Cabinda and the World Cup

Terrorists are such effective geography teachers! Who could have located Yemen quickly without Google Earth until the Christmas Day bomb attempt on United Airlines? And who even knew of the existence of the Cabinda Enclave until the Togolese soccer team was attacked on its border?

In the Detroit attempt it was probably a faction of Al Qaida that succeeded in boosting its terror status. In Cabinda a small separatist outfit, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, (FLEC) succeeded brilliantly in putting itself and its cause on the map. The score? Two nil to the terrorists.

Against a global backdrop of war, famine and grinding poverty that struggles to make the headlines, the incident over Detroit was a farce and Cabinda a minor event. But if you buy the definition of terrorism as an intelligently scripted 'theatre of violence', both operations were highly successful. For an entire week the BBC kept the failed Detroit attempt on its number one news spot. There was political fallout too. It was extraordinary to see the most powerful man in the world having to keep explaining what he was going to do about men who put bombs in their underpants, even dud ones! Not a bad day's work for a small bunch of focussed fanatics.

Meanwhile another very powerful global figure – FIFA's Sep Blatter – was wheeled out to assure the world that the African Cup of Nations goes on, because 'football is bigger' than such incidents. The tournament did carry on but FLEC certainly got it off to a very bad start. Togo angrily pulled out and embarrassed Angola. Other teams were nervous. There have been analyses in the press on the political situation in Cabinda, and speculation that there will be a vengeful crackdown there once the Cup is over. All of this puts Angola on the back foot with regard to how it administers its oil-rich enclave.

The reverberations have been felt in Danny Jordaan's department. He sounded defensive in a BBC interview when asked what impact Cabinda would have on the World Cup. It had absolutely no link with South Africa, he protested. A terrorist attack in one European country doesn't mean other parts of Europe are unsafe. Why, he asked, do people come to a different conclusion about Africa?

Well, yes, many people outside Africa are a bit hazy about African geography, as indeed are many South Africans. And the idea that Africa is always the heart of darkness does get pretty tedious. But a testy dismissal actually won't reassure anyone. In fact such thin-skinned responses are more likely to suggest to the world a lack rather than a sufficiency of confidence in our security arrangements.

And geography is perhaps not quite the point here. Terrorism has its international 'fashions'. There's a global copycat tendency in it. It will have been noted by other terrorist groups just how effective a propaganda coup the attack on the Togo team turned out to be. And that was just during the African Cup of Nations. The World Cup is a media event of an altogether greater order – a highly tempting party to bloodily gatecrash.

The fact is that we're hosting the biggest sporting and media event in the world. We may not like it but unfortunately it's a world in which there are zealots itching to propagandise their cause by spectacular violence. Invoking South African exceptionalism and protesting that we have no quarrel with these zealots and concluding that therefore they are unlikely to try to disrupt a World Cup in South Africa, is a bit like expecting a bull not to chase you because you're a vegetarian.

We will also have a global audience (which includes ourselves) that reacts with a voyeuristic fascination to acts of terror. The media feed off this and thus have the potential to exponentially expand the audience of the 'theatre of violence'. If Jordaan and FIFA aren't quietly reviewing security for the World Cup I'd be amazed.