this is not a South African story, not entirely….
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that for all our talk of unity, of ubuntu, of shared African identity, we rarely interrogate the fractures within our own communities. Our so-called “traditional values” often come with an unspoken hierarchy of belonging. We are raised to trust our own, to prioritise kin, to find comfort in familiarity. It starts small, family, clan, tribe and it is a surprisingly small jump from there to xenophobia.
The same energy that makes you distrust your neighbour makes you resent your neighbouring country. The mechanism is identical. Only the label changes.
And we are not saints. Even Zimbabwe has a dark past riddled with genocide and xenophobia. We might seem welcoming now, but there was a time when the economy was booming, and immigrants were treated badly. We may not have doused them in petrol and set them on fire, but we gave them derogatory nicknames, mocked their accents, and nobody batted an eyelid.
Oh how the tables have turned. After we lost our breadbasket-of-Africa status and became a basket case, we are now here where people would rather be exploited as illegal immigrants elsewhere than stay here.
If you were having coffee with me, I would ask you: how do we demand a seat at the global table when we cannot share a meal with each other?
Until we answer that honestly, the idea of a united Africa remains just that an idea we visit occasionally, like the World Cup, before returning to our inherited divisions.
What’s going on in your neck of the woods?
~B
WinterABC26 – From Conflict to Friendship
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