Cape Town: what's in a stereotype?

On the day before the opening game of the World Cup, between South Africa and Mexico, a lone figure draped in the Mexican flag was having a cigarette outside Cape Town airport. A group of airport workers approached him asking if he was Mexican—perhaps for a little pre-match ribbing—only for the man to throw his hands out, sweep the flag back and break into a short burst of operatic signing finishing with the declaration “Italiano!”

As the World Cup gathers pace and more and more people arrive, such incidents have been proliferating. As the Germans cut a swathe through the bewildered Australians, Gregory’s wife Lindiwe called from a German restaurant on the Cape Town waterfront. I didn’t hear much of what she said but the singing and stamping was unmistakably Teutonic. The next day she confirmed this, and the gigantic quantities of beer being drunk. Today the Brazilians at the airport really did parade through the baggage pick up playing their drums. My spies in Rustenburg in the day of the USA-England game reported that “the town was full of people behaving in a very drunken manner”.

The cavalcade of national stereotypes has now gone into overdrive. I’m in Johannesburg, in Little Athens with the Greeks. The boys are in recovery mode. They stayed on in Port Elizabeth with the Zimbabweans and in the long bout of drinking and carousing and smoking that followed they came off second best. Now they are nursing their self-inflicted wounds in a flat in Melville. Gluttons for punishment, they watched the Germany game with a bunch of hard drinking Germans and tried to get them to pay the sizable bill on the grounds that they were paying for everything else in Greece, so why change a beautiful relationship?

Joburg is cold, ridiculously cold. It's three degrees centigrade at night, and Little Athens is a flatlet with ivy growing through the cracks in the windows. Moisture gathers on flat surfaces and we can feel the draughts through the gaps in the floorboards and the doors. The Greeks laughed when I said I was bringing thermals and walking boots. They’re not laughing now.

We had a night-time swing through Melville and Pankhurst. The Greeks were in search of four things: football, beer, coffee and atmosphere. We found three out of four, but the atmosphere was not quite what we were all looking for. Street life in this weather is non-existent but for the parking attendants and their hangers-on who, hands in pockets, freeze in the shadows of the street corners. I roamed around in search of a little zol, found some, and chatted to two guys pressed to the window of an Italian restaurant, hunched up against the icy air, watching the first half of Brazil-North Korea.

Walking back into the bar where the Greeks have taken up residence it was hot and strangely airless. The football was on, but most of the punters were not concentrating. We all began the game supporting Brazil on the grounds that it is just impossible to support North Korea, and we all wanted to see the Brazilians go out and do their stuff—which they did, but their stuff these days is not quite the fantasy football we all imagined it might be. In fact, by the end of the game we’d warmed to the PRK; the North Koreans themselves refused to answer to their name for the nation when questioned by South Korean journalist at a press conference earlier today. In fact, their late goal got the biggest cheer of the night.

Today it’s going to be just as cold, but it is going to be a very different day, not a Greek day or a German day or an English day. Today is South Africa’s day. It’s National Youth Day, a public holiday that celebrates and commemorates the Soweto uprising. The main celebrations are in Kimberly, which is getting its moment in the sun, having not got any of the World Cup action at all. But we will be in Soweto and South Africa are playing Uruguay at 8.30. Today, I am South African.