Amandla!

The Nike Academy sits, hunkers down in the middle of Soweto like a very discrete alien presence. The word ‘Academy’ is meant to make us think/feel what? Reassure us of it’s organisational and moral values? A place from which people graduate, having been vetted in some way by Nike? We pass through their dark engines to become what? Enhanced? Somehow Nikeified in some useful, life enhancing fashion that benefits everybody. This really does read like mainstream Science fiction.

The building itself takes it’s cue from a system of architecture that has no sense of locality wherever it blossoms. Clean lines, useless empty space carved out of an interior that leads our eye to the slogans on the walls. Where our vision is unimpeded, our sight-lines to these branded slogans true and clear. An Arsene Wenger quote graces the entrance wall, sign itself of some internal premiership club fan battle between the makers the designers of the space. One or two of the letters had fallen off making the bland statement about making players even less intelligible. Two banks of iMacs face each other on a central communal trestle table. They look like they have never been switched on. They adorn the space as props. The combined processing power of these computers could potentially solve the more pressing problems of The new South Africa (or the new anywhere for that matter) than the football skills of its youth. I riff on the youth wing of the ANC, both Mandelas, Stompie Moeketsi, the struggle for the hearts and minds and bodies of South Africa at the sharp end of the anti-apartheid movement and transpose this into the Nike youth wing of the new Nike world.

And that’s the problem.

Irony, juxtaposition of ideas of liberation with the seductive mechanics of enrolment into capitalist compunction (buying trainers) is too cheap a call. The projection of an ‘Oh so priviledged’ gaze that has the temerity to feel let down by the natives.

That’s where I’m stuck. Between a rock and hard place, between instinct and reality, between the outmoded moralism of an over education and the devices and desires of post modernity.

When faced with a field full of people simply playing football. Balls, players, goals and pitches. A league. A charity teaching young people life skills through football training routines and ‘football discipline’.

I will return to this phrase ‘football discipline’ , it probably warrants an essay of it’s own, but for now I will park this and return to the Nike academy itself which shares a co-extensivity with the interior design and use of space we see in Apple stores the world over. Glass, clean spaces, devices, slogans, busy organised people serving an unseen but highly structured and intelligent system. And I find myself back in the world of science fiction. Where to stop into an Apple store, to step foot into a Nike Academy anywhere in the world is to step out of wherever you are, into the same place. Out of uncertainty into certainty, out of chaos into order. The implicit criticism and second ordering of wherever you are in contrast to; the clean lines and future looking order of the Nike apple store is irrefutable. I am on much firmer ground stating this, I feel confident of this ‘truth’ much more so that my liberal posturing over the lost golden ages of revolution.

And so it sits there. The Nike Academy. In Soweto. Oddly they have tried to wrap the word Soweto around the front of the building but seen from the township itself all you can read is ‘Sowet’ the O is clumsily lost, smeared around the sharp corner of the hangar like structure.

The fact that there is no discrimination globally in subjecting all of us to this experience is truly science fictional. To totalise a world that is increasingly riven by wealth/health/educational disparity in a one solution experience is pretty out there. Apple stores and Nike towns, Nike academies and Apple campuses for the masses. And then it hits me. This is the Willy Wonka moment of history. Arsene Wenger even looks a little like Gene Wilder. But seriously. The gates open, we step inside, out of the world and into paradise…

Footnote on Football discipline.

The superheroes of football are as much franchises as the comic book movies. Buy their boots, access their powers. Say no to racismus. Worship them and their statistics; Goals, assists, completed passes. The liturgy of this worship has been encoded by the Playstations* and X Boxes of the world. FIFA! A perfect storm in the eye of which sits, luxuriates the Nike/Academy/Town.

Take a young man give him 100, 200 thousand plus pounds a week for playing a game he loves. Watch him burn. Watch him or his people break some or all of the rules by which we have been brought up. their breaking of the social contract is our spectacle. Sex, tax, drugs, work/pension retirement. The deal we make, they break.

Take a poor boy from developing country X, give him all that money and he buys all the people in his family back home houses. In a patriarchal society where age is respected. Turn that upside down and now the 20 year old is revered above the 80 year old. Pay a boy a week what a man earns in a lifetime. and then get him to walk into the room. Tell me he doesn’t feel the resentment behind the smiles. And what does he think about on the pitch where all of this, the matrix of what has become his life now rests. The field of nightmares and dreams, this pass, that goal, this injury, that selection, all of life’s decisions, possible outcomes parsed out in games of football.

Money creates and money destroys.

This is football ill/discipline.

• Auto spell changes Playstations into plantations. Go ahead and type it. You can’t make this shit up.
• Published in Stand Magazine #17, May 2016