When you were a kid, did your parents ever have company? Mine did, and my mom was always so insistent on the house being spotless for them. I never understood it. Why is the goal when you bring other people around to make your house looks like no one lives there? So generally I would clean for about five minutes, wait until she walked out of the room to deal with something else, then shovel my mess under my bed. Efficient, effective, and over. I still don’t understand it to this day. In South Africa this summer I got a flashback of my own experience doing that. It was if South Africa decided they didn’t want the world to see their mess, so they shoveled it under their bed. Yet one of the moments that is most vivid in my mind still brings me back to the spot where I saw a glimpse of South Africa’s mess.
I will preface this to say that there is no judgment here, I just want to enlighten those who didn’t get a glimpse of the dirt on what SA is really like. ESPN did a magnificent job covering the World Cup and their broadcasts were quite good. They focused on the soccer and the culture, giving you a taste of a beautiful country. One of their goals is to show you the beauty of the game and of where it is being played, so they don’t get into the grit that a country is really built on. It exists everywhere, from the projects in the US, to the favelas in Brazil, to the shantytowns in Mexico. I’ve seen it before, I’ll see it again, but it never makes it any less striking or painful. You don’t really feel a country until you know its suffering and its flaws.
We were on the train from the Jo’Burg airport to Sandton to meet our bus for the day I have dreamed about for 6 years. A United States World Cup game. To say I was overjoyed and attentive would be an understatement. A 6am plane flight doesn’t exactly help your cause and I figured maybe the train would be a nice place for a nap. Fortunately I stayed awake. As we pulled into the station before ours, I looked out the window and saw what can only be described as a sprawling township. Endless rows of tiny, one room houses surrounded by a fence; it was like being at the zoo seeing the fences that are created to keep you separated from what is inside the fence. What was inside that fence? What was so dangerous, so intimidating that I must be separated from it.
As we pulled away from the station heading towards our destination I looked through the glass of the train and realized that that was all the world and I were really doing here in South Africa. Looking in at what the government, FIFA, and ESPN wanted me to see of South Africa. This was the first moment where I really saw what was being stashed under the bed while the world was here visiting. The dirt, the pain, the realization that repairing racial relations and restoring equality was still a long way off. That when people that are contained in such a manner makes you wonder if they are people at all if you get the impression that they are treated like animals. How far have they come and yet how far do they have to go. How far we have come and how far we have to go. When the world puts on its brightest display, there is still darkness that is there hiding under the bed.
As the train pulled away, the township faded away and disappeared. I returned to thinking about what that day meant to me. Yet even today, I remember looking out and thinking how far we have to go. How concerned we all are about sweeping our dirt under the rug and hiding it from our guests. The thing that was the most appalling was that no one else would see this unless they happened upon it, this giant patch of land where life was so different then my own. That a country could bring the world to show off and no one watching would see this. It reminded me that until you actually dig a little, you never know what is under someone’s bed and most of the time you are just looking through the glass as what’s really going on cruises by quickly to be forgotten.
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