By Stuart Thembisile Lewis
Ah, what a month and what a World Cup! It was a showcase of all things South African which the world will not soon forget. From prophetic octopi to the Hand of God version 2.0, 90 000 vuvuzelas pointed at 11 Mexicans and 49 million hands over hearts of green and gold, from the zebra-striped stadium of Nelspruit to the giant calabash of Soweto, we had it all.
I was lucky, I got to do it all. I watched Siphiwe Tshabalala net the opening goal of the cup with the crowds at Innesfree, saw the Socceroos trump Serbia and the Ivorian Elephants trample North Korea in the stands at the beautiful Mbombela Stadium, screamed on Netherlands in the final from my favourite couch and caught the most exciting game of the tournament, Uruguay versus Germany, in 3D. If you thought those little cameras in the corner of the net were scary, you don’t know the half of it. I even managed to sneak in an incredibly short ride on the Gautrain.
The one thing I didn’t manage to do a lot of, however, was study, which in hindsight may have been a slight mistake. At least I’m not alone in that. Thousands of students across the country are preparing to go back to school and almost immediately thereafter write their mid-year exams, the one problem being that all they’ve thought about over the last month and a bit is soccer, soccer and more soccer as opposed to more interesting things like trigonometry and Shakespeare.
So the students of South Africa I say: that was one crazy holiday but now feel it, exams are here …
Stuart Thembisile Lewis is a 17-year-old student and an aspiring writer slash journalist. This is an editorial he wrote for his school paper.
Nice try. But know this:Soccer WC is a platform for soccer artists to market themselves to the world. Artists work for an audience which tends to degrade them to a servile dependence on their public, especially the rich and powerful.
Despots wisely cultivate arts to direct their subject people from awareness of their loss of freedom, so that the artist’s freedom has to emerge from some blind, non-rational inner impulse. In the field of play he has to endure the harshest tackles from others who need recognition in order to live. That is why high-earning players do not risk their limbs to please their “nations” only to lose out on their lucrative contracts after the WC. They underperform or ‘get injured’ because they have to earn a living thereafter.
Arts, forces us to conceal our real selves and build our happiness in the opinions of others. It thus has a complementary and mutually reinforcing relationship to luxury and corruption, hence when people could not afford tickets, government had to use tax money to buy them to “fling gerlands of flowers over chains”, as one author termed it.
Fully ekse!
I reckon students like you are most ready to handle the “hangover”. I pity those of us who are so far removed from school and varsity that we have lost the stamina that comes with hard-partying holidays followed by the sudden return to the grind of study and grafting.
Keep the fire burning lad, our future is in you…
@Stuart, I don’t know why the word ‘aspiring’ is ascribed to you. Feel it, you are a writer/journalist. Like your style!
Hey, tottie, translation please! I’ve been teaching English for centuries, and I haven’t a clue what you’re on about.
Stuart, well done on a clear, crisp piece of writing.
Stuart, i enjoyed the WC just as much. My only wish was to have Semi final in Gauteng because i felt some of the stadia were under utilised viz Peter Mokaba, Mbombela
By the way i enjoyed reading your work and am expecting more from now on.
The world will aslo not forget that right after the world cup, the ANC fat cats of the government clamped down on our free press to protect themselves form exposure of their corruption. So after the initial hype, the world will just sigh and say: they are teh same as other African states. Yes, we would have deserved more but our reputation is now in tatters, no matter how well the world cup was received.