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Pieter-Dirk Uys

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SOCCER-FREE ZONE — a weekly sip from the World Cup 

– Pieter-Dirk Uys, The Mercury, 28 June 2010

Ghana Bafana! All Africans are back on track. But Cape Town will never be the same again. In order to beautify our City the FIFA Regime have ordered the relocation of the Botanical Gardens of Kirstenbosch from against the mountain to now border the N2 freeway from Cape Town International Airport. So now visitors driving to Town will pass 3500 indigenous plants, while 20,000 indigenous people are suddenly nowhere to be seen.

The bundle of shivering humanity under the Foreshore bridge nodded.

“The overseas TV cameras were here this morning. They talk to me. They want to know about my life. They call me a homeless person.”

“Are you?”

“No man, I told them Cape Town is my home there in the Joe Stalin informal settlement. Me and 20,000 other secret citizens of the Mother City.”

The rain beat down on tourists and traffic.

“Ja, they moved us all on that Friday in the rain. They say we can’t be there. We are too close to the N2 where people from overseas will arrive for the thing that’s happening and we are an eyesore.” Then he cackled. “I heard of iPhones, but iSores?”

He hugged the yellow and green blanket round himself.

“So they move us far away, man, where no normal person will come. They give us stinky containers to live in. Some of us are still sleeping under plastic. It says on it: ‘Feel it. It’s here!’ Feel it se moer!”

“But the stadium’s pretty cool?”

“That pisspot they erected in Green Point? Man, that’s where I once could spend the summer, sleeping under a tree on the old golf course. I was in no one’s way. But now I can’t go near it because it’s a high security zone.

It’s easier pissing against the wall of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station. I think I need a passport and a visa, if not a Visa card, to use one of the fancy toilets in the new stadium.” Another toothless cackle.

“I like your Bafana blanket.”

“Ja, the overseas TV reporter gave me this blanket. Said horrible things about us that I didn’t know. That South Africa will get none of this money paid out to the sports people? That our unemployment is 40 percent? Ja, I’m one of them. A male life expectancy is 49 years old? I should have been dead long ago.” We both cackled softly. “And that millions of children are malnourished.”

“Disgraceful.”

“Ja, maybe, but we just call it life.” Then a slow smile. “Well, they did promise us nice housing after the thing is over. The Green Point Stadium will be a white elephant. So we can turn it into the Sepp Blatter Informal Settlement!”

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