At The Mail & Guardian Percy Zvomuya has a piece recalling last year’s World Cup, which, as he aptly says, “A year later, the Fifa World Cup seems like it was hosted decades ago.”
And yet many of his best memories are akin to mine:
We witnessed a spontaneous outburst of passion: cars draped in South Africa’s colours, stranger hugging stranger to celebrate Siphiwe Tshabalala’s goal against Mexico and the interminable hum of the vuvuzela. Ah, the vuvuzela, that most South African of contrivances!
I’m working on an article on the World Cup and what it meant for South Africa in particular. But for me the memories of “spontaneous outburst[s] of passion” will always rank high. Whether those memories are enough to sustain an analytical assessment of the event are up for debate, but my presupposition is that vastly more South Africans will have good memories than bad of last year’s World Cup. That does not mean the country should rush headlong toward trying to host an Olympics or that mega-events are an unqualified boon to a country. But it is to say that these intangible, subjective assessments matter too.