Laura Pappano, co-author with Eileen McDonagh of Playing With The Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal, is an award-winning journalist and writer-in-residence at Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. She blogs at FairGameNews.com . In the original post below, Pappano discusses  Elizabeth Lambert’s hair-pulling and sportsmanship in women’s athletics.  Read Pappano’s previous OUPblog posts here.

Outrage over New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert’s dirty play – including her ponytail-yanking an opponent to the ground – is justified given this egregious act of poor sportsmanship.

But as the conversation and video have gone viral – from SportsCenter to NFL pre-game shows to David Letterman – the subtext has become less about comportment and more about the gendered expectations of female athletes.

Guys fighting in sports – whether ice hockey or baseball – is considered a “natural” by-product of intense play and, well, testosterone. They can’t help it. When women get heated in competition (ask any high school female athletes about trash talking and you’ll get an earful) there is a perception that they’re supposed to act…differently.

In a season of throw-backs, you can add this to the list: Just as our grandmothers insisted that girls don’t sweat, they “perspire,” there remains a narrow range of acceptable behavior for female athletes. Such rigidity is not new (in previous eras women basketball players were required to wear makeup in competition and submit to half-time beauty contests), but until Lambert we had thought the rules had evolved – at least a little.

The increasing skill level and intensity of women’s sports even at high school and college levels should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Problem is, of course, many have not been paying attention. Women’s sports remain poorly covered by the mainstream male sports media. News outlets hardly feel obligated to report on even major events (it took digging to get the result of the WNBA final). And chatter about Lambert on sports talk radio last week on the Boston station I listen to was preceded by the admission that “we have never talked about women’s college soccer on this program and we will probably never talk about women’s college soccer again, but…”

The fact remains that while female athletes have developed skills, hard-charging attitudes and leave-it-all-on-the-field seriousness about their play, we still view them as grown-up girls (in ponytails) who might be doing cartwheels in the backfield if they thought they wouldn’t get caught.

Some little girl-female athlete affinity is purposeful marketing. That’s the justification for Saturday afternoon college basketball games and cheap tickets. And, certainly, why shouldn’t women’s teams, from college basketball to professional soccer build a fan base from those who can relate to them as role models? Isn’t that the NFL’s goal fulfilled when millions of boys paste Ladanian Tomlinson Fatheads on bedroom walls and wear Peyton Manning jerseys to school?

Promoting athletes as role models, of course, is always tricky. But where men get a pass for bad behavior, women draw fire.

We forgive Michael Vick, and gasp when Serena Williams screams at a line judge’s late call at the U.S. Open.

We must get past the notion that female athletes are “nice” first and good second, and women’s games should be peddled as “family fare.” It is tiring to hear enlightened men describe themselves as “supporters” of women’s sports as if they are charitable donors. No one likes dirty play. But if Elizabeth Lambert just made people see that women’s sports are highly intense, competitive, and exciting, well, good for her.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below, he examines our nation’s concepts of vengeance and justice in light of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s forthcoming trial in New York City. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

There are four reasons which have been supplied to suggest that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) does not deserve a civilian trial in New York:

1. This is what KSM wants – a show trial, and he should not get what he desires.
2. The trial will increase the risks of a terrorist attack in New York.
3. Classified information will be released in a civilian court trial, to the benefit of potential future terrorists.
4. The injury KSM has inflicted is a war crime, and not a domestic criminal matter.

1-3 are unverifiable predictions, sub-points to the main point, 4, which is the motive force behind the considerable agitation behind Attorney General, Eric Holder’s decision. Those who oppose a civilian trial for KSM want vengeance more than they want justice. This is exactly what Michael Goodwin has argued:

“Either try the detainees in military courts on secure bases or, best of all, give them death now. Mohammed and some others already acknowledged guilt and said they were ready to die.

I say we take yes for an answer.”

Well, there we have it. Goodwin wants vengeance primarily, and justice only incidentally. Now, vengeance and justice are not unrelated. Vengeance presumes the existence of guilt, so the pursuit of vengeance can lead to justice. Indeed, in an anarchic, godless world of all against all, vengeance is the closest thing there is to justice. To speak of justice would be a categorical mistake because without the apparatus of sovereignty and law, it is a standard that stands on stilts. We say “Justice under the Law” because without law, justice is a meaningless concept.

