Going by the sights and sounds, the just-ended football World Cup in Brazil was a truly global event. There was a whole surge of positive emotions.
CONWAY TUTANI ECHOES
Veteran virtuoso guitarist Carlos Santana typified this when he performed at the closing ceremony alongside other iconic musicians, fusing sounds from all over the world but with a Latin American flavour before the grand finale pitting Germany and Argentina.
That the Germans triumphed was not much of a surprise because there was that air of assuredness about them: One for all, all for one.
Simply the best side won even though Argentina, my favourite team, paid heavily for a momentary lapse of concentration. Some will say that was a moment of bad luck rather than anything else.
In that high pressure cooker atmosphere, you need to keep the body and mind finely tuned – and the Germans did that to almost perfection.
Then there was fabulously talented Uruguay striker Luiz Suarez’s moment of madness when he sank his teeth into an Italy defender. He was so adrenalised to the crazy point of biting.
Suarez, despite his biting record, reportedly claimed that his teeth had merely accidentally collided with the Italian’s shoulder.
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This has echoes of the captain of a passenger cruise ship, Costa Concordia, who, after being accused of abandoning his sinking ship off the Italian coast in 2012, leading to the death of 32 holidaymakers, claimed that he had merely and by coincidence fallen into a lifeboat as the ship capsized.
The lesson is that people must be bold and honest enough to confront their culpability or blameworthiness without deflecting it on others like Suarez’s lawyer’s condemnation of world football governing Fifa’s four-month ban on the player as “draconian, totalitarian and fascist”.
This was uncalled for especially in view of the fact that Suarez had twice before been banned for the same offence. Suarez might not be the devil incarnate, but he certainly has issues that could have something to do with lifelong rage.
Remember when he called Manchester United defender Patrice Evra “negrito”, a derogatory term for black, in 2011?
Fifa president Sepp Blatter rightly summed up the tournament as having successfully spread the “message of peace, anti-racism and anti-discrimination”.
These World Cup values are indeed in tune with the times as the human race has moved from the past when bigotry and segregation were regarded as the natural order and institutionalised.
The World Cup values laid bare the bigoted foundation of some nation states. Why, in this day and age, should a country be officially called the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arab Republic of Syria, or some politicians insist that Israel is an eternally Jewish state?
Yes, it’s from the historical past, but those ultra-nationalistic values have been overtaken by progress. Isn’t this akin to apartheid? This implies that non-Arabs and non-Jews are lesser beings.
The Middle East, which has exploded again, could be wise to try football diplomacy. The journey is long and difficult, but reachable.
The world is going post-racial as seen in the composition of most of the teams at the World Cup.
Football has shown the way or taken the lead and politicians need to catch up.
This brings to life remarks made in 2011 by South African author and Nobel literature laureate Nadine Gordimer, who died last week at the age of 90, that race and colour will inevitably lose meaning and relevance globally as people intermarry and more and more see each other as individuals in their own right.
She was a realistic optimist who correctly observed that time would heal racial wounds.
In the same vein, the Zimbabwean government’s stance stated recently that whites had no rights to land is not only archaic, but wrong in the same way colonialists got it wrong in dispossessing blacks.
And it is not only wrong, but unconstitutional. This is not supposed to happen in a constitutional democracy.
The supreme law of the land clearly delegitimises discrimination and in many cases actually criminalises it.
But it’s clear that some politicians have vested interests in perpetuating racial cleavages or separateness as a permanent state of affairs.
Defender Jerome Boateng, who was one of the shining stars at the World Cup, would have had no chance of representing Germany had he been born during Hitler’s rule as that would have worked against Nazism’s racist lies and myths because Boateng’s father is a black Ghanaian.
At the same time national teams were kicking the ball up and down the pitch during the World Cup in Brazil, some people in Zimbabwe were being kicked out.
Furniture makers in Harare’s Glen View township who did not have stamped proof on their hands of attending the burial of national hero Stanley Sakupwanya were ejected from their business premises by ruling party youths.
This is not supposed to happen in a democracy. Was it in aid of ZimAsset?
The victims of the ejection were black, not white. What was the justification if not blatantly political? In contrast, Suarez was kicked out of the tournament by the rightful authorities. Who are party youths to eject people?
In a constitutional democracy, such ruffians would be arrested, charged and jailed — like Suarez was charged, fined and banned because he had no right to bite anyone. Had Suarez’s case not been dealt with sternly, this would have had a corrosive effect on the whole tournament, but it turned out to be of the highest quality in every way.
People must be bold and honest enough to reject brazen misconduct especially from among their own.
Democracy must be addressed first, second and third – and the World Cup showed that to a dot in spite of the bites and all. [email protected]
