On football Friday the malls and workplaces are bright with green and gold Bafana Bafana shirts, jackets and scarves. Every day more and more cars fly the South African flag; sometimes alongside another favourite like Brazil, but mostly alongside the national flag of the country of their original ancestors - Greece, Portugal, Germany or England. Local companies and big global corporations flagrantly assert their patriotism and enormous billboards welcome the visitors to the host city. The citizens of Johannesburg are proud that their province, Gauteng, is the base of choice for eighteen of the thirty-two teams playing in the tournament and that their city will be the venue for the first and final match of the 2010 Football World Cup.

This week, the first phase of the Gautrain, the rapid rail link, was officially launched ahead of schedule. A state of the art, bullet-shaped speed train that will take visitors from Oliver Tambo International airport to the luxury shopping centres in Sandton in fifteen minutes. Trains run every twelve minutes. In a race with a Lamborghini, the Gautrain reached its destination and was on its way back to the airport while its other sleek competitor was still stuck in traffic. This phase is for the tourists. Something to wow the international visitors and show them what South Africa is capable of producing. It was a successful PR stunt for Mbhazima Shilowa, one of the beleagured leaders of COPE who was present at the unofficial launch publicized by Talk Radio 702. However, there is no direct link to the stadiums yet and fans will have to become familiar with bus timetables and take buses provided by the City Council.

There is still some way to go before the Gautrain achieves its desired objective of linking workers from the outlying townships to their jobs in the centre of Johannesburg and Midrand. Many workers still rely on privately run taxis that cause havoc on the roads as they swerve from the fast lane to the kerbside to pick up another lucrative fare blithely ignoring other traffic on the roads. At one time these taxis were the only form of motorized transport available to black South Africans. The owners of these taxi fleets are now powerful business moguls and have obstructed a venture to create an integrated bus network because it will have made their taxis less competitive; thus the new Rea Vaya bus network has been limited to running within the town centre of Johannesburg. People coming in from outside Johannesburg centre can still use the older metrobus network which I’m told is much improved and still cheaper than a taxi.

The old city centre is visible on the horizon as I drive south from Sandton to see the newly built Soccer City Stadium on the outskirts of SOWETO. The windows of a tall tower of a building dazzle gold in the afternoon sun. Next to it a smaller, pyramid-shaped building glistens like the end of a nugget of gold. How wonderfully apt, I think, that Gauteng, the Sotho name for gold, should be so beautifully and symbolically captured; but as we approach and pass close by on the motorway, the hackneyed adage ‘all that that glitters is not gold’ becomes depressingly real. The vast majority of office buildings and skyscrapers that once allowed locals to consider Johannesburg the equivalent of a London or New York are empty and falling apart. Paneless windows and rusted metalwork give the impression of a ghost town, not unlike the old deserted mining towns of the American West.

However, taking a detour through the heart of the city one quickly realises that the the ghosts are the ex-white minority who fled to the suburbs after the change of government in 1994. Since then the city has been reinvented as a loud and bustling African city; there are throngs of people but they are all black.  Garishly coloured awnings and shop front facades have replaced the sober monotones of the European department stores of Woolworths and Stuttafords, Miladys and Bon Marche. A few intrepid Indian businessmen still ply a profitable trade and the old district of Fordsburg nearby remains staunchly Indian; its thriving Oriental Bazaar attracts buyers looking for a bargain while a variety of cafes and restaurants provide some of the best and cheapest Indian fare available.

Nobody appears to take much notice of traffic regulation sin midtown Joburg. You see a space and sneak in; the other cars slotting in around you like a Rubik cube. Some buildings have been squatted; clothes and blankets are slung over window sills to dry in the warm winter sun. I’m told that different areas are occupied by different migrant communities. Xenophobia against migrants who are more skilled, work better and for lower pay is a worry for the government and local NGOs, but apart from the major incident in 2008 it seems to have quietened down.  I want to take pictures with my handy Blackberry but it’s not safe to hold the camera out the window. The transparent glass bus terminals of the Rea Vaya look somewhat out of place; like space age pods waiting to zoom the line of patient commuters to another more futuristic world.

The motorway down to NASREC and the Soccer City stadium runs through the southern gold reefs. They rise up on either side; mellow gold and flat-topped. Men are covering the sloping sides in netting. Over time the flat gold will be covered by green grass. Shame. I rather like them as they are.

