Address by Ministry of Sport, Arts and Culture, Gayton McKenzie on the occassion of Media Briefing at Freedom Park
Programme Director,
Deputy Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, the Hon. Peace Mabe,
Director-General of the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture,
Chief Executive Officer of Freedom Park, and the Freedom Park Executive,
Members of the media,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Good morning, and thank you for joining us here at Freedom Park – a site that holds our country's memory, and reminds us that sport, arts and culture are never separate from the long work of building a nation.
Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that today we are many things at once: a department, a ministry, a deputy minister and a minister – but above all, we are public servants. And the work we are here to account for is not ours. It belongs to the people of South Africa.
Today we are going to cover a lot of ground – from a walk that we want every South African on their feet for, to a football match in Mexico that will bring back memories of 2010, to the support this Department is putting behind chess.
Let me start with news that is not ours, but that we share in as Africans.
World Athletics Relays – Gaborone, Botswana
On the weekend of 2 and 3 May – just over a week from now – Gaborone will host the World Athletics Relays. This is the first time in the 8-edition history of the Relays that the event will be held on African soil. It is the first World Athletics Series event ever hosted on our continent.
That is a milestone, and it belongs to Botswana. It belongs to the Botswana Athletics Association, to Minister Jacob Kelebeng and his Ministry of Sport and Arts, and to the people of Botswana, who this year are also celebrating 60 years of independence. They have called it a diamond year, and they are right to.
On behalf of the government and the people of South Africa, I want to offer our sincere congratulations to the Republic of Botswana. When one African country succeeds in hosting at this level, every African country benefits from the shift in how the world sees us.
I will be travelling to Gaborone for the event, and I do so not only as a neighbour paying respect, but because South Africa has a serious team on the track.
All four men from our gold-medal-winning 4x400-metre team from last year's World Relays in Guangzhou have been named for Gaborone. Akani Simbine, who anchored our 4x100-metre team to gold, returns as well. Bafana ba-athletics – if you will allow me the expression – are going to Gaborone to defend what they won.
To our athletes: the nation is with you. Go and do what you have trained to do.
A Star Amongst Us – Akani Simbine and the Simbine Classic
Before I move on, I want to acknowledge that one of the athletes I have just spoken about is in this room today. Akani Simbine. Akani, can I ask you to rise, so the country can see you.
Akani is not a man who needs an introduction in this country. But I am going to give him one anyway, because too often we thank our sportspeople quickly and move on. Not today.
Akani Simbine is the South African 100-metre record holder, at 9.82 seconds, set at the Paris Olympics in 2024 where he finished fourth. He is an Olympic silver medallist as part of our 4x100-metre relay team in Paris. He has been in every major championship 100-metre final for the past decade.
But this is the record I want you to hold onto. In April 2025, in Gaborone, Akani became the only athlete in the history of this sport to run under 10 seconds in the 100 metres for 11 consecutive years. The record he broke belonged to Usain Bolt, who managed 10. That is how we talk about Akani Simbine now. He is the King of Consistency. And if the 2026 season goes the way his career tells us it will, he will make it twelve.
But Akani is not in this room today only as an athlete. He is here as the architect of the Simbine Classic.
On 28 April 2026 – five days from now – the Simbine Classic will be held at Pilditch Stadium in Pretoria. This is a World Athletics Continental Tour Silver meeting, which means every athlete on that track will be running for ranking points that count towards the World Championships and the Olympic Games. Akani has publicly set the ambition of upgrading the event to Gold status. When he does, it will be the first South African athletics event ever to reach Gold Label status.
The Simbine Classic takes place exactly four days before the World Athletics Relays open in Gaborone. This is a serious preparation meeting for our athletes and for many international athletes heading up to Botswana. What happens at Pilditch on 28 April will shape what happens in Gaborone on 2 May.
I want the country to know something about the Simbine Classic that the Simbine team may be too modest to say themselves. At the 2024 edition of this event, then still called the Simbine Curro Classic Shoot-Out, Letsile Tebogo of Botswana ran 30.69 seconds in the 300 metres. That is the world best over that distance. It is the first world best of any kind set on South African soil since Michael Johnson ran the previous 300-metre best in Pretoria in the year 2000. Twenty-four years. And it happened at Akani’s event.
