Can Soccer Stop the Violence?
The Boston Celtics have adopted the South African word ubuntu as a team slogan this season. It means unity, interconnectedness and literally, “we are who we are through others.” There is a terrible irony that ubuntu is currently being embraced in Boston while South Africa has recently seen a viral spread of ethnic violence–the utter negation of ubuntu. Black South Africans, living in terrible poverty, have killed nearly sixty people and driven tens of thousands from their homes for simply being foreigners. If you were born in Mozambique or Zimbabwe, you live in danger of rape, robbery or murder. The roots of the violence lie in the country’s crushing poverty and a dynamic all too familiar to Westerners, the scapegoating of immigrants. Time reports: “In November last year, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated 4.2 million South Africans were living on $1 a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid. Globalization was supposed to be
