Fifa volunteer experience — part 5

Very often, in my experience, it is quite difficult to comment on sports and race issues without appearing to be offensive or over-generalising. It is indeed disheartening when one gets the impression that the black and white people of this country seem to “prefer” to live in different sporting worlds, with a few liberals sprinkled across the board.

In fact, this particular article came about as a joke. I resisted the temptation to write it together with the earlier posts (Fifa Volunteer Experience 1, 2, 3), because I could not find a proper way to present this dilemma.

We were resting on pitch-side during the match between Bafana Bafana and Norway when one of the volunteer officials jokingly asked: “Why does the crowd keep booing this poor white guy? What has he done because he seems to be playing good?”

By the “poor white guy” he was referring to now Mamelodi Sundowns defender Matthew Booth. It so happened that every time he was (is) in possession of the ball, the crowd would erupt in a wave of “BOOOOOOTH”. To a Norwegian who didn’t understand the trends in SA football that could have well sounded like “BOOOOO”.

To make matters worse, he was the only white guy in the starting line-up and probably the only white guy in the whole stadium, except for the Norwegian visitors. And this was a Fifa-accredited international friendly.

Out of ignorance — which must really be emphasised — such a scenario could easily have been interpreted as SA is still struggling with racial tolerance and integration. Sadly, such an observation would not be entirely off the mark.

There have been recent calls for transformation to be pursued not according to racial but class composition. This argument is, however, betrayed by the fact that the unwillingness to integrate is still defined by race and not class.

Anyway, I decided to put this piece down to paper when a friend alerted me to the sea of “blackness” during the 3-day volunteer training programme in Rustenburg as 800+ volunteers queued for food. One guy even made the joke that the picture looked like “Sepp Blatter’s idea of hunger relief in Africa”.

I do not know about Tshwane, Mangaung and Johannesburg, but the racial composition of volunteers in Rustenburg flew in the face of reconciliation. The best we could do — I think — were two ladies, one from Cape Town and the other from Germany.

I want to congratulate both — and probably others that I might not have noticed — and say to them that they are the pioneers of what the future of SA’s sporting spirit has to be.