Towards 2010: South Africa a time of nation building?
Nation-building is the process of constructing a nation using the power of the state. It aims at the unification of the people within the state so that it remains politically stable and viable in the long run. Nation-building may involve the use of propaganda and infrastructural development to foster social harmony and economic growth.
The “imagined community” is a concept coined by Benedict Anderson, scholar of nationalism and international studies, which states that a nation is a community socially constructed, which is to say imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.
An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not based on face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their association. As Anderson puts it, a nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion (association)”.
A nation is an “imagined community” because “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such imaginings.“
A nation in this manner is organic and whole. Nationality a plant of nurture. Andersen talks of the “national animal” and of the “physiology of the whole national group” , which organism was topped by the “national spirit” and the “soul of the people.”
Desmond Tutu, South African cleric and activist, was credited with coining the term Rainbow Nation in 1994 as a metaphor for post-apartheid South Africa under African National Congress rule. The expression has since entered that country’s consciousness to describe its proudly ethnic diversity.
The phrase was elaborated upon by President Nelson Mandela in his first month of office, when he proclaimed: “Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”
As South African President Thabo Mbeki has said: “The Government will leave no stone unturned to ensure that everything is done to host a tournament (2010 Soccer World Cup) that meets the expectations of billions of football fans across the world.
What must be done to inspire ordinary South Africans, in Mbeki’s words, to “ensure that, one day, historians reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and turned the tide on centuries of poverty and conflict”?
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