Will the World Cup unite South Africa?

SOWETO, South Africa – As the streets filled that night, people could not believe it. The whites, they said, never come here. Soweto has always worn the stigma of danger, the symbol of a country divided. A place – like most of South Africa’s townships – where blacks live and whites rarely tread.

But sport has a legacy of mending racial divide in this country. And the days of preparation before the World Cup rendered the nation’s biggest stadiums unavailable for the semifinal and final matches of the Super 14 rugby tournament. This meant the traditional white man’s game in South Africa had to be moved to Orlando Stadium, which is in the heart of Soweto, the country’s largest black township.

Suddenly, the loyal rooters of Pretoria’s Blue Bulls, an icon of the old Afrikaans establishment, had a dilemma: Either venture into a place where many of them had never stepped or miss the games.

So three Saturdays ago they arrived, navigating their cars down the dusty lanes through the miles of lean-tos and one-story houses rolling as far as they could see. They went past the brick home where Nelson Mandela once lived and the corner where 34 years ago a young child named Hector Pieterson was shot in what became the most vivid image of the fight against Apartheid. They parked on sidewalks, driveways and alleys. And for the first time they walked the streets of Soweto toward the gleaming stadium on the hill.

	Rugby fans felt right at home in Soweto’s Orlando Stadium. (Duif du Toit/Gallo Images)

But rather than anger, they saw smiles. Happy faces said hello, told them they were welcome. Told them to enjoy the game. Told them to come back. In moments, their fear drained away.

“It did so much to unify,” said Suzanne Styles, a marketing director from Pretoria who was at the game.

“All they come, it was so amazing,” Cornelius Keolopie, a vendor on Soweto’s Vilakazi Street, said as he sat behind a table filled with bottles of colorful sands that he sells. “I met a guy who said he had never been to Soweto. He didn’t know what he was missing. They did not know how much we loved them. They were amazed.”

Then next Saturday, when the Blue Bulls played again, this time in the Super 14 final, the fans arrived even earlier. That night, the Bulls won the championship and the white crowd refused to leave, singing instead in the Soweto streets. Black residents filed from their houses and sang along. Together they stumbled into the many shebeens, or small bars which are little more than converted one-story houses, and they sang until night grew into morning.

“It was like a Christmas, a New Year’s, a happy day,” said Azi Ndhlovu, who owns The Shack, a shebeen he made from his childhood home not far from Orlando Stadium. “Everyone got to know each other and got to meet each other and enjoy each other.

“It was not like before.”

This is so much what South Africa hopes it can be in its second decade after Apartheid. There is promise this World Cup will bring a togetherness to a country slow to rebuild, much the way the 1995 rugby World Cup, won by South Africa and managed so well by Mandela, prompted harmony. Everybody then came to embrace the nation’s rugby team, the Springboks, who were long a symbol of the white suppression.

Then a few days later the old mistrust returned.

“It seems the bigger issues and political issues get in the way and that euphoria doesn’t last,” said Anton Coepzee, a doctor from the affluent Johannesburg suburb of Sandton who went to the first Blue Bulls game in Soweto.

But now white and black South Africa have something to grasp again. During the rugby final, groups of black fans filled sections of the stands at Orlando Stadium. They cheered for the Blue Bulls and blew vuvuzelas, the horns that create a buzzing sound and have long been a staple of the predominately black crowds at the country’s soccer games. Soon the white people were blowing vuvuzelas too.

	Will Bafana Bafana get support from the whites in South Africa, too? (Themba Hadebe/AP Photo)

Likewise, white South Africa is warming to a sport it has long dismissed as a black game, throwing support behind Bafana Bafana, the nation’s predominately black national soccer team. All around, people of all races are wearing the yellow Bafana Bafana jersey. Motorists, who weeks ago would have been aghast at the thought of even talking about soccer, now fly small South African flags on the top of their car doors and decorate rearview mirrors with the country’s colors.

“If you are next to each other then you can understand each other,” Ndhlovu said as he stood in his bar one recent morning.

On the wall behind him, in what was once his back patio, there dangled a white blanket. This is the screen upon which he projects soccer games. And on the last two Saturdays of May, he showed rugby. All around were benches. He shook his head at the idea that only a few days before they had been filled with white men drinking beer, laughing, singing and refusing to leave even after the game started and choosing instead to watch from his shebeen.

The weekend after the final, three weeks after first coming to Soweto for only the second time in her life, Styles, the marketing director from Pretoria, returned. This time she led a party of white co-workers there to celebrate a boss’ birthday. They sat in The Shack and sipped beer from bottles and even tasted warm, sweet traditional African beers.

“The perception is that it’s too violent to be here,” she said, an impression she shared until last month. “There’s a perception that black people hate white people, and that’s entirely not the case.”

One Blue Bulls fan, Russel Schierhout of the Johannesburg suburb of Malahleni, was moved to write a letter to The Star newspaper telling of how he returned to his car on a dimly lit block clutching 50 rand in 10 notes to pay the attendant who was watching cars on the street only to drop the money while taking a photograph. Some local children appeared and rather than take the money, they instead told him he had dropped it and handed it to him. Out of appreciation he gave the boy one of the 10 rand bills he held.

“I now regret that I did not give him all the notes,” wrote Schierhout who ended his letter with the words “Humbled and exhilarated indeed.”

Or as Coepzee, the doctor from Sandton said: “It was one of those ‘I was there moments.’ ”

When asked if he would return, he didn’t hesitate.

“I would,” he said. “Yes, I would.”

In his shebeen, Ndhlovu smiled.

“Things are changing,” he said. “Before, no whites will come to the shebeens. Now they come and they bring a friend and then they go back and tell more friends that it is OK to come down to this shebeen, and so they will come, too.”

And maybe the divided country takes another small step forward.