Chris Smith’s blog

The World Cup has finally begun (read my new South Africa piece here, starting at pg. 71), and in honor of the globe’s most popular game, I’ve compiled a quick portfolio of soccer-related photos from Africa and the Middle East. You can see most of these images, in larger form, on Flickr.

Pimville, Soweto, South Africa, 2009.

Midan Hussein, Cairo, Egypt, 2000. I took this photo of an impromptu midnight game during Ramadan.

Maputo, Mozambique, 2002.

Colesberg, Northern Cape, South Africa, 2002. Note the color differential between players and coaches. It's the same with many of Africa's national teams today.

Gaza City, Gaza, 2001. I took this photograph in Beach Refugee camp, close to the Mediterranean but locked away from the world. Things were bad then, during the second Intifada. Things are worse now.

Atar, Mauritania, 2007. Mauritania is an insular place, and most people don't go out of their way to make you feel welcome. These kids were the exception.

Soccer field, Jabulani, Soweto, South Africa, 2006.

The May/June issue of Afar magazine is out, and it’s running my feature on South Africa’s “Born-Frees,” the first generation to come of age after apartheid’s end. [Turn to page 71.] I tell the story through the life of my friend Thami Nkosi, a 29-year-old Soweto activist and inveterate shit-stirrer, and the group of guys he grew up with.

In many ways, Born-Frees like Thami represent South Africa’s future, and their lives tell us a lot about the country today, and the ways in which both Soweto and South Africa have changed since 1994’s “democratic miracle.” So many things have improved–there’s a large and growing middle class, for instance, and Soweto is booming, bristling with new condos and malls and parks. But it is an unfinished revolution. Decades ago, the older generation marched in the streets, firebombed buildings, and at great cost won political freedom. Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, whose lives were largely defined by the anti-apartheid struggle, the Born Frees have always been able to vote for whomever they like and say what they please. Political freedom, however, hasn’t fully translated to economic freedom. In essence, the Born-Frees’ struggle boils down to a single question, repeated daily in a variety of ways: How to make it in today’s South Africa?

A sample from the piece:

At a friend’s house in Dobsonville, we hunker down for a barbecue, or braai, as South Africans call it, with beer, sausage, and big communal handfuls of pap, a grits-like staple. Thami holds forth under a tent in the driveway, energetically opining on the media, American rappers, and South Africa’s woeful political order. “I see these Jaguars with Jacob Zuma stickers, and I wonder what that means,” he says. “There’s so much crap happening in this country.”

…

That evening, we drive up to a walled compound at the top of a hill. Sifiso lives in a small apartment here with his fiancée and daughter. The security guard opens the gate, and we park beside a line of late-model cars, all buffed to a high sheen. Young, turned-out Sowetans mingle while a DJ spins local house music; a friend points out the son of Aggrey Klaaste, a famous black journalist from the struggle years. Looking around the party, it’s easy to feel good about the future. “Soweto is coming up,” Sifiso says.

The magazine’s on newsstands now, and I’ve just found a low-res web version [Turn to page 71.]. Check it out.

The new issue of the travel magazine Afar has a small piece of mine on Newtown, Jozi’s cultural hub. [Turn to page 18.] I’ve spent a lot of time in this former industrial neighborhood on my visits to Jo’burg, and I’ve seen it change. Back in 2002, my fixer and I almost got jumped while shooting in a shady bar near the old taxi depot cum trash-pit that once dominated Newtown’s landscape. The red-eyed drunks in the bar allowed me to take a few shots then thought better of it. Switching from English to tsotsitaal, they asked my fixer why he was protecting me. That was when we decided it was time to go.

That bar is gone now, replaced by a mixed-use condo project. It’s all part of a huge redevelopment push by the city fathers, aided by a welter of security cameras and an unwillingness to let all of downtown Johannesburg go to hell (indeed, similar efforts are underway in other parts of the city). But Newtown, with its mix of museums, restaurants, and nightspots, is the farthest along.

My last visit coincided with a music festival, where I ran into the venerable Pops Mohamed, a South African world-music icon who nevertheless rides the bus all over town. As the sun set over the city, we talked about Indian food, and the best bars in the inner suburbs. It was a decidedly unglamorous conversation to have with a pop star, but that’s the kind of place Newtown is: buzzy, but down-to-earth.

Afar’s content isn’t online but you can find it, as they say, at better newsstands everywhere. (Update, 4.11.10: I’ve just discovered an online cache, and edited this post accordingly.)

(You can see more of my South African photography here.)

I shot these photos last month while reporting a story on the ways in which Soweto–and, more generally, South Africa–has changed since the end of apartheid. The piece will come later, but for now there are photos.

Last week, Mother Jones ran an old photo of mine, one I made in 2002 of a Zimbabwean immigrant (or economic refugee, if you prefer) in his apartment in downtown Johannesburg.

As their nation slipped into chaos under the rule of longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, millions of Zimbabweans flooded into neighboring South Africa in search of work. Many ended up in Johannesburg, Southern Africa’s de facto capital, scratching out a living on the streets and sharing rooms in decaying apartment blocks in the city’s rundown core.

I made this photo in 2002, and things have only gone downhill since then, the years marked by spiraling inflation, stolen elections, and state-sponsored thuggery against the democratic opposition. Even if current power-sharing negotiations manage to loosen Mugabe’s grip on the country, Zimbabwe will need to be rebuilt, more or less, from the ground up.