Goodwin and others like Mayor Rudy Giuliani who want to deny KSM a civilian trial believe, though they have not fully articulated their reasons, that the international milieu exists as a state of nature in which there is no universal law and no universally accepted sovereign law-giver, and therefore, the pursuit of justice is folly and the pursuit of vengeance necessary. If there is neither legality nor illegality, then there is only strength and weakness. Vengeance will have to do. This is why Rudy Giuliani insists on the frame that we are a nation at war, that we are dealing with terrorists or “enemy combatants” and not what John Yoo called “garden-variety criminals.”

To be sure, in a government of laws such as in a liberal democracy, justice takes on higher attributes that vengeance does not (and cannot). While justice is about law; vengeance is about necessity because it privileges immediate judgment over the process that would deliver such a judgment. While vengeance gives specific solace to those who were injured, justice assures all citizens that the system in which they conduct themselves works, – i.e., while vengeance is pointed, justice is blind, and while vengeance is preponderant, justice is proportionate.

Well and good. But as we consider whether or not KSM should have been granted a civilian trial, we need to determine the context in which we make this judgment: is terrorism a domestic criminal matter or an act of war? If the context is the former, then the Constitution takes precedence and it makes sense to speak of justice and that is what KSM deserves. If it is the latter, then because there is neither universal law nor a sovereign law-giver in the international milieu, KSM will have to suffer our vengeance because justice is not an alternative.

We have not settled on an answer to this question of whether or not terrorism is a criminal or a war crime because our historical definition of war has not caught up with its modern incarnation in which deterritorialized non-state actors perpetrate acts of violence. Our discussion over what KSM deserves is a footnote to this larger debate.

I recently chatted with Gillian Saunders, director of Grant Thornton Strategic Solutions, the consulting firm that has been working on the 2010 World Cup for over a decade now. In this podcast she explains why South Africa got the bid, how preparation for the tournament has changed the country, the controversy behind the giant stadiums, and the one thing you should see when you visit South Africa.  Be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

Rafferty: So Gillian, I was wondering if first you could first discuss, give us an overview, of the role Grant Thornton has played in the preparation for the World Cup.

Gillian Saunders: Well we were first approached in the late nineties by the South African football association, FIFA, to assist them with looking at a bid for the World Cup, and they felt that the way to promote this country going for the bid, was to look at the economic impact it would have on the country. So we did an economic impact analysis then; subsequent to that we did one for the 2006 bid and then we did another one for the 2010 bid which of course was a successful bid and we now actually have the event happening next year. Since then we’ve updated it a couple times. Most recently only last year, haven’t updated it again since, we will plan to update it after the draw in December when there’s a lot more finality about exactly who’s coming, where they’re traveling, etc…

Rafferty: In 2004, what role did you play in South Africa winning the bid to host the tournament?

Saunders: Well I think one of the reasons that Africa was seen as an attractive destination for the event was people did feel that it’s an event that can actually help the economy of a country like South Africa and other countries in Africa, and that was what we demonstrated and what went into the bid book and what helped I think position South Africa as a meritus winner of the event; and if we go back even further, the initial exercise we did, and it was based on work we’d done previously for Grand Prix that had been successful as well in terms of saying that major sporting events actually leave an economic legacy and are beneficial to the destination. And that you know there are some people that feel the benefit is minimal, that the benefit is often not only measured in the actual economic benefit of the event or the net additional economic benefit of the event, but the profiling of the destination that has a knock-on effect for trade, investment, and tourism in years after the event. So we looked at all of that, and basically our exercise was used by the football association to get South Africa to buy into bidding for the event. And the FIFA 2010 event is a huge undertaking from a government perspective; the country has to give a lot of guarantees and has to be involved in a lot of the infrastructure needs if there are such. So it brought our government on board to go for the event

Rafferty: So since winning the bid, what role has your firm played in the preparation for the tournament?

Saunders: We’ve been very involved with a number of the venue cities. We’ve worked on specific economic impact studies for those cities so that they can understand the benefits to the city itself. We’ve also worked on the stadia, for, in fact eight of the stadias out of the ten that are being used, we’ve done the business plan for. That was used by the National Treasury to make decisions on what funding to give to the stadia development projects in each city. Then we worked on destination marketing work for provinces and towns and neighboring countries, doing strategies of how they can best maximize their involvement in the event, as well as how they can protect what they may need to protect in terms of if the event has a negative impact on their country. So for instance neighboring countries like Namibia and Botswana, it’s very much their high tourism season, and they need to have the strategy to maintain their normal tourism markets so that the tourists don’t feel crowded out and don’t not come. For instance the Olympics in Greece, when they were in Athens, I think it was in 2006, 2004, they saw one of their worst seasons on the Greek Islands, simply because tourists start to feel, “I can’t go there, it’s too busy for me.” So we’ve been working on strategies like that with neighboring countries and with towns, in South African towns and cities.

