This week, the air in SA has been thick with antagonism towards Britain — more specifically, England — as we prepare for an unprecedented sporting Saturday.
The mixed performances of the Proteas may mean a more cautious daytime enthusiasm for the Cricket World Cup pool game against the English in Mumbai. But this will build to a frenzy of Anglophobic passion by the time the Springboks play their Rugby World Cup semifinal under the Parisian night sky.
As a general rule, whether SA is involved or not, I don’t like to see English sports teams win. It seems to bring out the worst kind of jingoistic patriotism, undergirded by an unspoken “Rule Britannia” imperial nostalgia, as if sporting success confirms ongoing British/English supremacy. Similar sentiments facilitated the idiocy of Brexit and have kept an inept and corrupt Conservative Party in power for more than a decade.
Of course, losing can also elicit ugly responses. England’s departure from the European Football Championship in 2020 emboldened racists to direct a torrent of abuse at black players in the English team. And racism is only one part of an unhealthy sports fan culture in the UK, which also includes a mixture of booze, tabloid mentality and toxic masculinity (as the new Netflix documentary on David Beckham reminds us).
The problem with sitting on my high horse complaining about England and sport — as I regularly do at home, inculcating in my children the same attitude — is that I am guilty of exactly the same myopic nationalism that I am criticising. Former colonies may have history on their side when they revel in the prospect of beating a former coloniser, but country-based hatred is never a good look. It is especially jarring from white English-speaking South Africans like me who have, as Jacob Zuma notoriously put it, our British passports in our back pockets (literally or metaphorically).
Besides, there are as many ways of “being English” as there are ways of being South African, or for that matter American, Palestinian or Ukrainian. All national stereotypes could do with some deflating. Even the caricatured pint-swilling, Brexit-supporting, Tory-voting, foreigner-loathing Englishman has his own human complexity: his forgivable paradoxes, his justified frustrations and his understandable fears.
This is one of the premises of The Old Oak, the latest and probably last film by veteran director Ken Loach, who has spent much of his career documenting the struggles of the poor and working class in the UK. Set in a former mining town in County Durham, The Old Oak depicts the community’s divided response to the arrival of a group of Syrian refugees.
Some, like pub landlord TJ (Dave Turner), are sympathetic; TJ’s father was a miner and a union man, instilling in his son a sense of kindness and respect for others’ dignity. Others, like TJ’s old friends and acquaintances — his only regular pub patrons — are quick to displace their anger at the town’s economic and social decline onto the newcomers, spouting vituperation and bigotry.
In a predictable but still convincingly feel-good turn, the Syrians, having survived warfare, displacement, camps, hunger and incalculable loss, are patient and generous towards their reluctant neighbours. Led by TJ’s newfound friend, Yara (Ebla Mari), they eventually help the townsfolk to rediscover a long-lost sense of solidarity and mutual care.
The film does not offer a reprieve from systemic inequality in the various forms that this takes. Indeed, its characters must learn to dwell in hopelessness and despair. Yet it nonetheless offers viewers a glimpse of what can be achieved when, across barriers of language, culture, race and nationality, people are willing to live together, eat together and grieve together.
The Old Oak is one of 16 films being screened as part of the European Film Festival SA. Gratifyingly, it is a British/French/Belgian co-production; after all, the UK’s continued participation in the festival each year gives the lie to the false logic of Brexit. The unequivocal message of Loach’s film is that there is far more to connect us across borders than there is to divide us.
Audiences in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban can watch The Old Oak this weekend. It may prove a useful antidote to the on-field and off-field rivalry.
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