Akani is also not just running a meeting. On 28 April, Pilditch Stadium will open its gates to children from the age of seven. Through the Akani Simbine Foundation, launched in February 2025 with his wife Terisa, up to 1,500 children and their parents from underprivileged communities will get a taste of what world-class athletics looks like. There is a Kids’ Zone. There are short sprint races. There are readathons and arts and crafts and South African children’s books. This is what it looks like when an athlete takes what he has earned on the track and turns it into something for the next generation.
This Department is supporting the Simbine Classic, and we are finalising the detailed terms of that support this week. I am using this moment to encourage every South African who can make it to Pilditch Stadium next Tuesday: bring your children. Bring your neighbours. Our athletes deserve a full house.
Akani, we see you. Thank you for what you do for this country on the track, and thank you for what you are building off it. The nation is proud of you.
Budget Vote 2026
Our Budget Vote will be tabled in Parliament on 12 May 2026.
SA Walks
SA Walks will take place in October. The reason is simple. If this is going to be a walk in every single province – and it is – then our provinces, our municipalities, our federations, our civil society partners, our schools, our churches, our traditional leaders, our private sector partners, and many more, all need time to mobilise properly.
A well-organised walk, where a grandmother in the Eastern Cape and a young man in Limpopo and a family in the Northern Cape all know the route, know the time, know who to bring and what to bring – is a walk that changes something.
The purpose is straightforward. South Africa is facing a health crisis that is not only a health problem. It is a lifestyle problem. It is a movement problem. It is a 'we sit too much and move too little' problem. And the response to that does not come from a hospital. It comes from streets, parks, fields, and pavements.
We want every province on its feet on the same day. One country. One walk. Many places. We will release the date, the provincial routes, and the registration details well in advance.
I will be walking myself. I will not be asking South Africans to do something I am not doing.
FIFA World Cup 2026 – Our Fan, Legends and Cultural Programme
2010 – Where This Story Begins
Before I tell you what we are doing in Mexico in June, I want to tell you a story. It is a story that most of you in this room already know, but it is worth telling again, because the ending has not been written yet.
On 11 June 2010, at Soccer City in Johannesburg, South Africa kicked off the FIFA World Cup against Mexico. It was the opening match of the first World Cup ever hosted on African soil.
In the 55th minute, Kagiso Dikgacoi played a ball through the Mexican defence, and Siphiwe Tshabalala – Shabba – struck a left-footed shot into the top right corner of the net. That goal was the first goal of the 2010 World Cup. It was scored by an African, on African soil, in front of an African crowd, and the sound of Soccer City that afternoon is something that those of us who were there, and those of us who watched it on television, will never forget.
Rafael Márquez, the Mexican captain, equalised in the 79th minute. The match ended 1–1. In the 91st minute, Katlego Mphela hit the post – we all remember where we were when that ball hit the post.
Bafana Bafana later became the first host nation – though not the last – in World Cup history not to advance from the group stage. That is a fact and it is part of the story. It is also a wound that has not fully healed for our football.
But this is the part of the story I want you to hold onto.
On 11 June 2026 – exactly 16 years to the day after that match at Soccer City – Bafana Bafana will again play Mexico. This time, it will be the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and this time, we will be the visitors in Mexico.
The same two countries. The same opening fixture. Exactly sixteen years later. That is not a coincidence that football gives you often. When history hands you a gift like that, you do something with it.
The Legends Rematch – Pachuca, 8 June 2026
Here is what we are doing with that gift.
On 8 June 2026 – three days before Bafana plays Mexico in the opening match – the Legends of the 2010 Bafana Bafana squad are set to walk out onto a pitch in Pachuca, Mexico, and face the Legends of the 2010 Mexican squad in a rematch.
SAFA and the South African Masters and Legends Football Association have been working together to identify 20 of the players and team management from the 2010 squad. The playing kit will be secured by SAFA through its sponsor, Adidas.
The venue and the match are being hosted in partnership with Pachuca – whose Club Pachuca – Los Tuzos – is one of the most storied football clubs in Mexico. We are deeply grateful to Pachuca for the role they are playing in making this possible. This is not a match happening next to the World Cup. This is a match happening because two football nations, with a shared moment in history, decided to honour that moment properly.