Rafferty: So, how has the preparation for the World Cup affected the economy in general? Or how different does the country look from 2000 when you began doing this research? Does the landscape look any different? Do you think the economy has improved?

Saunders: I think the main change in South Africa is the government has put a huge amount of money into infrastructure. The normal amount that often gets quoted is more than 400 billion rand. Now what a lot of that is, is accelerated infrastructure projects that would have been needed and should have been done anyhow. But we were, if you like, very lucky that the World Cup became an impetus or a catalyst for all that happening. But within that is probably of the order of 30-40 billion rand worth of infrastructure that’s directly related to the event. Which is transport infrastructure around the stadia themselves and the stadiums. And I don’t know if anybody’s been lucky enough to see our stadiums, but we’ve got some stunning stadiums coming up. The one in Cape Town has had it’s lights lit up now, and you’ve seen it against the sort of backdrop of Table Mountain and the harbor and the port. It’s an amazing thing to see. We’ve got another beautiful stadium, in, new stadium, in, or more or less new, in Johannesburg called Soccer City and it’s designed after a calabash. And so these things are coming up around the country and people are seeing them either reported on the news, photgraphed in the newspaper, or they’re going past them themselves and they look stunning. And our transport infrastructure is still rather a lot of building signs and road works, but we can see that we are getting some massive improvements to our transport infrastructure. What’s happening now as well, I think the ball has really started rolling with the Confederations Cup earlier this year, is the sponsors and the host cities are really getting behind the programs and advertising that are sort of getting the population now to feel very positive and proud about the events coming. So there’s a lot of billboards that are using 2010, there’s a lot of advertising, a lot of merchandise in the shops that’s already out there. So it’s starting to build up the excitement in the country towards the event and that’s beginning to go quite nicely. We have something for instance, it was started by the tourism industry, instead of having casual Friday, we have Football Friday. And everybody wears a soccer shirt, any soccer shirt, Bafana Bafana, our national team is good, on Fridays. And that’s starting to roll out. We’ve had the Deputy President launch it on the lawns of the Union Buildings. So those are things that are changing, that we are seeing in the psyche in South Africa.

Rafferty: I have read there’s been controversy over these stadiums, basically saying that they’re a huge money suck because in the end they’re going to be rendered useless after the World Cup, and I was just wondering what your opinion is on that.

Saunders: Some of them are going to be well used. For instance, the one in Cape Town is a prime location and an iconic city where we know when we worked on the business plan that conference organizers, race organizers, people who organize functions and events, main ones, looked forward to getting that facility and being able to use it. The trick to any of these is multiple sports that you can get in them and the alternative uses which you can get in them. So we feel Cape Town can go very well and one of the big pluses for Cape Town would be if the Western Cape rugby moved to the new stadium, which has been talked about, it’s been discussed in the press, but nobody knows whether or not it would happen. Because they have a stadium that’s too small, that could easily be sold for good property development rights and then make a move into the new one. So the things that could still happen to make these stadia even more long term viable. A stadia generally is a cost to a municipality, you know there’s only a couple of places like the soccer leagues in Germany and England that can have stadias that actually sustain themselves. So they often make a small operating profit or a small operating loss, they are sustained by subsides from the government side—it’s the extent of those subsidies and how much they would cost. And some of our stadia in the less prominent towns, such as Nelspruit and Polokwane, they may be the ones that struggle the most in terms of having on going reasonable levels of usage and reasonable levels of income. But they will be used on an ongoing basis.

Rafferty: Grant Thorton, at the beginning of your research, you estimated that the World Cup would contribute 55.7 billion rand to the South African economy and generate 415,400 jobs, and 19.3 billion rand in tax income to the government, and I was just wondering if you could tell me: Do those numbers still stand? Do you still estimate that’s what we’re going to see happen?

