Mandela Promised An African Century. The Olympics Would Complete It.

14 October 2026

On 6 April 2000, Nelson Mandela gave a speech to the London School of Economics and made a promise on behalf of a continent.

“We are convinced that we are in a period of decisive historical significance for Africa and its place in the world,” he said. “We are determined that this 21st century shall indeed be the African century.”

He outlined a vision of an African renaissance, and he was clear it would be a different kind of rebirth from Europe’s more than 500 years ago. Africa’s, he said, would not culminate “in colonisation and dominance of a world economic system, of which the slave trade was an integral part.” He wanted an Africa that worked with the world’s institutions and took its place alongside everyone else.

A quarter of a century later, sport is delivering on that vision.

It has been quite a month for sport in Africa. On the 6th of October, the IOC confirmed that South Africa is among seven countries in the running to host the 2036 Olympic Games. A week later, Formula One signed a 10-year agreement with Rwanda to stage an African Grand Prix from the early 2030s, and at the end of the month, Dakar, Senegal, will host the IOC’s first-ever event on the continent: the Youth Olympic Games. F1 will race on a new circuit south of Kigali, its first race on the continent since Kyalami in 1993, a year before Mandela became South Africa’s president. Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame, said: “Today belongs to Africa.”

For African sport, the ultimate goal is to host the Olympic Games in 2036 or 2040, and the continent is already showing how it plans to get there. Formula One is the latest sport to agree to stage events in Africa, but it’s not the first. In the past few months, Nairobi has been awarded the 2029 World Athletics Championships, Cameroon has won the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, and CAF has moved AFCON into the global summer calendar. Morocco, meanwhile, wants to host the 2030 World Cup final at its new 115,000-seat Hassan II Stadium near Casablanca, ahead of the Bernabéu or Camp Nou in Spain. Between now and 2030, at least one major international or continental event will take place in Africa every year; each is a stepping stone on that journey.

Mandela’s Rainbow Nation
Any story of African sport since the end of apartheid has to start in South Africa, and with Mandela. He was the catalyst for the boom that followed, a sports fan and a keen amateur boxer in his youth, and he understood what sport could do for a country and a continent. Seven weeks after his LSE speech, at the first Laureus World Sports Awards in Monaco, he said:

“Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”

Everyone wanted to be associated with him, and visitors, touring teams and athletes made a point of meeting him.

In those first years of his new South Africa, he used sport to show the world the rainbow nation it had become. South Africa hosted and won the Rugby World Cup in 1995, with Mandela famously presenting the trophy to Francois Pienaar while wearing the captain’s number 6 Springbok shirt. Then, as host again, the national team, Bafana Bafana, won the 1996 AFCON. In 1997, the British and Irish Lions toured and won the Test series there, and in 2003, South Africa staged the Cricket World Cup.

Then came 2010, and the first FIFA World Cup on African soil. The vuvuzelas, the colour, the noise and the sheer joy of it made it a party the rest of the world loved. Mandela, by then 91, made an appearance at Soccer City before the final, waving to the crowd. Another memorable sporting moment that featured him.

After his death in 2013, the momentum faded, and politics took over. Within four years, the government had barred four of its sporting federations from bidding for events, Durban was stripped of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, and the 2023 Rugby World Cup went to France.

The 21st century began with South Africa, led by an African president, carrying the hopes of the continent. Now we are witnessing Mandela’s wider vision, with global events being staged across Africa, in the north, west and east.

AFCON’s Summer Move
Next year’s AFCON is an example of the vision Mandela described at the LSE bearing fruit:

“An Africa that is integrated in the world on an equal basis.”

When AFCON was played in January and February, it created friction between CAF and European clubs, which had the continent’s best players in their squads. That was always an issue, and the timing also made the tournament hard to fit into an already crowded football calendar.

So, in 2019, CAF promised to move the tournament to the summer, but heat and scheduling problems in the host countries pushed the last three editions back into the January and February window. That changes next year, and with the dates approved by the FIFA Council, the tournament will be the first in East Africa since Ethiopia hosted in 1976, and the first with three hosts. CAF expects it to reach more than 400 million people across the region.

There are concerns that the hosts may not be ready, but the same has been said ahead of almost every major international event in a new city. Patrice Motsepe, the CAF president, has called reports of a delay “totally unfounded” and said: “The AFCON next year in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda is going to be enormously successful.” Kenya has paid its $30 million hosting fee and is building a 60,000-seat stadium, and Uganda is waiving visitor visa fees for the tournament. Everyone is committed to making this tournament happen.

In global terms, the summer move matters. AFCON will no longer be squeezed into the middle of Europe’s season. It will sit in the same summer window as the European Championship and the Copa América, and with East Africa only one or two hours ahead of Europe, it can reach a far bigger audience, including the African diaspora.

Athletics: Woven Into The Fabric Of Kenya
The 2029 World Athletics Championships in Nairobi is another first for Africa and Kenya. London bid for the same championships and lost. Announcing the decision in September, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said:

“It was important that the World Athletics Championships should come to Africa when we had the right host, the right bid and the right circumstances.”

