I watched the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup with a few friends at a German restaurant in Brooklyn. Co-host Mexico went up against South Africa, who had made their return to the World Cup after failing to qualify for the last three tournaments. Unsurprisingly, many of the other patrons watching the match supported Mexico. Together, my friends and I were a motley crew: A Dane, a Singaporean, an Eritrean, three South Africans, and a Peruvian-American.

I had arrived at the bar wearing a 1998 South Africa jersey, MCCARTHY 17 emblazoned on the back for Benni McCarthy. The country’s highest scorer—an impressive thirty-one goals for the national team—and its most decorated player, McCarthy won a Champions League trophy with FC Porto under José Mourinho. He then went on to play in the English Premier League and establish himself as a highly capable striker. McCarthy was born in 1977 in Hanover Park, a township the Apartheid state classified a “coloured” group area. Coloured people, according to the Population Registration Act, were defined as “a person who is not a white person nor a native.” McCarthy’s father came from the Free State, the province bordering landlocked Lesotho, and his family history was one of movement and migration. Forcibly deracinated from the leafy suburbs of Kirstenbosch, Claremont, Newlands, and Constantia, Hanover Park became, like the rest of the Cape Flats, an Apartheid dumping ground for the city’s Black (and coloured) residents.  McCarthy, who came of age in the final decade of Apartheid, shined with the potential of the post-Apartheid nation.

At the bar, we watched the match settle into a 2–0 lead for Mexico. This year’s tournament is only the fourth time the South African national team has qualified, and would later feature their unprecedented debut in the knockout stage. (They qualified automatically in 2010 by virtue of being hosts.) Admirably gallant, but ultimately uncoordinated, the South Africa–Mexico opener was lackluster. South African coach and former Belgian football player Hugo Broos had set up the team in a defensive formation built to absorb pressure, featuring five defenders behind a compact midfield and two strikers upfront. If executed well, the wingbacks could break on the counterattack and cause significant problems for the opposing team. But the formation crumbled as two players were given their marching orders by the red-card-happy Brazilian referee—Yaya Sithole in the fiftieth minute and Themba Zwane in the eighty-fourth, the latter banned for the remaining games—and South Africa ended the match with nine men. Julián Quiñones opened the scoring for Mexico in the eighth minute, and Raúl Jiménez sealed the victory in the final quarter.

In World Cups past, it’s been typical for African countries to root for each other. But for South Africa’s opening game, the absence of such Pan–Africanism was stark: Scores of Africans online and in-person had chosen, for this not unhistoric match, to back Mexico against their continental neighbor. As a teenager, I remember supporting Ghana as they reached the quarterfinals in the 2010 World Cup only to be eliminated by Uruguay. In the 120th minute of extra time during a scramble near the goal line, Luis Suárez deliberately blocked Dominic Adiyiah’s header with his hand to prevent a goal, which resulted in a red card for the Uruguayan striker and a penalty for Ghana. Asamoah Gyan, who had been Ghana’s standout player, took the penalty kick and sent the ball ringing against the crossbar, much to the delight of Suárez, who celebrated on the touchline, and the dismay of the African fans who had poured into the stadium. (Uruguay eventually won the match in a penalty shootout and finished the tournament in fourth place.) This same continentalism was strong too in the 2022 World Cup, when Morocco made history by making it to the semifinals. In the months leading up to this year’s Cup, though, xenophobic protests in cities across South Africa had antagonized Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Palpable in the team’s vulnerable performance was a feeling that this tournament was going to be especially beleaguered.

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The game produced another strange déjà vu, insofar as the 2010 World Cup was also inaugurated by an identical Mexico–South Africa opener, in Johannesburg. That tournament was the largest sporting event ever hosted by an African country, and the first World Cup held on the continent. My family had taken the train into downtown Cape Town to watch the game in one of the free fan parks. I remember watching Siphiwe Tshabalala’s goal rocket past Mexican keeper Guillermo Ochoa. Commentator Pater Drury’s exclamation, “Goal Bafana Bafana! Goal for South Africa! Goal for all Africa! Jabulile! Rejoice!” became immortalized, alongside Shakira’s “Waka Waka” and K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag.” The poetic announcement of Tshabalala’s goal was more than narration. The early 2000s saw the dawn of South Africa’s Rainbow Nationalism—the notion, coined by Desmond Tutu, that South Africa was a “rainbow nation” because of its diversity of languages, cultures, colors, and ethnicities. The World Cup and other sporting events were part of an organized effort to present the country as modern, capable, and hospitable. (The 1995 Rugby World Cup pretty much invented this paradigm when Nelson Mandela and Captain Francois Pienaar embraced each other on the celebration podium after South Africa won the tournament. Mandela wore a green “Springbok” rugby jersey with Pienaar’s 6 on the back. Pienaar, a white Afrikaner, and Mandela, Black.) Eric Hobsbawm famously said that a team of eleven named people can feel as real a nation, and South Africans saw themselves in the eleven named South Africans on the football pitch. At that moment, the rainbow nation felt tangible.

This spring, the South African movement March and March—a self-described citizen-led group that advocates for strict immigration policies and enforcement, organized independently of any political party—staged massive protests against undocumented African migrants in Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Durban. The name started out as a statement of intent. At present, the movement engages in demonstrations every Thursday. Following their nationwide protest action, founder Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma told supporters, “Every Thursday for the next six months, we are marching until they [undocumented immigrants] are gone.”