Saunders: Yes they do, the only area, because some of that expenditure has happened, it’s been a lot of the infrastructure spending. The only area that people could challenge if they wanted is the tourism spending which I mentioned at the beginning and since how we’ve build that up. But all the research we’ve looked at related to soccer and people following an event like this, is that recessions and things like don’t usually have much of an impact. They might trade down slightly, but they’ll not, not travel, so we fully expect the same levels of tourism and tourism expenditure as we had originally estimated. And to be quite honest, our estimates are probably on the conservative side because we know there’s certain information we just couldn’t get the information on, that’s being spent by some of the provinces, and some of the cities, and some of the sponsors. So being consultants we are slightly on the conservative side. So we wouldn’t change those numbers at all, and the employment generated as well, we wouldn’t change any of those numbers. We would stand by them and say, “Look they were on the conservative side, they are still a little bit on the conservative side.”

Rafferty: There’s going to be a bunch of people traveling to South Africa for the World Cup. What is one thing that you would recommend they do? And it doesn’t even have to be soccer related. What’s one thing you suggest they do when they come?

Saunders: It’s a difficult one, but I think the thing that has the most impact is if they can make it to a good game park and do some game viewing. You know African wildlife is stunning, the African Bush is stunning, it’s a very very different experience. And even if they can’t make it to one of the top game reserves, which would mean traveling in some instances quite a way, it depends where they’re based and where they watch their matches, we have lots of smaller wildlife farms nearer to the big cities, so take time to go and see some of our wildlife, it’s stunning.

Rafferty: Great. Well Gillian, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today, I really appreciate it.

Saunders: It’s a pleasure Michelle, thank you very much.

Jake Kraft received a MSc in Anthropology at Oxford in 2004 and just finished up a JD/MBA at Stanford. Having recently visited South Africa, one of Jake’s college buddies (and my dear friend) suggested Jake contribute to our “Place of the Year” campaign, to which he kindly agreed. In the following piece Jake sheds light on South Africa’s exorbitant population loss since the mid 90s by consulting three natives who chose to leave. Be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

South Africa exports many goods which the world consumes and which enrich South Africa. Other countries buy South Africa’s metals and minerals, agricultural products, machinery, and wine, sending their own goods and cash in return. But in the last fifteen years, South Africa’s greatest export has traded at great profit to importing nations and at great expense to the exporter. Since the mid-1990s, more than one million South Africans, including more than a fifth of the white population, has emigrated abroad. Many of these are South Africa’s most educated citizens; most have no plans to return.

Last winter I visited South Africa and enjoyed tremendous natural scenery, wildlife, bustling cities and towns, food, and cultural traditions. South Africa is wonderful for a tourist, but life as a resident is more complicated.

I made the trip to visit three South African friends whom I had met in the United States. This opportunity to see them and learn about their home was special not only because I would be guided by locals, but also because it would be my last chance: all three had decided to leave the country and settle elsewhere.

My first stop was in the Eastern Cape, to visit my friend the journalist. A wiry white English South African, he had been lucky to study at top boarding schools and attend an excellent private university where he had become a collegiate champion in kayaking. In addition to inimitable charm, he has a great deal of compassion, and as a journalist wrote stories highlighting the plight of AIDS victims and AIDS orphans. He unearthed local corruption, and developed an encyclopedic knowledge of South African history and culture, as well as a seemingly endless number of friends who would greet us wherever we went.

He now lives in London. South Africa has limited opportunities for an enthusiastic journalist to grow in his career, especially as traditional media models fall apart and journalism becomes intertwined with the internet. He would love to go back if he could, but he doesn’t know how or when South Africa will have professional opportunities in which he can flourish.

From the Eastern Cape I traveled to Johannesburg, where I met my friend the entrepreneur. Chinese South African, he had grown up in a posh area on the North side of the city, attending excellent schools and University in the United States. His family lived in mansion straight out of Beverly Hills, including swimming pool and pool house, magnificent rooms for living and entertaining, and a garage full of sleek Mercedes. The local malls and restaurants were equivalent to anything I’d seen in the United States and we spent a very civilized afternoon eating scones and playing croquet with friends at the local club.

My friend now lives in China. Besides its luxury, his family home in South Africa is surrounded by 15 foot walls, which are topped with electrified barbed wire. The outer doors of the house are fortified with steel bars and must be unlocked with a key from the inside or outside in order to enter or leave. An enormous guard dog barks at any movement. Security guards with sub-machine guns patrol his neighborhood. Even so, not long ago, perpetrators managed to poison the dog and hop over the walls from a nearby telephone pole, catching his mother as she was exiting the pool house, and holding her and the rest of the family at gun point as they robbed the home. The family survived, but the incident was uncommon only in that sense. Every house in the neighborhood has this kind of security, and violent robbery is a daily risk. As he pursues his ventures, my friend would prefer that his success won him some other life.

