Sarah goes soccer!

Sarah Osman (1980) was born in Sudan, and has been living in the Netherlands for the past 11 years. She’s been working in the field of development cooperation for the past 3 years, and has recently decided to take her skills and knowledge back to Africa. Her first stop is Cape Town, South Africa. After her column Wanted! Home in Africa for RNW, Sarah goes soccer.  In this latest column, she will share with us her experiences of the build-up to the 2010 World Cup in Cape Town. Not the mainstream news, but background stories that often get missed in the euphoria of the big event.

Away from the big stages, the celebrities and the screens, there’s a whole other way of seeing football, namely how football is embedded into the everyday life of the average Capetonian.

By Sarah Osman

I sat down with senior curator Paul Weinberg and street photographer Lindeka Qampi who told me about Soccer Kultcha, a photo exhibition that will be launched on 11 June in Cape Town.

Uncommissioned photography
Lindeka Qampi is one of 15 photographers who make up the ‘Iliso Labantu’ network. The name of the collective means ‘the eye of the people’ and their work is central in the exhibition as Paul explained. “The work we’re showcasing is not commissioned photography. It’s purely about the photographers’ own vision, passion and commitment, which comes through so well in Lindeka’s work. Her photographs look closely at soccer culture in the Cape Flats and particularly the area where she lives in Khayelitsha.”

Daily life
Lindeka told me that her interest in football lies in how it is part-and-parcel of daily life in her community. She highlighted the fact that soccer in the diverse Cape Town communities is more than just a sport. It is infused in the fabric of social life; it is seen on clothing, taxis, in houses and many other spaces. “When kids come home from school, the first thing they do is play soccer. So what I do in my work is connect soccer with our daily life. The poverty is there but at the same time so is the love for soccer. What attracted me to soccer is the way that kids play on informal fields, without training shoes, with broken socks. But they are happy. I think that happiness is the most important thing and I wanted to show this in my work.”

“Way off the radar”
The local NGO EMEP (Extra-Mural Education Project) launched a programme where children from Hillwood Primary School in Lavender Hill and Hlengisa Primary School in Nyanga got disposable cameras which they used to photograph images in their neighbourhood. “The other group of photographers whose work is exhibited are primary school learners who, through EMEP’s project, photographed the world around them while focusing on soccer. Soccer in a way does unite people, it’s the biggest game in the world and the World Cup is the biggest sport event in the world. There’s been a lot of ‘bringing together’ around the 2010 World Cup, but way off the radar screen. This exhibition is bringing some of these missing parts together so that we can celebrate our culture” said Paul.