As the Fifa World Cup trophy arrived in Cape Town on Tuesday night, Danny Jordaan, the architect of next summer's tournament, declared "the death of doubt". The waterfront location was symbolic. Football's greatest prize had landed on the southern tip of the continent, and its magic would flow north, turning all Africans into players in a show they may think of as the playground of the old colonial powers.
Here in the host country everyone is looking for the moment that turns the first African World Cup into reality. For many it will arrive tomorrow when South Africa find themselves at the head of one of eight groups for the tournament that kicks off on 11 June, and fixtures and locations assume vivid new life. But Jordaan and the country's president, Jacob Zuma, must be deferred to when they say the arrival of the trophy bestowed authenticity on all the feelings of excitement and liberation that have grown since the Rainbow Nation beat Morocco and Egypt in the bidding race back in 2004.
Only a utopian or a gargoyle for the PR trade could preach that staging a football tournament for a month on the African continent will transform the physical lives of its people. It will not eradicate townships, HIV-Aids, violent crime or cavernous inequality, which the arrival of David Beckham, Fifa delegates and millionaire football industry types only serves to accentuate.
The road from Cape Town airport to the conference centre where the six African contenders will find out what they are up against in tomorrow's draw takes the Swiss bureaucrat and Football Association functionary past the Joe Slovo informal settlement, a scrapyard of corrugated metal sheds from which 20,000 residents are expected to be relocated to a "project" to conceal crushing poverty from Europeans riding taxis along the N2 road.
But what matters more than the rich man's unease at this stage is Africa's own view of the World Cup and the benefits it may bestow. There is no real template for a whole continent bidding itself into the light of international recognition at such vast infrastructure cost. The Beijing Olympics of 2008 were the world's most expensive advertisement for Chinese power, and the Sydney Games of 2000 were self-described as a coming of age for Australia. Next summer's World Cup, though, demolishes a psychological barrier between the so-called developed world and the globe's most troubled landmass.