My last trip was to the Free State town of Ladybrand, a small farming hamlet not far from the Drakensberg Mountains and the Lesotho border. Here I met my third friend, the broad shouldered and sandy-haired son of an Afrikaner farmer. He had grown up chasing cattle thieves on horseback, swimming in river dividing South Africa and Lesotho, and dreaming of playing rugby for the Springboks. He never spoke English until he traveled to Cape Town for his University degree, where he gave up rugby and excelled at actuarial studies. After finishing University, he landed himself a job with a prestigious international consultancy, where he was whisked around Africa, working at the great mining projects and factories of the continent. Once he had a taste of the outside world, he wanted more, and sponsored by his company, he came to the United States to finish his education. When he did, he decided to stay in San Francisco. There is opportunity in South Africa, he believes, but why take the risk with so much government corruption and physical violence. As a South African, he did not feel wanted in America, but as a businessman, he did not he feel wanted by South Africa.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen more beautiful sunsets, eaten better steaks or had more outdoor fun than I did in South Africa. But I left the country feeling discouraged. If my three friends are in any way representative of the million plus who have left or are leaving, how can the South Africa expect to win its fight against AIDS, improve its government and civic life, or bring its education and economic opportunities not only to the lucky few born into them, but also to the millions born into extreme poverty? How can the country find a way to keep its educated and passionate young citizens, or a way to bring them back? What should be the priority? The rule of law? Economic opportunities? Security?

For more than 30 years of his life Albie Sachs lived as both lawyer and outlaw in an apartheid South Africa—working through the law in the public sphere, and against the law in the underground. As a result, he was detained in solitary confinement, tortured by sleep deprivation, and eventually blown up by a car bomb which cost him his right arm and the sight of an eye. Later he returned to play an important part in drafting South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, and was appointed by Nelson Mandela to be a member of the country’s first Constitutional Court. As Sachs wrapped up his 15 year term this fall, Oxford published his book The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. Below Sachs tells us why people all over the world visit the South African Constitutional Court every year.

Following his post is an excerpt from the opening of The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law which features artist Judith Mason. She explains the inspiration behind her Blue Dress, one of the art pieces acquired by Albie Sachs for the South African Constitutional Court gallery and the image on the cover of his book. To learn the full story behind Mason’s Blue Dress collection go here. And for more first hand perspective on South African culture and history, be sure to check out all of our Place of the Year contributions.

Justice Albie Sachs on the Constitutional Court Gallery

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in Parliament Square. Its site is wonderful, and the rather unprepossessing building it occupies has been artfully adapted to give it a friendly, functional and stylish character. The one feature that I thought worked badly, however, was the presence in strategic places on the walls of large oil portraits of dead white, male dignitaries who had occupied the building in the past. One day I will be a dead, white male judge myself, nothing wrong with that in itself. But if it is the only imagery you see, the story is one of unjust exclusion, at odds with the very notion of doing justice to all without favour or prejudice. And even those less afflicted with political correctness than myself would recognise that apart from one elegant Gainsborough portrait, the pictures represent rather gloomy dead souls haunting a building in which the evolving wisdom of the ages is intended to resolve the problems of today in a clear, transparent and convincing way. I couldn’t help comparing the paintings with those that hang in the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, from which I have just stepped down as a judge after my fifteen year appointment came to an end. And this reflection made me realise what a remarkable place South Africa is to be in these days.

In particular I thought of the image of the Blue Dress in our Court. The Court was the first major new building of the post-apartheid era, constructed in the heart of the Old Fort Prison where both Gandhi and Mandela had been imprisoned. Thousands of visitors from all over the country and the world, visit the Court each year, not only to watch justice being done, but to journey through a remarkable building filled with extraordinarily rich and soulful artwork. And always, visitors pause for some minutes, and sometimes cry, when they see the Blue Dress.

The work on the cover of this book commemorates the courage of Phila Ndwandwe and Harald Sefola whose deaths during the Struggle were described to the Truth and Reconciliation Commision by their killers.

Phila Ndwandwe was shot by the security police after being kept naked for weeks in an attempt to make her inform on her comrades. She preserved her dignity by making panties of of a blue plastic bag. This garment was found wrapped around her pelvis when she was exhumed. ‘She simply would not talk’, one of the policeman involved in her death testified. ‘God…she was brave.’

