World Cup fever humbug

The World Cup (of football, in case you're wondering) is nearly upon South Africa - the first African country ever to host this juggernaut of commercialisation and proxy patriotism. There aren't many public signs yet of popular enthusiasm for this spectacle - in the past couple of weeks the vendors at traffic-lights have started selling WC paraphernalia, and quite a lot of people have bought little SA flags to fly on their cars - but otherwise it seems to be only the official sponsors who are attempting to whip up emotions with lots of advertising. The football extravaganza appears to be a good reason to drink beer, make telephone calls, use your visa card, and so on - in other words to do everything you're usually exhorted to do, but even more so.

On the other hand, entire categories of people are not happy with the World Cup being held in SA, or rather they're not happy with the money being spent on it when SA has economic and social problems which in any objective scale are far more worthy of attention and investment. Recently the transport workers and municipal employees have been striking for better wages, while the national union of miners is threatening to follow suit and pitch the country into darkness just when the floodlights need to stay on for the football; and soldiers are threatening to abandon the borders and let thousands of foreigners stream across to gatecrash the party. An increasing number of communities have been staging "service delivery protests", in which they block roads, burn government buildings, stone the police, etc., to draw attention to the fact that they have limited running water, poor sanitation, no electricity in some cases, and generally a very low standard of living, partly due to the government's failure to provide basic utilities and housing. None of this is new, but all of these groups particularly object to the money being spent on the World Cup. As one young woman expressed it, "How can they find the money to build stadiums but not libraries?"

It might not be so bad if a case could be made that the new stadiums will provide jobs and generate income in the future, or will at least serve their communities in useful ways. But it's already clear that most of them will fail to cover their running costs when the WC is over; they're likely to go bankrupt pretty quickly. SA has so far spent some 2.6 billion dollars on new stadiums - ten in nine cities; only three of these have a local football club which could help to cover costs in the future. The stadiums in smaller cities don't even have transport infrastructures to get people to the gates when the World Cup is over - presuming that there'll be any events to go and see.

SA has made great efforts to be generous hosts for the WC, and the event itself will probably be a success - but six weeks from now it could well begin to strike home that an awful lot of money has simply been wasted in the name of national pride - and for a few games of football.

The names

It struck me when I first got here that the majority of place names in Johannesburg sound very British: immediately around where I live you can find Sandton, Hyde Park, Kew, Waverley, Melrose, Craighall, Parkhurst, and Greenside. Here and there across the city are Afrikaans names: Strijdom, Bloubosrand, Klippoortje, Weltevreden, Braamfontein, Roodepoort. You have to look a lot harder for names in African languages, and these are mostly in Soweto: Jabulani, Moroka, Mofolo, Naledi, Zondi.

All of these names have their own charm - but the distribution shows that the very naming of South Africa, like so many things here, is still very much marked by the colonialist and apartheid past; names are far from neutral. There are moves to change this: the city of Pretoria has officially been renamed Tshwane - although it will take a long time to change all the street signs and the maps, let alone what people call the city when they talk about it. The larger metropolitan area of Durban is called eThekwini, while Polokwane used to be Pietersburg. A whole long stretch of the R24 in Johannesburg is being renamed Albertina Sisulu Road, replacing some eighteen other street names including Market Street and Main Reef Road. A lot of the changes commemorate heroes of the struggle against racial discrimination: Pretoria Hospital became Stephen Bantu Biko Hospital; Coronation Hospital became Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital, and Johannesburg Hospital is now Charlotte Maxeke Hospital. This all seems fair and laudable, although some lament the loss of history for the sake of political correctness, and many criticise the cost of changing street signs, municipal stationary, etc, when the money could be better spent on schools and health care etc.

And some see the funny side: a radio advert for the TomTom GPS navsat device features someone stopping to ask for directions, to be told: "Take this first left on Sekoto which used to be Becker Road, then the second right on Mahlahtini which was once Robin Avenue, then go straight on when it changes to Ntemi Piliso, the street formerly known as Prince."

Rock art

Long before the European colonialists arrived, the San people were living a fairly hand to mouth existence in SA - and producing some astonishing art. The oldest wall paintings found so far are some 3,600 years old - not as old as European stone age art, but apparently that's because the conditions for preserving the paint - and the rock - are better in Europe. However, the San produced thousands of these paintings - there are hundreds of sites all over SA and undoubtedly there are more to be found. These paintings continued to be produced well into the colonial age - perhaps into the late nineteenth century - in the 1930s elderly San people were able to show researchers some of the painting techniques they'd learnt as children. The paintings are usually found under overhanging rock faces, and analysis of the composition of the paint reveals strange mixtures of minerals, plant juices and blood - suggesting that the paintings played a part in religion and ritual. The mythology, however, is largely lost - the usual fate of a civilisation without writing. It's fascinating to speculate about the meanings of these paintings, beyond the obvious representational significance.

In Welgevonden I saw my first cave painting site, in a beautiful location with a view of a valley. There was a small sign saying that the paintings had been inspected by someone from Wits University and that they were "several hundred years old" - and therefore they shouldn't be touched. I took a couple of photos as above which didn't come out too well - so to give you an idea of how spectacular these paintings can be I've added some others I found on the internet - see if you can tell the difference.

Check out this site if you want to see more.

Welgevonden - other animals

Welgevonden is a new reserve - created in 1993 - and is relatively large - 40,000 hectares - so in trade jargon it's "not yet at its carrying capacity", which means there aren't many animals for its size. This can be frustrating, as you sometimes drive for quite a long time without seeing anything except trees and bushes and a few examples of the disparagingly named "general game" (e.g. zebras, wildebeest, impala, waterbuck - all considered to be beneath comment back at the lodge). For example, the reserve has 120 elephants but we didn't see a single one.

On the other hand you never know what you will find - a fledgling black chested prinia flew into the land rover at one point and stunned itself - it flew off again a few minutes later. At one point we were hurtling along a track and I saw a large cat right next to the road, not moving- it took a moment for it to occur to me that this was actually an odd place for a cat to be - I shouted out, we stopped the vehicle and reversed - it was a caracal, a type of lynx, which was hunting some birds a few metres away. Cat and birds ignored us for a couple of minutes, then the caracal got bored and wandered away. I found out later that this sighting was extremely rare - the ranger had only ever seen one once before, and some of the South Africans at the lodge had never seen one in decades of visiting game reserves - and we'd nearly run over it.

Above: prinia, caracal, eagle owl, lions, giraffe, young exemplar of general game hardly worth noticing - but beautiful.