Africa’s Cup runneth over!

For too long, the world has taken away from Africa. Now, the world is coming back, on Africa’s terms.

Madiba’s image – his calm, strong face – gazes across Soccer City, Soweto, where the soaring voices of tenors stretch to the rafters, packed with fans, and where the dancers on the pitch wave colourful kente cloths frame the shape of a fabulous continent. This is the Football World Cup 2010. This is South Africa. My God, this is Africa. It can do it, and do it great.

I’m with them every step of the way. Even though I’m sat here, at a battered dining table, in my cold flat in Aarhus, and outside the rain has fallen incessantly for three days, I’m watching and my hopes and joys are squarely on the continent. Not so much the mother continent as a mother-by-adoption. As we might say in Africa: I am a brother, by a different mother.

Many say that South Africa is not Africa. But let’s leave that aside just this once, and pray that the Rainbow Nation’s coming out party is its best so far. Better still to come, I pray. And watching the opening ceremony, it’s pretty clear: all the colours of the rainbow, and one added, the most prominent – BLACK – are here. The naysayers can go hang. The cynics may quit now, the skeptics hold their tongues until later. The ghosts of the past – colonialism, slavery, wars, tribalism, disease, drought- are slowly being exorcised. This is the biggest stage the world can conjure, and this time, it’s being conjured in Africa.

Nkosi Sikelel’i Africa. God bless you Africa.

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