In this weeks column Clarkeonenil’s Monday writer Graeme Garvey reports from South Africa and keeps it all in context.
The terrifying attack on the team bus of the Togo players before the recent African Cup of Nations raises the spectre of further outrages at the forthcoming World Cup. How likely is it that one of the teams will be attacked? Probably not very likely as the Togo incident took place in an area of heightened risk, as did the 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team’s bus in Lahore, and security issues have been paramount in South Africa since the Cup was awarded. Therefore, an attack by an armed gang is a scenario they will have considered in great detail. Much more likely, however, are random, smaller-scale incidents of robbery with violence because guns are easily available and the likely attackers feel they have little to lose.
Are stories of violence in South Africa over-exaggerated? Firstly, it is important to put things into context. How dangerous, for that matter, is the U.K. in general and cities like London and Manchester in particular? As we know, violence tends to erupt and usually we can steer clear of it if we know the area. Secondly, attackers are nearly always frightened young men who want the odds heavily stacked in their own favour. That is why they tend to pick on weaker, more vulnerable targets. It is not very likely that a large group of England fans will be attacked but individuals wandering into the wrong areas at much more likely to become victims. That is part of the reason, a small part admittedly, why packages to watch the World Cup are so expensive – to keep you away from trouble spots.
There is undoubtedly something odd in a situation where fans who are usually the ones people need protecting from have become the ones who need the protection. That is why it is most likely that the innocent, unsuspecting ones will probably be the folk who suffer. And guns seem to be everywhere. On a recent internal flight from Johannesburg to George (where Hansie Cronje crashed into a mountain) both passengers on either side of me told me they had been held up at gunpoint quite recently. Many of the whites and affluent blacks go to such places in the suburbs of Johannesburg as the shopping, eating, gambling, leisure complex called Monte Casino. Prior to being searched on entrance, there is a place to store your guns, set up in a similar way to a cloakroom in Britain. There are definite shades of the Deep South of the USA and it can catch out the unsuspecting Brit. I was asking directions to a friend’s house at a garage near the Wanderers in Johannesburg where Test Cricket is played. I have to admit that I didn’t notice until I’d asked him that this big security guard was wielding a submachine gun. Now how did I manage to miss that? In the circumstances, I was happy to settle for his polite ‘don’t know’.
It is not so much about colour, any more, as about wealth, although being white is just about enough provocation in itself for some disenchanted blacks. And yet…
And yet it is an open and welcoming country where the vast majority are lovely people struggling to make a difficult situation work. We see beggars in England and often suspect that they have alternatives. Come to South Africa and see the real poverty where people do not have alternatives. It is a humbling experience and I just hope that football fans go there with a sense of humility and respect, willing to learn a little bit about a mighty country.
