Cape Town has proven to be an interesting case study for the success of the World Cup in South Africa. Cape Town is, after all, the postcard image that South Africa sells to the world, a beautiful tableau wedged between Table Mountain and the sea. Cape Town and the Western Cape is a much easier sell than Johannesburg and Gauteng, at least from an aesthetic vantage point. I love Joburg. But it’s not a beautiful city, at least not at first glance.
Yet the bulk of World Cup attendees will spend more time in Gauteng than anywhere else. Soccer City and Ellis Park are both in greater Joburg, Loftus Versfeld is in Pretoria, and most going to Rustenburg and Royal Mafokeng will use Joburg as a base. Cape Town has the stadium at Green Point, which is stunning and feeds Cape Town’s skyline well, but which is also the only World Cup venue in this part of the country. Cape Town may be as South Africa wants to see itself, but Joburg is as South Africa is.
As a postcard image, then, Cape Town serves its purpose. What I find most telling is that it’s not like Cape Town is mobbed with humanity. Oh, sure, the bars in town are hopping and the tourist bait that is the V & A Waterfront (Cape Town’s upscale shopping center, its R5000+ a night hotels, its idealized photo opportunitis — turn that way and there is Table Mountain! This way and you get the sea, with al of those ships! Over there the skyline! — are all at the V&A, as is the launching point for Robben Island) — is a veritable United Nations of humanity. But what I find equally interesting is that most of the rest of the city, Green Point and Sea Point and Camps Bay, say, are bustling but far from swamped. From what I can see, there are many, many people who will make a great deal of money on the World Cup, but as many will feel somewhat let down by the profit margins they don’t see grow and the excess of World Cup googaws they don’t sell. And not a few will feel as if they have been sold a bill of goods.
But the value of this World Cup for South Africa was never likely to be financial. Lots of money will pour into South Africa, but loads of tourist money pours through anyway, and equal loads were spent preparing for the event. And the reality is that events such as this one almost never fulfill the promises made by the unguent hucksters whose smile and glimmery eyes promise unimaginable windfalls. Instead, the biggest profit to be gained will be in that admittedly amorphous and boosterish concept of Nation Building, so crucial to the self-identity of the New South Africa, but so elusive and unmeasurable.
Tomorrow I am back to Gauteng. I will be staying in (or near) Melville, my preferred base of operations when I am in Joburg, and will be attending the late afternoon US-Slovenia game at Ellis Park. I am there for just a few days before I head down to coastal Durban where I will undoubtedly get yet another view of this World Cup.
