In its 2022 report assessing sources of inequality in five countries in Southern Africa, the World Bank named South Africa “the most unequal country in the world, ranking first among 164 countries in the global poverty database”.
While wealth and income are indicators of inequality, the report found that race remained “a key driver of high inequality” because it impacted education and the labour market.
Horace Mann, a pioneer of American public schools, once remarked: “Education, then, beyond all other divides of human origin, is a great equaliser of conditions of men – the balance wheel of the social machinery”.
In South Africa, education’s equalising potential is dependent on various factors. Given the country’s legacy of racial and spatial segregation, the quality of schools most children have access to is still largely based on which side of the divide they were born and raised.
These schools are also institutions where sporting talent is identified and developed. Sporting codes offered by various public schools are a product of the legacy of racial segregation.
Football remains the most popular sport in the black and underprivileged communities, while rugby and cricket are the domain of affluent communities.
However, football has grown to become more than just a sport. It has become as powerful as religion. It influences ordinary people in ways that one can never understand. It drives their emotions and behaviour. It affects the colours they wear, the brands they pledge allegiance to and their moods daily.
But football’s greatest power is its ability to sway attitudes of supporters towards other issues, unrelated to sports, like family and relationships.
I have always believed that if ever one wanted to invest in something closest to the people I love, investing in football would be a step towards achieving that goal. That opportunity came and we acquired AmaZulu FC.
In a vastly unequal country like South Africa, meaningful attempts at social equalising can only happen if they meet people at their social pockets. An example of these social pockets is that of football fans. The sport plays an even bigger role as a social equaliser among the supporters.
No investment has been as good for my soul as investing in AmaZulu.
This investment in a football club demonstrates football’s potential role as a social equaliser that meets people at their social levels and passions. It is an investment that allows supporters from different social standings in society and families to have conversations, with football as a platform for that conversation.
Personally, it has created a platform for me to have frank discussions with the team’s supporters who may be uneducated and low in the family hierarchy. But because they love and have passion for the club, they secure an audience with its president.
Through that audience, they feel highly respected and regarded as they see the club president listening attentively to their advice. When I say “I hear you”, they go home emboldened that: “I may be unemployed or considered to be nobody in my family, but when it comes to football I am listened to.”
AmaZulu is also a monument to Zulu heritage and culture. The club’s (and the supporters’) tradition and rituals stand as a living monument to Zulu culture and heritage, constantly reminding us that as much as we live in a globalised world, our cultures remain relevant.
Take the most enduring war cry in our history “Hebee, Usuthu”. AmaZulu has kept this war cry and many other historically significant songs alive for almost a century, facilitating the transfer of knowledge between cohorts of supporters.
This is a sole account of football’s potential to collapse socio-economic, racial, cultural and gender boundaries.
The platform that the sport presents is not just limited to sports discussions. It is an important public sphere where discussions between people take place organically.
- Zungu is chancellor of Mangosuthu University of Technology and president of AmaZulu FC.
