2010 Football Worldcup
The world cup at home, places of a stirring continent Italian Version
For the first time the 2010 Football World Cup was played on the African continent; while all over the world the matches were broadcasted on big screens and plasma TVs, Africa experienced the matches of Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium or of the Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg in a ferment out of the ordinary.
Far away from South Africa’s spotlights, African people anxiously wait for the beginning of this great event, maybe the last possibility of being “seen” and “listened to”. In the villages people get organized with the list of the matches, search for the right frequency of a TV fixed during the opening ceremony and gather in front of small and big scratch screens, after a working day, to share moments of enthusiasm and memories.
From Malawi to Zambia and from Tanzania to Mozambique small basic huts, but equipped with all the necessary facilities to watch the matches, rise. A small important business for a community that does not resemble at all the one of South Africa. No banners, no scarves, no caps, no World Cup gadgets.
You just need a Ronaldinho’s shirt, worn and with holes, of a child during the match Japan vs. Cameroon to establish the contrast of a continent we have learned not to look at.
In Lilongwe, where TV, decoder and loudspeakers are a precious thing to barricade behind steel bars together with an official sponsor like Coca Cola, the goal of the Bafana-Bafana is not enough to win the first match, maybe the most important one for the whole continent, but ardor and adrenalin rouse nostalgia and memories of an old locker-room album. An African audience who watches the matches from the grids of a window, ironically surmounted by a homemade Coca Cola logo and takes advantage of the half-time to grill some pieces of goat meat in the street. Half-times that allow the men of the villages gathered around a small screen, which cost time, money and sacrifices, to smoke a cigarette and heat water to cook Nsima, the classic African polenta to be consumed all together at the end of the match.
Matches and half-times followed by much people who do not stop working, like in supermarkets or restaurants of big cities, clubs for rich people, villages, but also in houses. The joy for Ghana in contrast with Bafana-Bafana’s disappointment joined the fates of African people.
Vuvuzelas sing praises also in the stadiums of capital cities during the matches of the local teams and are still the emblem of an event, the symbol of a continent that strongly wanted to be “heard”, but that probably, once the spotlights turned off, went back to not being heard again.