…I wept when I heard Phila’s story, saying to myself, ‘I wish I could make you a dress.’ Acting on this childlike response, I collected discarded blue plastic bags that I sewed into a dress. On its skirt I painted this letter:

Sister, a plastic bag may not be the whole armour of God, but you were wrestling with flesh and blood, and against powers, against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in sordid places. Your weapons were your silence and a piece of rubbish. Finding that bag and wearing it until you were disinterred is such a frugal, common-sensical, house-wifey thing to do, an ordinary act…At some level you shamed your captors, and they did not compound their abuse by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how brave you were. Memorials to your courage are everywhere; they blow about in the streets and drift on the tide and cling to thorn-bushes. This dress is made from some of them. Hamba kahle. Umkhonto.

This weekend, James S. Fishkin, Professor of Communication and Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy, will conduct a Deliberative Poll® in Michigan. A scientific sample of 200+ people will convene in Lansing to deliberate about the state’s economic future, and in the end, the poll will reveal what the public thinks about these issues, both before and after it has had a chance to become informed.

Fishkin’s most recent book, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation, explains this method of polling. It combines a new theory of democracy with actual practice, and has demonstrated how an idea that harks back to ancient Athens can be used to revive modern democracies. Fishkin and his collaborators have already conducted deliberative democracy projects in the United States, China, Britain, Denmark, Australia, Italy, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland, and in the entire European Union. These projects have resulted in the massive expansion of wind power in Texas, the building of sewage treatment plants in China, and greater mutual understanding between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

When the People Speak is accompanied by a DVD of “Europe in One Room” by Emmy Award-winning documentary makers Paladin Invision. The film recounts one of the most challenging deliberative democracy efforts with a scientific sample from 27 countries speaking 21 languages. Watch the trailer after the jump.

EUROPE IN ONE ROOM
Courtesy of the Center for Deliberative Democracy

Still have some unfinished after-school business from the 90s? Was it your dream to be this kid? Do the words “Do it, Rockapella!” elicit an involuntary fist pump? Take a stab at redemption with the “Place of the Year” challenge—created in conjunction with our friends at DK Publishing. The rules are simple and would make Carmen Sandiego seem like child’s play if it weren’t already:

1. Answer the ten questions below.
2. Submit answers to publicity.us@oup.com by November 27, 2009.

Gumshoes with all ten correct answers (the equivalent of 1,000,000 ACME crime bucks) will then be placed in a raffle for prizes which include: Atlas of the World 16th edition, South Africa: DK Eyewitness Travel Guide, The Rough Guide to South Africa 5, and Top 10 Cape Town & the Winelands. Winners will be announced November 30, 2009.

One entry per contestant. All cheaters will immediately lose all crime bucks and be subject to the wrath of the Chief.

Questions:

1. South Africa has how many official languages?
a.3
b.11
c. 2
d.6
e.14

2. South Africa has a nickname, what is it?
a. The Rainbow Nation
b. The Divided Nation
c. New Africa
d. The Continent’s Capital
e. The Second Africa

3. True or False: South Africa is roughly 3 times the size of Texas.

4. How many capital cities does South Africa have?
a. 1
b. 4
c. 3
d. None
e. 5

5. South Africa has coastlines on which two major bodies of water?
a. The Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
b. The Indian and the Atlantic Oceans
c. The Pacific and the Southern Ocean
d. The Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean
e. The Southern Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea

6. Who, or what, are “The Big Five”?
a. A group of influential political Afrikaner leaders
b. The five major African tribes found in South Africa
c. The five symptoms of malaria
d. The nickname for five of Africa’s greatest wild animals
e. The five driest months of the year

7. South Africa’s population has increased by 5 million people in the last year. What is the current population of South Africa?
a.48,783,000
b. 40,491,000
c. 21,129,000
d. 52,476,000
e. 40,218,000

8. True or False: South Africa has more people infected with the HIV virus than any other country.

9. Who was elected president of South Africa in 2009?
a. Thabo Mbeki
b. Nelson Mandela
c. Frederik Willem de Klerk
d. Jacob Zuma
e. Kgalema Motlanthe

10. Ke Nako. Celebrate Africa’s Humanity is the official slogan for the South Africa Fifa 2010 World Cup. What does Ke Nako mean?
a. A time to make friends
b. It’s time
c. Let friendship shine
d. Be a good sport
e. Let’s be friends

Now that you are done, be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” posts here.

