Cape Town has a perception as a racist city, according to Danny Jordaan, South Africa's Local Organizing Committee CEO for the 2010 World Cup. And he believes that the city (and the country in general) will have to shed that image if the 2010 event is to be a success.
As a step in that direction, Cape Town will host “90 Minutes for Mandela,” which will pit an Africa XI against a World XI of all time greats in honor of Madiba's 89th birthday. The game will provide a litmus test, or at least a gauge, of where South Africa is in terms of its capacity to host a big event without major glitches.
The 2010 World Cup is going to be a vital moment for South Africa. In many ways it will represent the country's coming out party, a sort of debut or “Sweet 16,” coming as it does sixteen years after the epochal events of 1994. In this sense the World Cup will be about much more than sport. With the rest of the world watching, South Africa can show that it belongs in the first rank of nations and it can reveal to a skeptical and patronizing world what an African nation is capable of given the opportunity.
