Nelson Mandela

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Joshua Howat Berger

Johannesburg - As South Africa counts down the final days to Friday's World Cup kick-off, Nelson Mandela's name is everywhere.

The country spent a tense week waiting for definitive word on whether the former president, who is increasingly frail at 91, would attend the opening ceremony.

After days of conflicting statements from family and organisers, the tournament got the ultimate boost on Tuesday with news from his family that he would attend - if only for a short while.

Preparations for the World Cup began in earnest only after his presidency and were led largely by others.

But for locals, the World Cup bears the indelible imprint of Mandela's legacy.

"It is through his tireless efforts to achieve reconciliation and to build a thriving rainbow nation that the world bestowed South Africa with this honour of hosting the games," President Jacob Zuma said on Sunday.

"He also worked hard personally to bring us to this glorious moment."

Mandela's involvement proved critical at key moments in South Africa's campaign to win the games.

In April 2004, the month before world football governing body FIFA was due to announce the 2010 World Cup host, Mandela visited Trinidad and Tobago to meet Jack Warner, the president of the region's football association and a key member of FIFA's executive committee.

"Jack bluntly told us that if we wanted his vote, we must bring Mandela to the Caribbean," said Irvin Khoza, chair of South Africa's World Cup organising committee.

Mandela was 85 at the time, and his doctor had instructed him not to travel.

But the Nobel Peace Prize winner made the trip anyway, winning Warner's crucial support.

A critical symbolic presence

Mandela broke his doctor's orders again the next month to be in Zurich for the announcement of the winning World Cup bid.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter has called Mandela "the person who got the World Cup for South Africa".

"Madiba became a critical symbolic presence when crunch time came," said Verne Harris, a historian with The Mandela Foundation, using the clan name by which Mandela is affectionately known.

"It wasn't a foregone conclusion before he went (to Zurich). It went down to that final vote."

But Mandela's larger role has been in using sport to unite a nation.

A year after taking office as South Africa's first black president, Mandela famously threw his support behind the Springboks, as the country hosted the 1995 rugby World Cup.

His embrace of the traditionally white sport helped bring the country together in the tense early days of democracy, a theme explored recently in the Clint Eastwood film Invictus.

"I think he's identified the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa as another moment that could be really useful for South Africa in terms of nation-building," said Harris.

"A sports tournament is a sports tournament, but does that feed into people's commitment to addressing social challenges?"

Mandela's personal assistant, Zelda la Grange, said Madiba is a "great strategist" who always understood the political value of sport.

"Sport is a medium that speaks to people across racial and religious divides," she told AFP.

"It was a very shrewd political move of him to grasp the opportunity that comes with sport to talk to people and convince them of reconciliation through rugby," she said.

"I think we'll see a re-occurrence of that attempt at reconciliation during the World Cup."