Then he added: “Athletics is woven into the fabric of Kenya.”

That’s true. Since Kipchoge Keino won the 1,500 metres at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Kenya has produced some of athletics’ greatest names. This century, we have witnessed David Rudisha’s magnificent world record in the 800 metres Olympic final in London in 2012. Eliud Kipchoge won two Olympic marathons and was the first man to run the distance in under two hours, and Faith Kipyegon has won three Olympic 1,500 metres titles in a row. Kenya is not alone: Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie and Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj are among the continent’s greats.

When Nairobi won the vote, many asked why a country with a doping crisis had been given the championships at all. Since 2018, a shadow of drugs has hung over Kenyan athletics. That year, the Athletics Integrity Unit classed Kenya as a “category A” high-risk country, and the bans have kept coming. Albert Korir, who won the 2021 New York Marathon, was banned for five years in March and will miss the Nairobi championships. Ruth Chepngetich will be available, but her world record time of 2:09:56 in Chicago in 2024 has left many uneasy. She took almost two minutes off the previous record, and last year she was banned for three years after testing positive for a diuretic. Her record stands because it was set before the failed test, but Peter Eriksson, the former Athletics Canada head coach, has led a petition questioning it, saying the time “exceeds the limits of female human potential.” Her ban ends in April 2028, a year before the championships.

The doping questions are fair, and more will be asked before 2029. But for 60 years, Kenya and its neighbours have stood on the podiums of world athletics, and runners from around the world travel to train in Iten and the Rift Valley. A world championships on African soil is overdue. Coe put it best: “Nairobi has demonstrated emphatically that this is their moment.”

The Economic Impact
Hosting major international sporting events is expensive, and money is always the first question every host has to answer, but tourism is seen as an important and valuable way to boost a country’s economy. South Africa spent about $3.9 billion on the 2010 World Cup, $1.3 billion of it on stadiums, and drew around 300,000 extra foreign visitors that year. Pravin Gordhan, the Finance Minister at the time, said the tournament and the required construction had left the economy about 1% larger than it would otherwise have been.

Hungary spent about €186 million to stage the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, and PwC put the indirect economic impact at €158 million, before counting the effect of a global television audience that World Athletics expected to pass one billion.

Staging Formula One races offers, perhaps, the strongest economic case, because a Grand Prix returns every year. The first Las Vegas Grand Prix in 2023 generated close to $1.5 billion in economic activity, including $77 million in state and local taxes. That is more than twice what Rwanda earned from tourism in the whole of 2025. Jean-Guy Afrika, chief executive of the Rwanda Development Board, sees the race as a long-term bet: “It’s an investment. It’s not an expenditure for a single event.” If Kigali can capture even a fraction of what Las Vegas earns, a 10-year deal could be worth billions to Rwanda’s economy.

Not everyone sees it that way. Amnesty International called the deal “a sportswashing prize for the Rwandan authorities”, pointing to Rwanda’s human rights record at home and its role in the conflict in eastern Congo, and urged F1 to use its influence to push for change. Those questions will follow the Grand Prix, as they did after Visit Rwanda sponsored Arsenal and the 2025 cycling world championships in Kigali.

Crucially, Africa’s sports audience is young. Formula One says almost 60% of its fans in key Sub-Saharan markets are under 35, and every sport is chasing that generation. Africa has the youngest population in the world. As Mandela said in Monaco, sport “speaks to youth in a language they understand.”

Money matters, but so does attention. At This Sporting Planet, we have written about how Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund uses sport to engage its younger generation and increase participation. To do that, you need to give local and continental populations access to major events and their athletes. For too long, African fans have watched those events happen somewhere else, often in the middle of the night. Over the next decade, the world will start coming to them.

The Greatest Show On Earth
As global sport turns to Africa, one prize is still missing, one that would have the biggest impact of all: the Olympic Games, known as the greatest show on earth.

Hosting the Olympics is about far more than sport. Tokyo in 1964, Seoul in 1988 and Beijing in 2008 each marked a nation’s arrival on the world stage. Africa has never hosted the Games. Cape Town came closest, finishing third in the vote for 2004.

Expect that to change. South Africa is one of the seven countries interested in hosting the 2036 Games. India, Qatar, Germany, Hungary, Turkey and South Korea are the other bidders, with India and Qatar seen as the front runners. The IOC will draw up its shortlist in March next year.

But 2036 is not South Africa’s only chance. Its government has approved a bid for either 2036 or 2040, and the signs point Africa’s way. In 2025, Kirsty Coventry, the Zimbabwean double Olympic swimming champion, became the IOC’s first African president. Dakar’s Youth Olympic Games, in a little over two weeks, are the test run, and if they go well, the case for hosting the real thing grows stronger.

“We are convinced,” Mandela told his audience at the LSE 25 years ago, that Africa was entering “a period of decisive historical significance”. Over the next five years, the international sporting calendar will fill with major events on the continent, each a sign of Africa’s growing importance on the world stage and of the renaissance he described.

If Africa can win the ultimate prize and bring the Olympic Games to the continent in 2040, 144 years after the first modern Games in Athens, then Mandela’s African century will have arrived.