After the match, our Legends will stay on. On 9 and 10 June, they will conduct coaching clinics – sharing what they learned at that World Cup, with young Mexican players and with South African diaspora footballers. On 11 June, they will be in the stadium when Bafana walks out to face Mexico in the opening match. And on 12 June, they come home.
To Shabba, to Itumeleng Khune, to the entire class of 2010 – the country has not forgotten. And in June, neither will Mexico.
The Ekhaya Centre – Our Home in Mexico City
Wherever South Africans gather in the world, we need a place we can call ekhaya. Home.
From 7 to 12 June, DSAC – together with Brand South Africa and SA Tourism – will host the Ekhaya Centre at the Centro Nacional de las Artes, CENART, in Mexico City. We will open the Ekhaya Centre officially on 7 June.
Ekhaya will be a place to watch football. It will be a place to see South African art, to hear South African music, to eat South African food. It will be a media centre for the journalists covering Bafana’s campaign. It will be a fan park and a fan engagement space. It will be a venue for business and investment networking – because when our flag is flying, our economy should be working alongside it.
We will also be present at the Aldea Global centre in Mexico City alongside exhibitions from the other 48 countries playing in the tournament, and up to 20 of our artists will be performing on stages at both venues – showcasing South African talent to the world.
We will also run smaller activation centres aligned to Bafana Bafana’s match schedule – in Atlanta, and in Monterrey. These centres will activate around the fixtures.
A Country of Superfans – The Lucky Fan Programme
I want to say a word about fandom in this country.
I grew up in a house where football was a religion. My father would sit at the kitchen table and decide what to pay and what not to pay. Football tickets were always on the list of what to pay. I know my uncle and his friends – they would take the train all the way from Bloemfontein to Joburg, just to go and watch Orlando Pirates. That football club was the whole centre of their existence. In that era, wheelchair-friendly access at our stadiums was a rumour. Men in wheelchairs still came to watch Kaizer Chiefs anyway. That was the country I grew up in.
It is insulting, to people like my father, to people like my uncle and his friends, to the men who came to the stadium in wheelchairs when nobody was going to help them get in – to call them anything less than the heart of the sport. I do not believe in the word "superfan" as a Minister. Because in South Africa, we have more superfans than we have ordinary fans. This is a country of superfans. Football and rugby and cricket are not a pastime in this country – they are what we talk about on the factory floor, what we talk about at church, what the pastor mentions in his sermon on the Sunday after a Saturday derby.
That is why we are launching the Lucky Fan Programme. We are taking one lucky fan from every Premier Soccer League team to the FIFA World Cup in Mexico. Their flights, accommodation, ground transport, and daily allowances will be fully sponsored by two big companies. This Department will assist with visa facilitation and match ticket allocation.
The selection will be run by a panel of judges drawn from the best voices in South African sport. Robert Marawa, Andile Ncube and Vino Snap are already confirmed on the panel, and the rest of the judging panel will be confirmed and announced in the days ahead. The entry will be simple: you submit a thirty-second clip explaining why you are the biggest supporter of your club. The rules of the competition will be made public. The judges will decide.
I ask the media to help us get this message out, because we want every South African who qualifies to have a fair shot at becoming their club’s Lucky Fan.
Artists, Chefs, Podcasters and Journalists
A World Cup is not only a football event. It is a cultural moment. And our cultural ambassadors travel with the team.
We will be supporting South African artists to perform at the Ekhaya Centre and the other activation centres. We will be supporting South African chefs to feed our fans, our guests, and the curious Mexicans who want to know what South African cuisine actually is. We will be supporting South African podcasters and journalists to cover the tournament and to tell our story in our own voices.
To those South African journalists, podcasters, and influencers who will go with us: you are not going to Mexico to cover a holiday. You are going to render a service to your country. You are going to tell South Africans, in their own voices and on their own platforms, what their players are doing on the world stage. That role is not always adequately recognised in this country, and it should be. The details of the selection process will be publicised by this Department in the days ahead.
Honouring Mafikizolo and Mi Casa
Two of the acts we will be taking to the World Cup stages have given this country decades of its best music, and 2026 is the year we honour them for it.
