LONDON - When South Africans heard that they had been awarded the 2010 Fifa World Cup, they were jubilant. It would be the first time the tournament had been hosted by an African nation. They would not be so jubilant now if they know what the British media are saying, and what warnings the British and United States embassies are issuing through the internet. The warnings, called "alerts" or "advisories," come close to telling the respective citizens that if they want to attend the games, they do so at their peril.
The present critical view the media and television in Britain take of South Africa is not all that different from the former hammering of apartheid. Why? We will come to this later.
Earlier this week, Channel 4, the highly rated daily news hour, presented a programme that was quite chilling. It took watchers into Cape Town's Khayelitsha and told them about gangs and drugs and murder and robberies. Call it comment if you like, but it was factual, chapter and verse, and ugly. Several other UK newspapers have taken the same approach, so much so that my Cypriot greengrocer asked me, "Why are the papers so hostile to South Africa?"
In The Times (June 4), Jonathan Clayton (formerly the newspaper's correspondent in South Africa) wrote that his own home had been burgled and almost all the contents of the study taken.
"We'd slept through the entire episode, though suspicions lingered that the burglars had used a spray to make one of us sleep more deeply - a favourite tactic of housebreakers...Somehow, and with great skill, they managed to navigate alarms, electric fences and private security patrols...With belated clarity, I understood why so many of our neighbours had packs of dogs."
Clayton's report is wholly balanced. He had not been long in Johannesburg at the time, and neighbours advised him to upgrade his security after the burglary, which he did. One neighbour suggested that because his house had been worked over, probably he would be left alone for a while. Three weeks later, the burglars were back. As Clayton remarks, "In South Africa everyone has a horror story to tell."