What exactly had Marco Materazzi muttered to Zinedine Zidane at the 2006 World Cup final? The soccer world spent a lot of off-time speculating. Some said, it was about Zidane’s sister; others said it was about mother. A few nice and genteel people, a dying species, said, “Don’t you know? He was talking about terrorism.”
That was like Lord Linlithgow. The story goes that an aide uttered a four-letter word when he saw the tent collapsing over a tea party that the viceroy was hosting. Before the ladies blushed and damsels swooned, the good lord turned to the offender and said aloud: “Quite right to tell people to duck.”
But Zidane was no English gentleman. He is French, he didn’t like a word of what the other fellow said, and he didn’t duck. He took the uncouth Italian head on. He headbutted Materazzi right in his chest.
Players curse, swear, damn, and blaspheme in the heat of the game. Most of those are forgiven after a few red cards and fines, and forgotten in the cooling aftermath. The gentlemen who manage sports call it sportive spirit. Good sport!
But what Argentina’s Enzo Fernandez said wasn’t in the heat of the game, and can’t be erased from memory with sportive spirit or alcohol. He and his team had won the Copa America, beating all fellow-American teams. At the victory parade, they sang a song of low racist taste against the French team and their players of African origin. Sitting several leagues of the Atlantic away, and having nothing to do with Copa America, the French cried foul. FIFA ruled it not fair (no pun intended), and Fernandez said sorry.
Forgiven and forgotten? It should have been, but then came a few politicos further fouling the game and its fair name.
Argentina's conservative vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, defended Fernandez, sacked an official who had asked him to say sorry, and declared that Argentina wouldn’t take censure from a colonial country. Argentina, she contended, “never had colonies or second-class citizens” and had “never imposed our way of life on anyone... Enough with faking indignation, hypocrites!”
A white lie, Madame! Then how come you are speaking Spanish and not any tongue of those aborigine tribes that had been peacefully living in your lands before Christopher Columbus arrived with shiploads of white men?
The Latins may not have colonised Asia or Africa, but are colonists in their own land. The colonisers of India and Africa have at least left us alive to tell the stories of political slavery, but the Spaniards who went to what is today called the Latin world were the worst of Europe’s colonisers.
The ugliest face of European colonialism was seen not in the battlefields of India or the deep woods of Africa, but in the lands that were once inhabited by the gold-rich tribes of the Amazon, the Parana and the Paraguay basins and the slopes of the Andes and the Aconcagua. Their gold was looted, their women raped and infected with diseases of shame, and their men massacred. Simon Bolivar and San Martin may have been great political liberators, but the republics that came up in the wake of their struggles against Madrid and Lisbon were for the white settlers.
Señoras y señores, we know what colonialism was. If you claim not to know, let me tell you in my bad English, and in lighter vein. Take it sportively, please.
The Portuguese converted the natives;
The Spanish massacred the natives;
The Dutch traded with the natives;
The British ruled the natives;
And the French? Well, they had a good time with the natives.
prasannan@theweek.in