In 2026, Mafikizolo marks 30 years in the industry. Thirty years of a sound that defined South African pop, of songs played at weddings and funerals and everything in between, of a brand that carried this country’s music deep into the rest of the continent.
In 2026, Mi Casa marks 15 years. Fifteen years of J’Something, Dr Duda, and Mo-T writing and performing songs that moved different continents onto the same dance floor.
When we take Mafikizolo and Mi Casa to the Americas, we are not taking background music. We are taking the soundtrack of modern South Africa.
World Cup song
We also want to announce to artists that they should record a World Cup song, which will be played at the Union Buildings during Bafana Bafana’s send-off and on all radio stations. The details of this competition will also be announced soon.
Update on VAR
You will remember that the question of Video Assistant Referee technology – VAR – in our domestic football has been a matter of ongoing public conversation.
SAFA is on the verge of announcing the chosen supplier for the technology, and we have been assured that the installation of the equipment in the chosen VAR rooms can happen within days – to be followed by the specialised training for the VAR technicians and referees.
Chess Support
I now want to speak about chess.
This Department has made a conscious choice to put support behind our athletes in a way that addresses a problem that is bigger than chess alone. It is the problem of ‘if you can pay, you can play’ – and if you cannot pay, you do not play.
That is not the South Africa we want. A child who can beat a grandmaster should not be kept off the board because her parents do not have the air fare.
Chess South Africa, as many of you know, has come through years of administrative difficulty – years in which the organisation spent more time in courtrooms than on chessboards. That is changing. Chess South Africa is on a revival and growth path, and this Department has chosen to walk that path with them.
This year, we are funding 34 South African athletes to participate at the Commonwealth Chess Championship in Sri Lanka. The cost of that support is R2,015,197.
We are also funding 54 athletes to participate at the African Youth Chess Championships in Uganda. The cost of that support is R2,120,052.
The total investment in our chess athletes this year is R4,135,249.
I want to be direct about why this matters. In a country with our resources, there is no excuse for a young South African with talent to be kept out of an international competition because of money. When we find those young people – whether it is chess, or athletics, or any other code – this Department will stand behind them.
Presidential visit to F1
I want to share some news that reaches beyond one race weekend.
His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa has agreed to join me at a Formula One Grand Prix later this year. This is a working visit, not a social one. Its purpose is to support South Africa’s ambition to bring Formula One back to the African continent for the first time since our country became a democracy.
Formula One has not raced on African soil in more than three decades. In that time, the sport has returned to the Middle East, to Asia, to the Americas, and to every continent except ours. That is not acceptable, and it is not sustainable. An entire generation of young African motorsport enthusiasts have never seen Formula One race in their own backyard. We intend to change that.
The President’s participation sends a signal that this ambition is held at the highest level of the South African state. There are criteria that any country must meet to bring a Grand Prix home – commercial, logistical, infrastructural, and safety criteria – and we are working methodically to meet every one of them. The President’s visit will allow us to observe, to engage, and to strengthen the case.
I will have more to say on timing and on the specific Grand Prix in due course, in coordination with the Presidency.
Mandela Birthday and Scatterlings Music Festival – Trafalgar Square, UK
On 18 July 2026, in Trafalgar Square in London, South Africa will put on a free open-air concert – the Scatterlings Music Festival.
We have chosen the date deliberately. 18 July is Nelson Mandela International Day. It is the day the United Nations, at South Africa’s initiative, set aside each year to honour Madiba’s legacy of reconciliation, of dignity, and of service.
We have also chosen the year deliberately. 2026 is a year in which South Africa marks several anniversaries at once: 30 years of our Constitution, 50 years of the Soweto Uprising, and 70 years of the Women’s March. Taken together, they tell one story – the long, unfinished journey of our freedom, carried through generations.
And we have chosen the framing deliberately. The festival is inspired by the music and message of Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu – the two men who, in 1969, met in Johannesburg when an 18-year-old Sipho challenged a 16-year-old Johnny to a guitar contest, and who went on together to form the band Juluka. That band, and that friendship, crossed the borders that apartheid tried to impose between South Africans. They showed, together, that culture can lead where politics cannot.
