Each time the vuvuzelas on 2010 soccer TV stop blaring, an animation, female character comes on the screen and wails in a Honduran-sounding accent: “Khe narkhooo!” That counts as visual, aural and oral evidence that this soccer spectacular was nothing that Batswana in the southern African region were supposed to benefit from.
To be sure, it is hard to tell how many Batswana there are in the region because a growing number of people in a certain neighbouring country discover their Botswana roots each time their national economy suffers a double-digit decline.Surely though, there are millions of Batswana who can pronounce “Ke nako” (it’s time), correctly.
Naturally, the first choice should have been South African Batswana, but the Local Organising Committee went all the way to South America to find the, “Ke nako” voice model. Somewhere along the way someone must have alerted the LOC that this model got the word stress, pitch accuracy and vowel sound all wrong. The LOC came up with another version - which sounds Fijian. It is also worth noting that, “it is never time,” at a stadium, in a predominantly Setswana-speaking-and-controlled area.No former Bophuthatswana area, where a majority of Batswana live, has seen 2010 action. Former Bophuthatswana strongman, Lucas Mangope, must have seen this coming when he suggested during his reign that this ex-Bantustan should be incorporated into Botswana.
In some ways the tournament was supposed to be a celebration of the multi-faceted freedom that South Africans acquired not so long ago. That explains the “Give Me Freedom” song by a Somali-Canadian musician whose skeletal frame makes one wonder whether he shouldn’t be asking for a nice, sumptuous meal instead. The misuse
of that freedom will stand out as another of the inglorious moments of the Cup.
Footballers used that freedom to dive and not play. Security guards at one stadium used it to blackmail organisers by going on strike to demand more pay. American celebrity, Paris Hilton, and her rich friends used it to sample non-medicinal South African dagga. Women dressed in orange miniskirts (paid operatives of a European brewery it is alleged) used it to unlawfully advertise an imported beer. The beer’s logo on the miniskirts was strategically placed near the ‘penalty’ area. Fans used their freedom to cause an ear-splitting cacophony of single-octave vuvuzela “music”. Almost all referees invented their own non-FIFA-sanctioned rules. Jabulani, the official tournament ball and 33rd team, exercised its freedom of movement to float around the pitch at will and score its own goals.
For Batswana, 2010 was a great lesson in poultry farming – especially on the science of hatching. A whole 2010 entrepreneurship industry sprouted countrywide seconds after Sepp Blatter pulled a card out of a white envelope as he simultaneously announced that “the 2010 FIFA World Cup games will be held in Sous Africa.” A good many people this side of the Sous African border drew up quite elaborate business and relocation plans. The fruition of these plans would have seen them driving in the mornings from their new homes in Phakalane to their 2010-windfall-funded businesses in less baboon-infested parts of the Gaborone International Commerce
Park.
The moral of the story: don’t ever count your chickens before they hatch. Or cast in a more relevant context: don’t build a garage for a Range Rover before you secure 2010 money to buy it. The next World Cup in Brazil should be an improvement on South Africa’s. If the Brazilians need R&B music to spice up the festivities, they should go for “I Want to Know What Pain Is” – that being a remix of a Foreigner’ hit song, “I Want to Know What Love Is.” The recipients
of that pain should be the players from competing countries. They should experience that pain at the 2013 Confederations Cup tournament against a side wholly made of inmates specially selected from Brazil’s toughest maximum-security prisons by a presidential taskforce.
Once the players know what real pain is, they would be less inclined to make theatrical dives at the World Cup proper. As Brazilians would say in Portunglish, “e hora [ke nako] to restore football to the glory of its Pele days.”