Grenada National Cricket Stadium. AP Photo/Harold Quash.

The mistake was, perhaps, understandable. After all, it could just as easily have been Taiwan who had funded the stadium, and in part, they had. In December 2004, not long after Ivan had hit the island, Grenada’s Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell made a surprise visit to Beijing, upsetting Grenada’s political establishment. They had forged close relations with Taiwan, with whom they had formed diplomatic relations in 1989, and had already received a pledge of $40 million in aid to rebuild the hurricane-wrecked national stadium and other infrastructure.

On hearing of Mitchell’s trip, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry tartly severed relations with Grenada and stated that “The government of the Republic of China regrets Prime Minister Mitchell’s lack of foresight. We have stated sincerely our intention of not participating in a meaningless game of “dollar diplomacy” with China, and will never let Grenada waver between the two sides of the Strait in order to seek profits. The government of the Republic of China expresses its serious protest against, and condemns, the People’s Republic of China for its use of “dollar diplomacy” to drive us out of the international community.”

Taiwan realized they had been trumped. Mitchell had worked out a better deal for Grenada from Beijing. Stung, Taiwan has since been trying to recover $28.1 million in loans dating back to the 1990s, even attempting to seize Grenadian properties in the United States. That loan had funded the cricket stadium’s original construction in 1998.

Meanwhile, 500 Chinese workers toiled day and night for a year to build Grenada’s new stadium. And elsewhere in the Caribbean, another cricket stadium showcased in the 2007 World Cup also came courtesy of China, Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in Antigua, at a cost of $21 million.

Sir Vivian Richards Stadium, Antigua. AP Photo/Jonhnny Jno-Baptiste.

Taiwan, though lacking the extensive reserves and free spending ability of its rival, also scored with the $12 million renovation of the Warner Park cricket facility in St. Kitts & Nevis.

Warner Park Stadium, St Kitts and Nevis. AP Photo/Lynne Sladky.

This stadium construction rivalry is the result of each nation’s aim to receive “one China” recognition from the Caribbean nations: with the latter trading an unusual resource, the identification of sovereignty, for financial assistance.

Asia and the Africa Cup of Nations

Outside the cricket-mad Caribbean, twenty-first century dollar diplomacy has had a similarly dramatic impact on football stadium infrastructure, and is proving particularly significant for the Africa Cup of Nations. Andrew Guest wrote extensively about that on this space two years ago, looking at China’s role in building the stadia used for Angola’s hosting of the Africa Cup of Nations. Andrew focused on China’s motivation from a different diplomatic angle, noting that the stadium could be seen as a chip in China’s bid for access to Angolan oil in competition with the United States.

Estádio da Tundavala, Angola. AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell.

Angola is far from alone in benefiting from China’s “dollar diplomacy”, whether motivated by competition with Taiwan or the United States. Zambia’s shiny new 41,000 capacity Ndola Stadium came at a cost to the Chinese of $65 million, while in 2012, we will see another Africa Cup of Nations played at a Chinese built stadium in Libreville, capital of Gabon.

Stade d’Angondjé, Libreville, Gabon

As well as the politics in play, the construction of the stadia themselves raise some questions. Typically, these Chinese-funded stadiums are built relatively cheaply and quickly, and a large part of the reason for that is China’s use of its own workers and technicians in large numbers, instead of training local workers. And when local workers are used, problems have arisen.

In Zambia, for example, the construction of a Chinese-funded shiny new stadium has not allayed suspicions in the country about China’s motives and methods of assistance. Just two months ago, Michael Sata – a vocal critic of Chinese investment – was elected as the country’s president. He has in the past demanded the deportation of Chinese workers, and accused Chinese companies of mistreating Zambian workers (it should be said, whispers have long persisted that Sata has received funding from Taiwan). Sata, though, has toned down his criticism of China in recent months – perhaps a sign that China’s dollar diplomacy is, indeed, working.

Yet on a local scale, serious questions are still being raised in Zambia. China’s Anhui Foreign Economic Construction Company has overseen fatalities and strikes that have raised major question marks about the conditions workers have been placed in at the Ndola stadium construction site. Workers downed tools in the spring over unpaid wages, with one worker saying “We don’t know what will become of us. This stadium is finishing in two months time, so who is going to pay our benefits? Is it the Chinese or the Zambian government?” He continued, “We are not ready to go back for work until we get answers from government and the same government should tell their Chinese friends to improve our conditions of services.” This came shortly after a fire killed two workers at the site.

In Costa Rica, similar controversy has arisen. Eric Beard on the Football Ramble covered this superbly recently, noting the concessions Costa Rica’s then-president Oscar Arias made to China in return for the “donation” of a new 35,000 capacity home for Costa Rican football, Estadio Nacional.

“Arias agreed that Chinese workers could build the stadium, despite the fact that Costa Rica was stricken with unemployment from the global economic crisis,” Beard writes. “He allowed the Chinese company in charge of the project, AFEC, to entirely bypass Costa Rica’s labor laws, which are notoriously strict. Though Costa Rica is a proud advocate of human rights, Chinese employees of AFEC worked inhumane hours right under the nose of the Costa Rican democracy. There was even one casualty on the project, as 37-year-old Liu Hong Bin was hit by a construction vehicle in November 2010. Putting human rights aside, the stadium barely stimulated Costa Rica’s economy, as even most of the materials used were shipped over from China.”

