Uniting South Africa, the legacy of FIFA World Cup!

Johannesburg: Come Friday, South Africa will be awashed with yellow as millions of citizens are donning

special shirts of that colour to show their support for the Bafana Bafana, the home squad for the FIFA World Cup that starts on June 11. This has been happening for weeks now, as Football Friday -- a campaign to get South Africans united behind the 2010 FIFA World Cup -- has taken off like wildfire. Supported by all levels of government and corporates, almost every car sports a flag as they drive on streets where lampposts and buildings are adorned with larger versions. The World Cup is expected to unite the country in a way that has not been seen since South Africa`s first democratically-elected President Nelson Mandela used the Rugby World Cup to bring together Black and White citizens in 1995. Till then, rugby remained largely a sport for the minority white community, while the favoured sport of the majority was football. Already in the past fortnight, in two major pre-World Cup events, thousands of whites got their first taste of life in Soweto, the township which started in the apartheid era to house the Black community separately. Two of the country`s largest stadiums are in the Soweto area, where 75,000 people of all races gathered on Thursday night at Soccer City to spur on the home side to a 2-1 victory against Colombia in a friendly game. Braving chaotic traffic with a spirit of camaraderie, the hordes of fans blew their noisy Vuvuzelas, a type of long horn, donned all sorts of hats and clothing, painted faces, and generally embraced each other, irrespective of race, colour or creed. Even in the cricket-crazy community of Indian origin here, both local and expatriate, there is a keen anticipation of the World Cup games, tickets of which are almost sold out. Lalit Modi and his Indian Premier League pumped millions of rands onto a marketing campaign last year to make the IPL a household name in South Africa within a matter of two weeks. They placed signs on every streetlamp in major cities and took up full page advertisements in every newspaper in South Africa. But with the FIFA World Cup, it is not the marketing money that has made a difference and united the country in a way that the highly commercialised IPL ever could hope to. It is the common man, woman and child that hold the promise of making the first venture by FIFA into the African continent the biggest success ever. Certainly FIFA and a host of affiliates and sponsors will make a lot of money and capitalize on the event. There has also been a lot of talk about the economic benefits to both South Africa and the continent as a whole from the legacy of the World Cup. But at the end, perhaps the biggest benefit of all will be, albeit inadvertently, furthering the dream that Mandela so masterfully crafted with the Rugby World Cup -- reconciliation and brotherhood among South African citizens like never before. All united in sport. PTI