I want to say something about Sipho Mchunu specifically, because he is still with us. He is one of the fathers of this music, and too often, in the way this story gets told, his name sits in the shadow of the name of his friend. That is an injustice this Department can help correct today.
It was Sipho who taught Johnny the Zulu music and the Zulu dances that became the backbone of Juluka’s sound. The band took its name from a bull owned by Sipho – Juluka, meaning "sweat" in Zulu. Sipho’s voice carried half of every song they recorded together. And in 1985, when the two of them had toured Europe, Canada, and the United States, and had platinum albums on the wall, it was Sipho who decided, on his own terms, that it was time to go home. He returned to his family farm in KwaZulu-Natal to raise cattle and to live the life of his people. That is a man who kept his own counsel. That is a man who did not need the stage to know who he was.
He came back for one more album with Johnny in 1997, and he remained Johnny’s friend until Johnny’s death in 2019. In 2018, the Durban University of Technology awarded the two of them honorary doctorates together.
Baba Sipho will be part of the Scatterlings line-up in London. And I want to use this moment to acknowledge that he is the co-creator of some of the most important music this country has ever produced. That is how we will introduce him on the Trafalgar Square stage and that is how history should record him.
Trafalgar Square is not an accidental venue. London is a leading global cultural capital. It is home to a significant South African diaspora. It is a historic site of anti-apartheid solidarity – for decades, South Africans in exile gathered at that square outside South Africa House to sing, to protest, and to remember. On 18 July 2026, South Africans will gather at that same square once more, but this time not in protest. This time in celebration.
The lineup is a generational one. It brings together Jesse Clegg, Msaki, Sjava, Tresor, Beatenberg, Zolani Mahola, J’Something, Zakes Bantwini, Simmy, Muzi, Sun-El Musician, Thakzin, Bongeziwe Mabandla, and Sipho Mchunu – with additional South African artists to be announced by this Department in the coming weeks. Together they will perform reimagined Johnny Clegg classics alongside their own work, in a single shared cultural moment.
This is a free peoples’ concert for the twenty-first century. It is South Africa’s gift to the world on Mandela Day. And it is a reminder, to South Africans at home and abroad, that we belong – by what connects us, not by what divides us.
Afrikaans Taal Centenary
I want to turn now to a matter that sits close to a lot of people’s hearts, and sometimes sideways to the truth.
On 9 May 2026, this Department will host a cultural commemoration of the Afrikaans language at the War Museum of the Boer Republics in Bloemfontein. The programme will run from 10h00 to 17h00, and we are making provision for around 2,120 guests.
The guest list is deliberate. It includes local schools. It includes the Griqua community of the Mangaung District. It includes the University of the Free State, the Central University of Technology, and the Afrikaans Taal en Kultuur Vereniging. It includes communities bused in from Heidedal and Thaba Patchoa. The performance line-up runs from Heatherdale High School to Antjie Krog reading poetry, from the Free State Griqua Council to Lenthia Jantjies and the Visser brothers, from Logan Pietersen and Nadine to the Harte Bliksems Comedy Play. That list should tell you something before I say anything else about it.
Because I want to address, head-on, a misconception that has followed Afrikaans around for far too long.
Afrikaans is not a white language.
Afrikaans has never been a white language. It did not start as one. It is not one today. And the attempt to make it one, at certain points in our history, was a political project that did violence both to the truth of the language and to the people who actually carried it.
Let me tell you how this language was actually born.
Afrikaans was born at the Cape, in the contact zone where Dutch settlers, Khoi and San indigenous peoples, enslaved people from Madagascar, from East Africa, from West Africa, from Mughal India and from the Dutch East Indies – what we now call Indonesia – met, lived, worked, and had to find a way to speak to one another. It is a creole language. It was shaped, as much as anything else, by the slave quarter and the kitchen and the market square. For a long time the colonial establishment dismissed it as ‘kitchen Dutch’ – kombuistaal – precisely because it was the language of people they did not consider important.