The African National Congress (ANC)—Nelson Mandela’s party—came to political power in 1994 under the slogan “A Better Life for All”; for movements like March and March, the African migrant is a menacing figure that stands between South Africans and the life promised to them by the post-Apartheid dispensation. Whereas the white migrant who comes to South Africa to live and work (remotely), enjoying the benefits of earning in pounds or dollars, is seen as an asset to the country, a source of foreign direct investment, African migrants are blamed for the country’s myriad socio-economic problems in rhetoric that mirrors far-right movements across the world. According to March and March, migrants steal jobs, use limited public resources, and are to blame for the sale of drugs, high crime, and unemployment rates, the latter of which currently sits at 32.7 percent. March and March purportedly prioritize the voices and concerns of South African citizens, and express belief in the rule of law, community accountability, and transparency, yet their members have been documented roving the streets and demanding shop owners prove their legal immigration status.

While it is precisely this kind of nativism that undermines the universalism the ANC’s slogan once articulated, movements like March and March are ultimately a symptom of what happens when state failure and the persistence of historical inequalities coalesce. African immigrants have become scapegoats for the state’s failure to deliver the just and equitable society it promised. Xenophobic sentiment and violence also have a deep history in South Africa: In 2008 and 2009, the country experienced a wave of pogroms directed mainly at people from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Nigeria, and Mozambique. This same fratricidal violence resurfaced in 2015, and now in 2026, couched in the language of law and order, a nationalistic, totalizing appeal to self-determination that would make Hendrik Verwoerd—the Prime Minister credited with introducing the Apartheid as national policy—rest easier in his grave. “They are taking our jobs, selling drugs, and committing crime,” is the charge made against those who are colloquially identified as “illegal foreigners.”

In December 2025, March and March and its affiliates set a deadline—June 30, 2026—for all undocumented foreign nationals to leave the country, making veiled threats of violence against those who remained. They echoed the call of Gayton McKenzie, Minister of Sports and Culture, who had popularized the slogan “Abahambe” (they must go) in his 2023 national election campaign. Leading up to the June deadline, African embassies chartered buses and flights to repatriate their citizens, while others left without any formal help. WhatsApp messages circulated, urging people to carry their identification documents, or “papers,” reminiscent of the passbooks the Apartheid government required Black South Africans to carry. Days before deadline, McKenzie dissuaded his supporters and members of his party, the Patriotic Alliance, from participating in the planned action, presumably to distance himself and his party from any ensuing violence and avoid damaging his political standing. The protest on June 30 ended up being largely peaceful, though there were reports of sporadic violence, arrests, and at least one death. But even this bathetic rupture left one thing clear: Thirty-one years after the birth of its democracy, South Africa remains plagued by the ghosts of colonization and Apartheid and continues to reproduce the same violence it sought to overcome. 

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South Africa’s sporting establishments historically played a consequential role in the country’s liberation struggle. The sports and cultural boycott of the 1970s and ’80s was instrumental in bringing Apartheid South Africa to its knees. The South African Council on Sport (SACOS), the sporting wing of the liberation movement, organized around a slogan that is still apt today: “No normal sport in an abnormal society.” Founded in 1962 by anti-Apartheid activist and poet Dennis Brutus, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) was able to bring about the suspension of Apartheid South Africa from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which led to the country’s eventual suspension from the Olympic Movement. SANROC coordinated and collaborated with anti-Apartheid movements abroad, particularly in United Kingdom, and lobbied international sports federations to boycott South Africa.

When South African Captain Ronwen Williams was asked about the wave of Africans supporting Mexico ahead of the team’s second group stage match against Czechia, his answer was sadly telling: “We’ve all got our own politics, our own problems, and our own fights that we deal with back home. Every country has that. I don’t know where that stems from. It does hurt. I have been attacked . . . my country as well, for things that are going on back home.” The mealymouthed reply couldn’t be farther from SACOS’ insurgency, or even the still palpable radicalism of older African players.

After Côte d’Ivoire qualified for the 2006 World Cup, striker Didier Drogba went down on his knees on live television to plead with rival factions in the country’s civil war to lay down their weapons. While his speech’s impact is perhaps overstated, Drogba’s actions are broadly credited with helping to end the conflict. Catalonian Pep Guardiola, arguably the most decorated manager of his generation, has taken public stances in solidarity with Palestinians, Ukrainians, and immigrants targeted by ICE. In the wake of France’s 1–0 Round of 16 victory over Paraguay, the vanquished country’s Senator Celeste Amarilla tweeted that Kylian Mbappé was a “colonized Cameroonian pretending to be French” and then demanded a retraction of Mbappé’s fittingly insulting response. Mbappé—though far less than one would expect of one of the leading superstars of a game so global, albeit overrun by dirty money—has repeatedly criticized Le Pen and the “extremists that seek to divide the country.” But theirs is an experience of being part of the minority. Moral bankruptcy is ingrained into the business of the World Cup itself. Infantino’s “Peace Prize” to Trump in 2025, was only icing on a rotten cake: In 1978, the World Cup was hosted by Argentina at the height of the Guerra sucia, or Dirty War, and more recently, the hosts in 2018 and 2022, Russia and Qatar, respectively, have had plenty of their own well-documented human rights abuses.

Ronwen Williams would have been two years old when Nelson Mandela was elected to lead South Africa out of Apartheid. He would have gone to school and university alongside South Africans of all ilks and nationalities, been taught the Rainbow Nation narrative, and learned to revere Mandela as father of the nation. Williams and his teammates, on the biggest stage available to them, were unable to rise to the occasion, however spurious its circumstances. South Africa drew their second match against Czechia and won their final group-stage game against South Korea in dramatic fashion, after abandoning their style of defensive football. But in their Round of 32 game, the team seemed to shrink under the weight of the moment and were knocked out by an unfaltering Canadian offense. More than any tactical failure, for South Africa, political inertia was the greatest weakness on display.

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