Eudy Simelane, Homophobia and the World Cup
Jennifer Doyle, of the excellent From A Left Wing blog, has a must-read piece on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free about football, homophobia and sexism, framed around the horrible fate met by Eudy Simelane:
Before the start of their 2006 World Cup semi-final, players for Brazil and France stood together and held a banner declaring “Say no to racism”. The gesture was part of a Fifa campaign – each of the 64 matches included a visible statement against the racist abuse directed especially at black players in Europe. From the round banner marked with this slogan which covered the centre circle until the start of the match, to pre-game statements read by team captains before kick-off, during Fifa’s 2006 World Cup, players, fans and tournament organisers declared that racism has no place in football.
Imagine a similar intervention today. South Africa has the highest incidence of rape in the world. The statistics are chilling: one in two women are raped; women are more likely to be raped than to learn to read; and they have little reason to trust the law to defend their right to their own bodies.
One grisly dimension of this crisis is that black lesbians are singled out for homophobic rape and violent assault with particular frequency. In April 2008, Eudy Simelane, a former midfielder for South Africa’s women’s national team, was raped, beaten, stabbed and left to die in a creek 200m from her home. A shocking number of South African female athletes have been assaulted – women who dare to play a “man’s game” become visible targets.
Read the rest, but I’d also like to highlight Doyle’s conclusion as something for us to think about:
If the culture of sports can be a breeding ground for racist and xenophobic impulses, it is also a space in which sexist and homophobic attitudes are deeply ingrained. If racism in football culture should be stamped out, then surely the sexism and homophobia that shadows the women’s game nearly everywhere, but especially in South Africa, merits at least a statement from Fifa, if not a full-blown campaign – designed by South African activists and endorsed by the world’s most famous players.
The onus should also be on fans, organisers and players at grassroots levels to discuss the issue of homophobia in the game, as we’ve looked at here a few times. The more it is addressed in the open and acknowledged as an unacceptable problem, the easier it is for change to happen. A high-profile campaign from FIFA at the World Cup would be a big start and I agree with Doyle’s points, but if those of us who play, watch and most importantly discuss the game address with more honesty the lazy cultures of sexism and homophobia ingrained in it, that would help enormously.
Sport is often accompanied by a whole lot of high-flown rhetoric about bringing people together and generally being a force for good for humankind, a goal it it has no way of achieving. The Olympics is particularly guilty of it.
I think that the strength of anti-racism campaigns in football is that, although they may make grander claims, they are focussed, essentially, on policing the behaviour of players and fans at football matches. So they are directly relevant to football and have a potentially achievable objective. Football administrators can’t eradicate racism in society, but they can at least try to eradicate racist chanting at football matches, and that is a worthy ambition and a useful contribution to the bigger movement.
While it would be a good thing to tackle the sexist and homophobic culture of football, you would have to think hard about how best to do it, because there’s a real risk of losing the focus and becoming ineffective. So for example, it would be a good start to extend the current anti-racism policies and treat homophobic language as seriously as racist language. But it’s not clear how football can approach an issue as difficult as the rape culture and the general level of violence in South Africa.
Harry – I think that’s a very interesting point, but I’d also say: the casual acceptance of homophobic and sexist chanting at football matches shouldn’t be ignored. It might not be exactly the same thing as the racist chanting that has been largely stamped out at least in England in part due to those campaigns, but it’s not be forgotten. I realise that’s not necessarily completely relevant to your point about South Africa, but it’s worth mentioning in the broader picture I was discussing in my final paragraph here.
Even if it would just be a symbolic meassage, it would do more good than harm. But the fact that they have done nothing to honor her memory at “their tournament”, shows what the priorities are for the RSA FA and FIFA. She’s marginalized even in death.
It’s completely valid to take them to task. Sometimes it is ok to say “Hey, you’re country has some problems practices, are you doing anything to improve them?”. It’s not racist, neo-colonialist or white man burden-ish. Every country has problems, but when nothing is really being done to address it. I think it’s valid for outsiders to ask why not?