The earliest written Afrikaans we have was not written by Afrikaners. It was written in the early 1800s, in Cape Town, by Cape Muslims – the descendants of the slaves brought to the Cape from the Indian Ocean world. And it was not written in the Latin alphabet. It was written in Arabic script. Cape Muslim children learning their prayers in madrasahs were writing Afrikaans, in Arabic letters, decades before any nationalist movement claimed the language as a white possession.
That is the actual origin story. It is an African story, it is a slave story, it is a Khoi story, it is a Muslim story, and only then is it also an Afrikaner story.
The racialisation of Afrikaans – the deliberate political project to make this language the property of one community, and to hold it up as a symbol of white Afrikaner nationalism – that came much later. It came through the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners in 1875. It was hardened by the Afrikaner nationalist movement of the twentieth century. And it was weaponised by the apartheid state – most notoriously in 1976, when the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools triggered the Soweto Uprising and cost the lives of children.
That history is real. I do not ask anyone to forget it. But the way you honour that history is not by conceding the language itself to the people who tried to own it. The way you honour it is by giving the language back to everyone it always belonged to.
Today, Afrikaans is spoken by around seven million South Africans as a first language. More than 60 per cent of those speakers are not white. The majority of mother-tongue Afrikaans speakers in this country are coloured South Africans. The Griqua community speaks Afrikaans. The Nama speak Afrikaans. There are black South Africans, Muslim South Africans, mixed-heritage South Africans for whom this is the language of their home, of their grandmother, of their prayers, of their love songs, and of their jokes. Not a borrowed language. Their language.
One of my favourite facts about this language: Afrikaans is the only language in the world that is named after a continent. Afrika. Africa. The name says what the history says. It is an African language.
So when this Department holds a commemoration on 9 May in Bloemfontein, the commemoration is not for one community. It is for every South African who speaks this language, in whatever accent, in whatever register, in whatever neighbourhood. It is also, pointedly, a commemoration for those who have been told that Afrikaans is not theirs, and who deserve to hear, from the state, that it is.
We are doing this a year into the centenary of the formal recognition of Afrikaans as an official language, which took place on 8 May 1925. The recognition, a hundred and one years ago, was real. But the language itself is far older, and far broader, than that Act of Parliament. The language belongs to the Cape, not to a statute. And the language belongs to all of us.
June 16 Commemoration
And that brings me directly to the next item on our agenda, because there is a thread between the two. In 1976, Afrikaans had been an official language of this country for 51 years. And in 1976, the schoolchildren of Soweto marched not against the language itself – which, as I have just explained, never belonged only to the state that claimed it – but against its imposition on them as a medium of instruction, by a government that had no right to use any language as a weapon. The children of Soweto knew the difference.
On 16 June 2026, we will mark the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising.
Fifty years. Half a century since between ten and twenty thousand black schoolchildren marched through the streets of Soweto to Orlando Stadium to protest the apartheid government’s imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction – and were met with teargas and live ammunition. The first child to fall was 13-year-old Hector Pieterson. The official count of deaths on that single day was 176. There is a consensus among historians that the real number was much higher, between 500 to 700.
Those children changed the course of South African history. They intensified the isolation of the apartheid regime. They galvanised a generation of resistance. It is widely and correctly understood that the Soweto Uprising was the pivotal moment that made our democratic transition inevitable.
The 50th anniversary is not an ordinary commemoration. It is a generational reckoning. The democratic South Africa those children died for now reaches its own half-century of reflection on what that sacrifice demands of us.
This Department will stage the national commemoration at Orlando Stadium on 16 June 2026. Orlando Stadium is the place those children were marching towards when they were confronted by police. No venue in this country carries greater historical weight for this occasion.
His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa has been requested to deliver the keynote address on the day. The programme, the broader Youth Month activities, and further details will be announced in the coming weeks.
For now, I ask one thing of South Africans: between now and 16 June, take the time to tell a young person in your life the story of 1976, and to come to the stadium on June 16, to be part of paying tribute to our difficult past. Not just as history, but as our inheritance.
LIV Golf in South Africa
I want to say something about LIV Golf, because I know it has been in the news, and I know people have been asking – including people in this room.
The reports you have seen over the past week say that the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia is reconsidering its long-term funding of LIV Golf. Those reports are real. LIV’s leadership has confirmed that the league is funded through the 2026 season, and that they are working hard to secure what comes next – which they will do for sure.
