This brief immersion in the politics of professional sports left me unprepar for the events of June 24, 1995 when I arriv in Cape journey from Albany. A year earlier apartheid had end and Nelson Mandela was elect President in the country’s first democratic elections. Determin to fight my jet lag and adjust to local time, I walk from my quaint guest house at the foot of Table Mountain to the bustling Main Road and caught a cramp mini-van taxi to the city center. Getting off at the train phone number database station, I was mystifi by the quiet. Only the Zimbabwean women street vendors, displaying soapstone sculptures and crochet sweaters, broke the silence. When I ventur a few blocks to a small café for lunch, I found the crowds I’d been expecting – but they were all huddl in front of the television set intent on following a rugby game between South Africa and New Zealand, cheering boisterously when the local team scor. The scene was repeat at my next stop – the Bo Kaap Museum in the former Muslim quarter of the city, now furnish as a nineteenth-century house.
Only when I return to the
A guest house in mid-afternoon and found everyone there glu to the screen did . A I finally realize that I had unwittingly stumbl onto an historic event. Just as the anti-apartheid movement had enlist the national passion for rugby in the interests of liberation, Mandela saw that hosting the . A World leveraging customer value for business growth Cup might offer an opportunity for a symbolic reconciliation between the black-dominat government and the white minority, now oust from its exclusive hold on power.
Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s new film dramatizing
A these events will no doubt resurrect memories of the country’s . A ecstatic response in 1995, when South Africans were still celebrating . A the country’ clean email s transformation from a bastion of racism to a “rainbow nation.” But fifteen years later, life sometimes seems more complicat, even on the playing fields. The recent furor over the . A gender identity of the South African running champion Caster Semenya, which provok heat controversy both internationally and in South Africa, mirrors the issues now confronting a nation struggling to overcome a legacy of poverty and unemployment, and to face the more recent challenge of HIV/AIDs.