Opinion Dark days for the big men
This World Cup is a reminder of how South Africa has resisted the powerful dictators who plundered much of the continent...
No player has fascinated me more at the World Cup than Mesut Ozil. He has the languid self-assurance on the ball that comes only to the greatest footballers. Hes a German. Thats part of my fascination. Ozils a Muslim German of Turkish descent who believes he has married traditions: My technique and feeling for the ball is the Turkish side to my game. The discipline,attitude and always-give-your-all is the German part.
Ozils a German but only just. The late 1990s were marked by angry debate as the country moved from a Volkisch view of nationality one based on the bloodlines of the German Volk to a more liberal law that gave millions of immigrants an avenue to citizenship for the first time. Ozil would not have been German until the immigration law of 1999. Its this legislation that has birthed the Germany of Ozil and his teammates Sami Khedira and Jerome Boateng (Tunisian and Ghanaian fathers respectively) and Cacau (naturalised Brazilian) and Dennis Aogo (Nigerian descent). The Volk have spread wings to hoist Germany into the last eight.
Theres a third reason,beyond brilliance and birthright,for my fascination with Ozil. He is probably only on the team because The Big Man of the German squad,Michael Ballack,was injured a few weeks before the tournament.
Similarly,Ghana has advanced to the last eight despite that defeat to Germany even in the absence of its Big Man, the injured Michael Essien. As for Uruguay and Paraguay,two other quarter-finalists,they had no Big Man to begin with.
Africa needs more of that kind of spirit. Since decolonisation began in the second half of the 20th century,it has too often been the continent of The Big Man. That was the sobriquet V.S. Naipaul gave in A Bend in the River to the African dictator plundering the city of Kisangani in Congo through mercenaries granted license to run amok. The colonisers plundering merely gave way to the Big Mans impunity in stripping Africas assets bare.
Perhaps the most glaring examples have been in Zimbabwe and Congo,potentially wealthy nations that have hurtled backward. Robert Mugabe has single-handedly dismembered Zimbabwe. In Congo,over a 30-year dictatorship that defined kleptocracy Mobutu Sese Seko spread the wreckage that has provided the fissured stage for the recent slaughter of millions. So Im pleased that in this World Cup,the Big Men have proved dispensable. And Im pleased its being held in a country that shares African problems but has not yielded to Africas curse.
South Africa has the mineral wealth 90 per cent of the worlds platinum reserves and 40 per cent of its gold that has proved the resource curse of African nations including Nigeria. It has what Moeletsi Mbeki,the brother of former president Thabo Mbeki,described to me as a very warped society born in part of big mining,with its single-sex hostels for labourers torn from their families and thrust into those incubators of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. It is still a land where poverty is racialised.
But it has resisted the devastating Big Man syndrome. Over the past 16 years,South Africa has had four free elections and four presidents. A robust judiciary and free press frustrate attempts to cow them. The interaction,under the law,of various interest groups holds South Africa back from the brink. This is its great lesson for a continent where,by 2025,one in four of every person under 24 will live.
When I lived in Germany,a Social Democrat once told me that the countrys ultimate victory over Hitler would lie in the reconstitution of the Jewish community. I always thought that was a vain,slightly kitschy idea. But the Germany of Ozil and Aogo is such a victory over the Big Man who destroyed Europe. Africa,take note.
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