AfricaIs aCountry

Who will get rich

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Who will get rich

By
Sean Jacobs

The fantasy that local people - small businesspeople, informal traders, especially black people - will make money or get jobs during the 2010 World Cup.

South Africa's national football team training at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wiki Commons).

Just as the football at the 2010 World Cup will be great, someone will make lots of money. It is not going to be local businesses for sure. This excellent 13 minute short documentary (“Trademark 2010“) for Dutch TV public TV channel, VPRO, takes on the fantasy that local people – small businesspeople, informal traders, especially black people – will make money or get jobs during the tournament (Ht: Tom Devriendt).

Mainly filmed in Cape Town, the tightly structured short film consists of interviews with, among others, a young informal tour operator (who wants to corner the visiting Spanish-speaking market), a construction worker at the stadium (who contemplates the fact that he won’t have work after the stadium is completed), a former sports administrator (who laments FIFA’s greed), the leader of a group of informal traders in downtown Cape Town (who will be prevented from trading during the World Cup), sociologist Ari Sitas and campaigner Eddie Cottle of the group Campaign for Decent Work 2010. And then there’s the city official who sells jargon.

Only discordant note: Why does the film end by legitimizing former councilor, Arthur Weinburg, who represents the Cape Town Environmental Protection Association, a front for rich whites in the neighborhood where the stadium is located and have no other reasons to oppose it other than it is being built in their neighborhood and not somewhere else?

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

An annual awakening

In the 1980s, the South African arts collective Vakalisa Art Associates reclaimed time as a tool of social control through their subversive calendars.

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.