Rubawa
JF-Expert Member
- Dec 25, 2015
- 2,055
- 3,238
In an age of corporate sponsorship and super league greed, the Africa Cup of Nations brought us the beautiful game at its giddy, joyous, chaotic best
TAHAR RAJAB
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
There’s a scene in Blood Diamond where a ‘Zimbabwean’ Leonardo DiCaprio tries to sum up the cradle of humanity. ‘Peace Corps only stay around long enough to realise they’re not helping anyone. Governments only want to stay in power until they’ve stolen enough to go into exile somewhere else. The rebels aren’t sure they want to take over, otherwise they’ll have to govern this mess but… T.I.A. – This Is Africa.’
The film, like this year’s Africa Cup of Nations, showed the highs and lows of the continent – greed, beauty, lawlessness, the sweaty thrill that drips from heat mixed with chaos and disorder.
This has been a tournament of unrivalled passion, helped by some incredible goals and truly bizarre moments. The disorganisation and madness added to the rawness of the football on show and the continent as a whole.
Mauritania had the wrong national anthem played twice before their game against Gambia – this is Africa. In an age of mooted super leagues, World Cup stadia built with modern slavery, and corporate fat cats draining the life out of the beautiful game, there’s something quite charming about the spontaneity of African football.
When referee Janny Sikazwe bizarrely blew the final whistle at 85 minutes with Mali 1-0 up against Tunisia, I wondered whether he was inept at refereeing or just inept at corruption. The Confederation of African Football have since explained that he was suffering from ‘heat stroke and severe dehydration.’
I wasn't surprised however to learn that Sikazwe was actually suspended amid corruption allegations in 2018. The suspension was put in place that November but lifted by FIFA the following January after finding no evidence implicating him to match fixing allegations.
In 2013, I spoke with ex-international Kenyan stars on the development of football in their country. It was one of the tamer interviews from my time in Nairobi (and a relief from chats with witchdoctors and false prophets).
Despite passion for the sport over there being at a fever pitch (a fan was stabbed to death over a Liverpool vs Arsenal match a year later), the game struggled financially and allegations were made of the Kenyan FA arranging friendlies, just to pocket the money FIFA gave to them. The FA Chairman at the time, Sam Nyamweya, accused in 2014 of embezzlement of funds before his prosecutors withdrew their allegations, approached me during one of my interviews and repeatedly asked what questions I had up my sleeve. The interviewer became the interviewee.
Corruption is a symptom of poverty – but so is authenticity. Sadio Mane, Liverpool’s superstar forward, scorer of the winning penalty that saw Senegal lift their first ever Africa Cup of Nations trophy on Sunday and Player of the Tournament, was filmed cleaning the toilets of a Toxteth mosque in 2018.
Aged just seven, Mane’s father suffered a stomach problem and with no hospital in his hometown of Bambali, passed away. Twenty years later, the star footballer spent £450,000 to build one in the village.
Mane had to go to the fields to work every day after school. He had to flee to the capital Dakar aged 15 to follow his dream of becoming a footballer, and it was only after his mother brought him back that she took the huge risk and allowed him to pursue his passion. To children in Bambali and across Senegal, he and his championship-winning teammates are superheroes – men who went to the moon and back. Their stories are almost unimaginable. Speaking of things impossible to comprehend, I could only ever dream of my ancestral Comoros islands even appearing in the Africa Cup of Nations, and that is exactly what I did – usually with myself scoring the winning goal.
Our appearance in this year’s tournament was historic, and I hardly even expected a goal. Our first two games were two losses with no goals – no problem, it’s a miracle we were there in the first place… and then came history. A 3-2 win knocked four-time winners Ghana out and saw us through to the last 16. We’d produced one of the greatest upsets in African history, but the unimaginable didn’t stop there. An injury to our number one goalkeeper and two positive Covid tests to his understudies saw left back, Chaker Alhadhur, chucked in between the posts. To make the bizarre even stranger, he actually played well and only conceded twice.
That match also had no 10 Youssouf M’Changama scoring one of the best free-kicks of all time.
Sadly, however, that game will mainly be remembered on a darker note. Large crowds trying to get into the Olembe Stadium in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde led to a stampede that left eight dead and 38 injured.
Cameroonian sports minister Narcisse Mouelle Kombi imputed the deadly stampede to a ‘reckless’ decision to open a gate in the face of a ‘flood of people’. Others have blamed fans for turning up without tickets or Covid passes, and it is becoming clear that more security was needed to manage the turmoil.
Overcrowding at football games and large events isn’t unique to Africa but that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learnt in planning and organisation to prevent these calamities happening again.
Order must not come at the expense of our unconventional and unorthodox approach to life, however. Europe’s beauty, expressed most accurately in renaissance art, is a representation of symmetry and stability.
In The Last Supper, a triangular Jesus sits with six disciples either side of him. Michelangelo’s Pietà is also a large triangle in composition. Order is Europe’s highest ideal and although it is tremendously important to a society, it is also just a bit boring. Human beings aren’t built for chains of structure. Life in its truest sense is to be found in the instability and mayhem that comes with a lack of bureaucratic control. That is why the madness of the Africa Cup of Nations topped the consistent and somewhat predictable Euros.
The Motherland is peculiar, unbalanced, unreliable, and even seemingly lawless and uncontrollable (there have been 43 coups or attempted coups since 2010) – but that is what makes it so special. If you missed the Africa Cup of Nations, you missed out on football in its purest form.