This has been the story of LIV Golf since the day it started. Every year, there have been people predicting that this tournament would not survive. Every year, LIV has kept going, and every year it has grown the global game of golf in places that the old order of the sport had written off.
South Africa is one of those places. When we first went out to get sponsors for LIV Golf in South Africa, it was not easy. It was a battle, but with those brave sponsors that did join us we delivered the biggest golf event in the history of this continent. Today, sponsors are falling over their feet to be part of LIV Golf in South Africa – because they have seen what it is and what it does.
Without Scott O’Neil, the CEO of LIV Golf, who listened to a South African Minister pleading passionately for Africa to be given its time, and without our South African team, the Southern Guards who opened the door for that conversation to happen, Africa would have been robbed of the greatest golfing event in our history. I want to thank them publicly today.
Let me be direct about the PIF question. Seed funders put money into ventures to prove the model and to attract other funders. That is how investment works. The PIF is no different. The fact that other investors will now take LIV forward is a sign that the model is working, not that it is failing.
I will also be honest about something else. There is something sadistic about men who want to keep the sport of golf locked inside certain countries, as the preserve of certain people, when many of the best golfers in the world are not even from the countries they are trying to protect it in. That is not stewardship. That is gatekeeping. LIV has refused to accept it, and South Africa has benefited from that refusal.
So let me say it clearly: LIV Golf will go ahead as normal. The 2026 season is funded and running. And South Africa will host again next year.
I want to thank the South African public – not only those who bought tickets for the first event, but the many thousands who have already bought tickets for next year’s event. When you sang Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika at our event, I had tears in my eyes. I was too scared to look at the President, because no man wants to let another man see his tears. But I suspect he had wet eyes too.
We do not yet know exactly how we will make LIV Golf in South Africa bigger next year than it was this year. But we are going to try.
Mzansi–Atlanta Creative Industry Expo
From 25 to 31 May 2026, during Africa Month, I will lead a 10-person South African creative delegation to the Mzansi–Atlanta Creative Industry Expo in Atlanta, Georgia.
Atlanta matters to us. It is one of the world’s leading hubs for film, music, and cultural production. It is a city with deep, long-standing ties to South Africa – relationships that the Mayor’s Office has actively invested in through multiple trade missions in recent years. And it is a 2026 FIFA World Cup host city. Our presence in Atlanta in May is, in part, the beginning of our presence in Atlanta in June.
The Expo is proudly endorsed by this Department, and supported by the City of Atlanta’s Office of the Mayor, the State of Georgia, the Georgia Center of Innovation, and strategic partners across Atlanta’s creative ecosystem.
I will deliver a keynote address on the theme of collaboration and a shared future – on how South Africa and Atlanta can move from cultural exchange into structured, resource-backed collaboration. That means co-production agreements in film, music, and digital content. It means distribution and licensing pathways for South African content into the United States market. It means B2B engagements with investors, producers, and buyers. And it means treating our creatives as what they are – economic actors, export earners, and job creators.
I will be accompanied by a national delegation of 10 South African creatives and creative industry leaders, representing film, music, visual arts, and fashion. I have kept that delegation deliberately lean. A smaller, focused group will do more serious business than a larger group stretched thin.
I have also written to the MECs for Sport, Arts and Culture in each of the nine provinces, inviting them to consider participating – either by attending themselves or by leading their own provincial creative delegations, subject to their own planning and budgets. Market access cannot be the preserve of Gauteng and the Western Cape alone. A young filmmaker in Limpopo or a fashion designer in the Eastern Cape deserves the same shot at Atlanta as anyone else.
This is cultural diplomacy with a commercial purpose. The measure of success will not be the photographs we bring back. It will be the deals our creatives sign, and the doors that open afterwards.
Programme Director, let me close. I thank the Deputy Minister, the Director-General, and the entire team for the work that has gone into preparing what we have shared today. I thank Freedom Park for hosting us.
I thank the members of the media and I welcome your questions.
Ke a leboha. Enkosi. Dankie. Thank you.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us here at Freedom Park – a site that holds our country's memory, and reminds us that sport, arts and culture are never separate from the long work of building a nation.
