Entanglements of globalisation: representation of K’NAAN’s song waving flag during FIFA World Cup and the re-imag(ni)ng of Africa

Abstract

The paper interrogates the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa’s activated discourses of football pilfering unstable worldviews on global cultural flows. The World Cup on the African continent demonstrates the glocalisation cycle in world order as a conjunctural hegemonic historical process . This entails an encounter encompassing multifaceted angles of borrowings from film and media, culture and sexuality, politics and economy, class and gender and between the continent and Europe. It is the continent’s colonial encounter with Europe that spurs this study’s intellectual breeze from various disciplines of media, film, and theatre arts studies. When embraced by the metanarrative quest for what colonialism means in the historical memories of Africans, it offers a multiplicity of versions in their splendid diversities. As the biggest soccer extravaganza was performed on the African soil, the great expectation was to celebrate glocalisation and project Africa positively with the ramifications of football as the vehicle of ideologically uncontaminated flows of enjoyment. It goes on to unpack the global hegemonic constructs of Africa and takes cognizance of the intricate and nuanced mechanisms through which international dissemination of commercial advertising of the Coca-Cola video of Knaan’s song Wavin’ Flag mediated through a contradictory site of enjoyment. This renders images of the media painting Africa to degenerate into repertoires of mockery and sarcasm, dramatic irony, resistance and sensuous dimensions pregnant with racial innuendoes. It further explores how these prevailing power relations between individuals, teams and nations affect the life chances of individuals during the FIFA 2010 World Cup and thereafter. The paper bears testimony to the world that Africa’s benchmarks for measuring its progress are evident through music and what not.