Let’s celebrate the boy from Kakamas (population 9 538) who has taken a giant leap to stardom, writes Mike Wills.
Cape Town - In the hustle and bustle of Cape Town, it’s easy to forget that we live in an incredibly empty land.
Up in the Northern Cape last week, we drove for 250km on the R358, which is a very decent dirt road, without passing a single vehicle travelling in either direction.
The terrain had its own sparse beauty but at times seemed featureless – no koppies, hills, bushes, trees, houses or signs of life of any kind – until we looked closer and saw tortoises, weavers and some distant buck, and then realised that every metre of that long and lonely road was fenced properly, with periodic gates.
Someone was farming sheep, goats and game right across that relentless landscape.
Further north, closer to the Orange River, there’s something of an agricultural phenomenon taking place. Who knew that region was one of the biggest providers anywhere in the world of table grapes for Europe? And that peaches, oranges, raisins, dates and mangoes are exported from there by the ton?
The logistics for this vibrant economic activity in such a desolate space of extreme weather with transport links on corrugated dirt roads would defeat most of us, yet there were signs of massive investments in buildings, crop-netting and technology. When the Israelis do something similar in its arid landscape, it is hailed as a miracle. When hardy and smart southern African farmers do it, we don’t even notice.
Along the river itself, various rafting organisations run highly successful operations, paddling groups through magnificent, hectic terrain with consummate professionalism. They provide an experience far beyond the anal health-and-safety confines of life in UK and Australia.
On the way off the river on Sunday from Gravity Adventures camp at Onseepkans, at a dusty junction, we passed a magnificently evocative South African road sign; straight ahead to Pofadder, Springbok and Bitterfontein, left to Kakamas. Each of those towns seemed tough places to get out of unless you were one of those successful farmers.
Superficially they felt hot, poor, desolate and very isolated. Little did I know that while I was out of internet range, a boy from Kakamas (population 9 538) had taken a giant leap to national, and possibly global, stardom.
Rivaldo Coetzee’s story is almost too good to be true. When he was born in that Northern Cape town in 1996, his father named him after the brilliant Brazilian footballer, Rivaldo, who was a star in Spanish club football at the time. Seventeen years later, via the Ajax Cape Town youth programme, the Kakamas’s Rivaldo became Bafana Bafana’s youngest player and performed admirably in the win over Congo at Pointe Noire on Saturday.
There’s still a long way to go in Coetzee’s story.
But let’s celebrate his remarkable achievement and hail his club and national coaches, Roger de Sa and Shakes Mashaba, for running against the cultural grain in our sport, where experience tends to be prized far too highly.
* Mike Wills’ column Open Mike appears in the Cape Argus every Wednesday.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
Cape Argus