TAHAR RAJAB
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
There’s a scene in Blood Diamond where a ‘Zimbabwean’ Leonardo DiCaprio tries to sum up the cradle of humanity. ‘Peace Corps only stay around long enough to realise they’re not helping anyone. Governments only want to stay in power until they’ve stolen enough to go into exile somewhere else. The rebels aren’t sure they want to take over, otherwise they’ll have to govern this mess but… T.I.A. – This Is Africa.’
The film, like this year’s Africa Cup of Nations, showed the highs and lows of the continent – greed, beauty, lawlessness, the sweaty thrill that drips from heat mixed with chaos and disorder.
This has been a tournament of unrivalled passion, helped by some incredible goals and truly bizarre moments. The disorganisation and madness added to the rawness of the football on show and the continent as a whole.
Mauritania had the wrong national anthem played twice before their game against Gambia – this is Africa. In an age of mooted super leagues, World Cup stadia built with modern slavery, and corporate fat cats draining the life out of the beautiful game, there’s something quite charming about the spontaneity of African football.
When referee Janny Sikazwe bizarrely blew the final whistle at 85 minutes with Mali 1-0 up against Tunisia, I wondered whether he was inept at refereeing or just inept at corruption. The Confederation of African Football have since explained that he was suffering from ‘heat stroke and severe dehydration.’
I wasn't surprised however to learn that Sikazwe was actually suspended amid corruption allegations in 2018. The suspension was put in place that November but lifted by FIFA the following January after finding no evidence implicating him to match fixing allegations.
In 2013, I spoke with ex-international Kenyan stars on the development of football in their country. It was one of the tamer interviews from my time in Nairobi (and a relief from chats with witchdoctors and false prophets).
Despite passion for the sport over there being at a fever pitch (a fan was stabbed to death over a Liverpool vs Arsenal match a year later), the game struggled financially and allegations were made of the Kenyan FA arranging friendlies, just to pocket the money FIFA gave to them. The FA Chairman at the time, Sam Nyamweya, accused in 2014 of embezzlement of funds before his prosecutors withdrew their allegations, approached me during one of my interviews and repeatedly asked what questions I had up my sleeve. The interviewer became the interviewee.
Corruption is a symptom of poverty – but so is authenticity. Sadio Mane, Liverpool’s superstar forward, scorer of the winning penalty that saw Senegal lift their first ever Africa Cup of Nations trophy on Sunday and Player of the Tournament, was filmed cleaning the toilets of a Toxteth mosque in 2018.
Aged just seven, Mane’s father suffered a stomach problem and with no hospital in his hometown of Bambali, passed away. Twenty years later, the star footballer spent £450,000 to build one in the village.
Mane had to go to the fields to work every day after school. He had to flee to the capital Dakar aged 15 to follow his dream of becoming a footballer, and it was only after his mother brought him back that she took the huge risk and allowed him to pursue his passion. To children in Bambali and across Senegal, he and his championship-winning teammates are superheroes – men who went to the moon and back. Their stories are almost unimaginable. Speaking of things impossible to comprehend, I could only ever dream of my ancestral Comoros islands even appearing in the Africa Cup of Nations, and that is exactly what I did – usually with myself scoring the winning goal.
Our appearance in this year’s tournament was historic, and I hardly even expected a goal. Our first two games were two losses with no goals – no problem, it’s a miracle we were there in the first place… and then came history. A 3-2 win knocked four-time winners Ghana out and saw us through to the last 16. We’d produced one of the greatest upsets in African history, but the unimaginable didn’t stop there. An injury to our number one goalkeeper and two positive Covid tests to his understudies saw left back, Chaker Alhadhur, chucked in between the posts. To make the bizarre even stranger, he actually played well and only conceded twice.
That match also had no 10 Youssouf M’Changama scoring one of the best free-kicks of all time.
Sadly, however, that game will mainly be remembered on a darker note. Large crowds trying to get into the Olembe Stadium in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde led to a stampede that left eight dead and 38 injured.
Cameroonian sports minister Narcisse Mouelle Kombi imputed the deadly stampede to a ‘reckless’ decision to open a gate in the face of a ‘flood of people’. Others have blamed fans for turning up without tickets or Covid passes, and it is becoming clear that more security was needed to manage the turmoil.
Overcrowding at football games and large events isn’t unique to Africa but that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learnt in planning and organisation to prevent these calamities happening again.
Order must not come at the expense of our unconventional and unorthodox approach to life, however. Europe’s beauty, expressed most accurately in renaissance art, is a representation of symmetry and stability.
In The Last Supper, a triangular Jesus sits with six disciples either side of him. Michelangelo’s Pietà is also a large triangle in composition. Order is Europe’s highest ideal and although it is tremendously important to a society, it is also just a bit boring. Human beings aren’t built for chains of structure. Life in its truest sense is to be found in the instability and mayhem that comes with a lack of bureaucratic control. That is why the madness of the Africa Cup of Nations topped the consistent and somewhat predictable Euros.
The Motherland is peculiar, unbalanced, unreliable, and even seemingly lawless and uncontrollable (there have been 43 coups or attempted coups since 2010) – but that is what makes it so special. If you missed the Africa Cup of Nations, you missed out on football in its purest form.