Iris Berger is professor of Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University at Albany and author of Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980 and South Africa in World History. For many years, she was involved in anti-apartheid organizations in Upstate New York. In the following piece she recalls how sports have played a vital role in South African politics. You can check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here.

I had never paid much attention to rugby. My only previous encounter with the game occurred on September 22, 1981 when I joined 1,000 other demonstrators who marched in a downpour from the New York State Capitol to a stadium on the edge of Albany to protest the match between the Springboks and the local rugby team. As Pete Seeger led us in singing “Wimoweh,” the virtually all-white South African team trounced the Eastern All-Stars 41-0. Threats of violence had prompted Governor Hugh Carey to cancel the game and an explosion at the headquarters of the Eastern Rugby Union seemed to confirm his fears. But the United States Court of Appeals ruled that cancellation would be an abridgement of freedom of speech.

This brief immersion in the politics of professional sports left me unprepared for the events of June 24, 1995 when I arrived in Cape Town in mid-morning, groggy from the twenty-four journey from Albany. A year earlier apartheid had ended and Nelson Mandela was elected President in the country’s first democratic elections. Determined to fight my jet lag and adjust to local time, I walked from my quaint guest house at the foot of Table Mountain to the bustling Main Road and caught a cramped mini-van taxi to the city center. Getting off at the train station, I was mystified by the quiet. Only the Zimbabwean women street vendors, displaying soapstone sculptures and crocheted sweaters, broke the silence. When I ventured a few blocks to a small café for lunch, I found the crowds I’d been expecting – but they were all huddled in front of the television set intent on following a rugby game between South Africa and New Zealand, cheering boisterously when the local team scored. The scene was repeated at my next stop – the Bo Kaap Museum in the former Muslim quarter of the city, now furnished as a nineteenth-century house.

Only when I returned to the guest house in mid-afternoon and found everyone there glued to the screen did I finally realize that I had unwittingly stumbled onto an historic event. Just as the anti-apartheid movement had enlisted the national passion for rugby in the interests of liberation, Mandela saw that hosting the World Cup might offer an opportunity for a symbolic reconciliation between the black-dominated government and the white minority, now ousted from its exclusive hold on power. This time I joined the group to witness – and celebrate – the victory of a new South Africa and see to Mandela walk onto the field in his team’s bright green cap and uniform, his shirt bearing the number of the team’s white captain.

Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s new film dramatizing these events will no doubt resurrect memories of the country’s ecstatic response in 1995, when South Africans were still celebrating the country’s transformation from a bastion of racism to a “rainbow nation.” But fifteen years later, life sometimes seems more complicated, even on the playing fields. The recent furor over the gender identity of the South African running champion Caster Semenya, which provoked heated controversy both internationally and in South Africa, mirrors the issues now confronting a nation struggling to overcome a legacy of poverty and unemployment, and to face the more recent challenge of HIV/AIDs. It’s an open question of whether, in this more difficult context, the current President Jacob Zuma will be able to use the World Cup soccer championship in 2010 to reinvent the country’s image and to renew people’s commitment to a shared national identity.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the health-care reform bill that the House passed. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Democrats must be thinking: what happened to the halcyon days of 2008? It is almost difficult to believe that after the string of Democratic electoral victories in 2006 and 2008, the vast momentum for progressive “change” has fizzled out to a mere five vote margin over one of the most major campaign issues of 2008, a health-care bill passed in the House this weekend. If you raise hopes, you get votes; but if you dash hopes you lose votes. That’s the karma of elections, and we saw it move last Tuesday.

Democratic Party leaders scrambled, in response, to keep the momentum of “Yes, we can” going, by passing a health-care reform bill in the House this weekend. But despite claims of victory, Democratic party leaders probably wished that their first victory on the health-care reform road came from the Senate and not from the House. President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have always hoped to let the Senate pass its health-care reform bill first, initiating a bandwagon effect so that passage in the House would follow quickly and more easily, and a final bill could be delivered to the president’s desk.

Instead, the order of bill passage has been reversed, making a final bill less likely than if things had gone according to plan. If even the House, which is not subject to supermajority decision-making rules, barely squeaked by with a 220-215 vote, then it has now set the upper limit of what health-care reform will ultimately look like. Potentially dissenting Democratic Senators see this, and there might now be a reverse band-wagoning effect. Already, we are hearing talk from the Senate about the timeline for a final bill possibly being pushed past Christmas into 2010. This is just what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama were hoping against, by pushing the Senate to pass a bill first. Unfortunately for them, the Senate took so long that to keep the momentum going (and amidst the electoral losses in NJ and VA last week), they felt compelled to pass something in the House to signal a token show of progress.