Now I see it. The pinky-orange and silver stadium that locals have dubbed ‘The Calabash’.  Security is high. We cannot go too close without a permit. Nearby, a line of uniformed men are being instructed on soon-to-be-used crowd control procedures. Like all the stadiums, Soccer City was built and designed with local expertise, was finished safely and completed ahead of schedule. South Africans are rightly proud of this achievement, especially when FIFA had lined up Australia as a fallback venue in case South Africa failed to deliver on time. It does look amazing even though the surrounding area is still a bit of a building site and a new network of motorways that reduces the daily commute has been welcomed by the locals.

Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of Blue Bulls Rugby fans descended on the revamped Orlando City stadium in SOWETO for an all South African national final against the Cape Stormers. This was a reverse of the 1995 Rugby World Cup spectacle that was the subject of the recently acclaimed film, Invictus, when Mandela managed to garner black support for the Springboks. This time white South Africans came to the heart of SOWETO; many seeing the black township for the first time. They blew their vuvuzelas and drank beer in the shebeens and by all accounts had a thoroughly grand time. Many more such events are planned but there are mixed views about the vuvuzela. People complain about the ear-splitting noise, the fact that you can’t hear anything else, that it has destroyed the singing of football songs and chants and particularly because this is not an age old tradition as many would believe. The vuvuzela was only introduced about ten years ago and the plastic tube is made in China.

It is hoped that the world cup will be a catalyst for real change in South Africa; change that will lift the masses out of the desperate poverty they still find themselves in sixteen years after the end of Apartheid. Much has been achieved but there is still much much more to do. South Africa has shown that where there is the political will, objectives can be achieved.  One hopes that democratic pressure can ensure these are met but the unseemly leadership shennanigans of the opposition party, COPE, and the continuing corruption scandals surrounding government ministers and officials give rise to despair. BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) appointments continue to cause resentment and many are frustrated by what they regard as incompetent people in leadership positions. However, a few new faces in the current government have gained the peoples’ trust to some extent; Minister of Home Affairs, Nkosazana Dhlamini Zuma is really cleaning up a very inefficient and corrupt department, Bheki Cele the new National Police Commissioner - looks like a crook but coming down harder on crime and on corruption within the department. and Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan is doing a good job and is trusted by the nation.

The whine of a vuvuzela shatters the peace of a quiet afternoon.  It must be young fans practice blowing the instrument for their big day - that is if they were lucky enough to get tickets. Huge queues form outside officially sanctioned outlets where last minute tickets can still be bought though many who have queued overnight several times were sorely disappointed when computers crashed after only a few tickets had been issued. Those who have given up on getting hold of tickets will be catered for at a number of football fanparks with big screens.

All thirty two teams have finally arrived in South Africa. Every South African wants this event to be a success and bad news stories produce a paranoia about frightening off international fans to such an extent that some have even suggested these stories ought to be censored. When members of the Uruguayan team discovered their hotel rooms had been burgled it was held off news reports until a caller to a talk radio station mentioned it and then newspapers were forced to report it. The recent stampede at Tembisa stadium in Johannesburg, which led to fifteen people being injured, made the news but was criticised by some locals for promoting negative images of South Africa. A 702 Talk Radio presenter made the point that bad news should not be censored but neither should it be sensationalised. These things happen all over the world and it should not stop people coming or people here from getting on with their lives, going to the stadiums and football parks and enjoying the specatacle. This seems like sane advice. South Africa has been host to many successful and trouble-free tournaments over the years.  England’s Barmy Army is an annual institution at cricket grounds and there have been no major incidents in all those years. The advice is be careful, be sensible but above all enjoy the warmth of the people and climate.

I was the first in my family to take the new Gautrain to the airport. I had spent the day participating in and enjoying the celebrations in Sandton to support the local team Bafana Bafana. It was a truly joyous spectacle. Sport brings South Africans together in a way that politics has failed to do. Seeing the talents of world class players on display in South Africa for the first time; the dream to be better, to excel, to inspire others with hope seems more realizable in Sport than in the politics of everday life. 

The new Gautrain station in Sandton still needs a few finishing touches but I arrive in anticipation of a quick, hassle-free journey to the airport. There are queues at the ticket machines. Some machines will only take card payments and some only cash. There are some patient young uniformed women helping passengers buy their first ticket. But there seems to be a problem. One machine won’t take R100.00 notes and eventually breaks down altogether. The other assistant seems to be taking a long time. It seems one can only buy one ticket at a time so a family of four in front of me takes ages to buy theirs. Also one must purchase a travelcard to let one onto the platform so that costs an extra R10.00 for visitors who are not locals as the latter can use their usual travel cards. Ironically, buying the ticket takes longer than the journey to the airport. This sums up for me a real problem in South Africa today. The journey is fast and smooth; I have reached my goal but there is still a long way to go before South Africa scores the winning goal.