'Africa has already won the World Cup'

Time to think again! Banish your prejudices! Forget your preconceptions! The 2010 World Cup may just help shift perceptions of the way the world thinks of Africa, thanks to Fifa’s levelling of the playing field – after 80 years.  This one is very definitely “Africa’s World Cup”.

It’s not that wars and famine or corrupt and mad dictators – which have long blighted Africa with cliched stereotypes – will suddenly disappear (and yes, we journalists are in part responsible for reinforcing these). But for the next four weeks, a billion TV viewers round the world will not only see African football showcased on its home turf, but will glipse a vision of a continent that’s booming.

Sub-Saharan economies are set to grow on average by nearly 5 per cent this year, despite the global slowdown.  This is the result of governance improving and poverty, disease and corruption all declining. Foreign investment’s surging. People are living longer, more and more children are going to school. Africa is feeling good about itself.

Its people know the world is watching and many believe their time has come. In African communties in Johannesburg, where I’ve just spent a week, taking the pre-cup temperature, the mercury is rising fast. In the largely immigrant
neighbourhood of Yeoville, each African community has its own unofficial embassy – Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Congo… the list goes on.

In Nigeria House, noisy magnet for migrant workers and for those who’ve flown in for the World Cup, there was a sense of riotous excitement about the football feast to come. Apart from one iconoclast (the man from Lagos gunning for Brazil), they were all very patriotic in their green and white.

But a prominent pan-Africanist streak also runs through Yeoville’s African communities.

“Sure, I want Nigeria to win,” said Bonny, leader of the pack. “We would be proud for any African country to lift the trophy at the end of the day.” It’s a sentiment I heard again and again, everywhere I went: they want the cup to stay on the continent – any team can win, as long as they are African.

African teams want to formalise before a global audience the mark they’ve already made on football. The African World Cup is to them a recognition of the distinctive style and talent they’ve brought to the game.

African footballers are hot property in Europe. So much so that Ghana’s top 250 players have left home to join European leagues. In Romania, African footballers make up the majoritiy of professional players; in Switzerland and Ukraine, it’s a third. More than 20 per cent of all transfers between European clubs are of African players.

Earlier this year, during the African Cup of Nations, the mass exodus of African players from European sides decimated leagues. Managers complained. Point made.

Despite all this, World Cup ticket sales to Africans outside the host nation account for a tiny fraction of total sold – 2 per cent if projections from a recent tally by accountancy firm Grant Thornton hold true. That’s just 11,300 Africans holding tickets, 77 per cent lower than expected. Ticket sales via the internet (which does not have such great reach in Africa) is blamed for this failure, as is “unaffordable pricing” – although tickets to matches are available for as little as £12.

Fifa – football’s governing body – is apologising on its website for cock-ups in ticket sales.  But Sepp Blatter, Fifa president, appears very much on-side, repeatedly demonstrating enlightenment in recent weeks. “The first African World Cup will be a big page in the history of humanity, not only in the history of sport,” he said. Mr Blatter urges the world to embrace and celebrate African tradition.

That tradition extends beyond the wailing vuvuzelas. It embraces the muti market in downtown Joburg where magic potions are concocted with everything from vulture brains to ground-up monkey skulls – making warriors strong, empowering and protecting them and twanging the hamstrings of opponents.

These beliefs are real and widespread, and with the cup being contested on Africa’s sacred soil for the first time, muti and the spirits of the ancestors are assumed to provide African sides with more than a home crowd advantage.

Across the continent, there’s a broad belief that whatever happens over the next four weeks, Africa has already won.