But the danger is that the move to regain control may initiate a further loss of control. The less than plenary “victory” in the House bill has only made it clearer than ever that if a final bill is to find its way to the President’s desk, it will have to be relieved of its more ambitiously liberal bells and whistles. Even though the House Bill, estimated at a trillion dollars, is more expensive than the Senate version being considered, and it has added controversial tax provisions for wealthier Americans earning more than $500,000, what the House passed was already a compromise to Blue Dogs. On Friday night, a block of Democratic members of Congress threatened to withhold their support unless House leaders agreed to take up an amendment preventing anyone who gets a government tax credit to buy insurance from enrolling in a plan that covers abortion. If even the House had to cave in some, there will have to be many more compromises to be made in the Senate, especially on the “public option.”

Sequencing matters in drama as it does in politics. It is at the heart of the Obama narrative, the soul and animating force behind the (now unraveling) Democratic majority in 2009. “Yes, we can” generates and benefits from a self-reinforcing bandwagon effect that begins with a whisper of audacious hope. From the State House of Illinois to the US Senate, from Iowa to Virginia – the story of Barack Obama is a narrative of crescendo. “They said this day would never come” is a story of improbable beginnings and spectacular conclusions. The structural underpinnings of the Obama narrative are now straining under the pressure of events. To regain control of events, the President must first regain control of his story.

I dare you to watch the trailer for this December’s Invictus—the story of how a newly elected Nelson Mandela used the 1995 Rugby World Cup to bring his people together—without feeling slight heart palpitation. Particularly in a scene where we see Mandela speaking with a political confidante:

“This rugby, it’s a political calculation,” she says.

“It is a human calculation,” responds Mandela.

Sounds like one awfully loaded conversation about rugby, but if there’s anything history, cinema, and Nike commercials have taught us, it’s that the game ultimately represents something much bigger than itself. From taking a stand (1980 Moscow Games boycott) and breaking social barriers (Jackie Robinson, Dara Torres) to beating odds (Nancy Kerrigan, Lance Armstrong) and growing up (Mighty Ducks 1, 2, and 3), sports are often the metaphors and inspiration of our lives. Which leads us to our big announcement… as it moves to the forefront of the global sports arena once more, we are excited to announce South Africa as Oxford’s “Place of the Year.” The 2010 World Cup—arguably the most important international event the country will host since officially becoming a post-apartheid, democratic nation only 15 years ago—signifies further transformation, quantifiable in millions of dollars worth of new infrastructure.

How much new infrastructure?

According to FIFA, contributions from the South African government total (in rands “R”):

Stadium and precinct development: R9.8 billion
Transport: R13.6 billion
Broadcast and telecommunications: R300 million
Event operations: R684 million
Safety and security: R1.3 billion
Event volunteer training: R25 million
Ports of entry infrastructure: R3. 5 billion
Immigration support: R630 million
Communications, hosting, legacy and culture: R504 million

Which translates to…

According to consulting firm Grant Thornton, which drew up the financial impact report for South Africa’s World Cup bid committee:

R55.7 billion to the South African economy
415,400 jobs
R19.3 billion in tax income to the government

The World Cup has received mixed reviews however: Economy boost or money suck? Increase in jobs or class divider? International prestige or embarrassment? Whatever pole you stand on, the fact is that South Africa has the world’s attention, making it a worthy 2009 “Place of the Year.”

Coming Up…

This week we are both excited and proud to share a range of perspectives in celebration of “Place of the Year.” The stories told will express a dichotomy of beauty and tragedy, and we hope give you a better, if not more personal, idea of a country that has largely influenced the world’s headlines, history class lessons, books, and films. To get things started I leave you with some handy facts straight from our Atlas of the World gazetteer:

Population: 48,783,000
Capital(s): Cape Town (Legislative); Pretoria/Tshwane (Administrative), Bloemfontein (Judiciary)
Government: Multiparty Republic
Ethnic Groups: Black 76%, White 13%, Colored 9%, Asian 2%
Languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu (all official)
Religions: Christianity 68%, Islam 2%, Hinduism 1%
Currency: Rand=100 cents
Most valuable activities: mining and manufacturing
President: Jacob Zuma (elected in 2009)

*As the week proceeds you will be able to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.