And as is the case elsewhere, a sparkling new stadium came at the cost of disrupted relations with Taiwan and with a free trade agreement with China, along with questions about labor rights and worker safety. As China’s international power grows, expect to see China’s stadium diplomacy to continue its controversial path.

This was a man who presided over the joint-worst World Cup performance of all time, but also a man who as a goalkeeper had once rivaled Lev Yashin in many eyes, who had played in Los Angeles, San Diego, St Louis in a pioneering era of American soccer; a man who as coach took two African countries to unprecedented heights – and managed to change the course of world sporting history, by tipping off Horst Dassler just in time for the Adidas head to back the right man in the 1974 FIFA presidential election.

Let’s start in the middle. It’s the beginning of a new decade, the 1970s, and the beginning of a new career for Blagoje Vidinić. He has just retired from playing after ending his career in North American soccer, having kept goal most recently for the St Louis Stars in the North American Soccer League, where he was known as “Barney” Vidinic. The 1968 season, Vidinić’s last as a goalkeeper, was not particularly successful, as he conceded 35 goals in 23 games, St Louis finishing third of four teams in the Gulf division during the NASL’s first season.

Vidinić is in the center in the top row. Photo via www.nasljerseys.com

Vidinić had previously spent two years playing for two incarnations of the Toros in the NPSL, having been part of a Yugoslavian invasion of American soccer in 1967, with no fewer than 25 of his compatriots joining him across the Atlantic. That season was not a success for Vidinić, either, as his LA team finished rock bottom of the Western Division, with Vidinić conceding almost two goals per game, then going on to play a handful of games for the San Diego version of the Toros before his spell in St Louis.

It was an inauspicious end to what had previously been an impressive career: in international play for what was then Yugoslavia, Vidinić had won a silver medal at the 1956 Olympic Games, a gold medal at the 1960 Olympic Games and had been part of the team that finished second at the 1960 European Championships. Facing the Soviet Union in the inaugural final of the latter competition, Vidinić uncharacteristically spilled a shot by Valentin Bubikin, allowing Slava Metreveli to equalise, with the Soviets going on to win in extra time.

Exactly how, following his North American adventure, Vidinić next ended up coaching Morocco isn’t clear – though the connection may well have come via former Yugoslavian international Bob Kap (Božidar Kapušto), who had also moved to American soccer – in his case to coach – and had been part of the Dallas Tornado’s unlikely world tour in 1968 that included a trip to Morocco (Kap, incidentally, went on to play a crucial role in “soccer-style” kicking coming to the NFL).

Regardless, Morocco’s recruitment of Vidinić would change his life. He took Morocco to the World Cup in 1970, held in Mexico, the first African nation to take part since Egypt in 1934. Morocco first faced West Germany, the 1966 finalists, and the Africans gave the Europeans an almighty scare, taking the lead into half-time thanks to a goal by Houmane Jarir – and not an entirely undeserved one at that, the Moroccans creating a good number of chances on the counter-attack (though West Germany did hit the bar twice, and missed a couple of fine chances to equalise before the break).

In the second half, Uwe Seeler equalized and then Gerd Müller found a late winner, the game ending 2-1 to West Germany, but it had been a fine showing by Vidinić’s men. Morocco again looked well-drilled by Vidinić in their next game in the first half, holding a talented Peru team scoreless for 65 minutes, though a trio of goals quickly came to end Morocco’s hopes of advancing any further in the competition.

Morocco did, at least, earn their first ever World Cup goal and point in their final game against Bulgaria, a 1-1 tie.

(How about those low-cut Bulgarian v-necks, eh?)

Vidinić had made his mark in Mexico. And someone else had made his mark on Vidinić. When he had taken charge of Morocco in the run-up to the World Cup, Vidinić found scant resources for his team, but soon received some unsolicited: boxes of Adidas equipment began arriving for his use with Morocco, boots even delivered for the team on their arrival in Mexico. Following elimination, Vidinić encountered the man who had provided the goods – part of his drive to win African support in his attempt to globalise his flourishing apparel business and increase his influence in FIFA circles. It was one Horst Dassler whom Vidinić met in Mexico City, who told him that “From now on, your family and mine shall be friends.”

Vidinić moved on to coach another African team, then known as Zaire (now DR Congo), in 1971. Zaire had only begun playing international soccer in 1963 (having gained independence from Belgium in 1960), and had never qualified for a World Cup, or come close to doing so. Indeed, no sub-Saharan team had ever qualified for the World Cup.

Zaire did, however, have a talented team: Hungarian coach Ferenc Csandai had led them to their first international honor with victory in the 1968 Africa Cup of Nations. But the team had not performed well at the 1970 Africa Cup of Nations. They quickly improved under Vidinić by taking fourth place at the same competition in 1972, as he instilled confidence and a greater understanding of modern tactics. Vidinić led Zaire to qualification for the 1974 World Cup with victory over his former team, Morocco, sealing their place with a 3-0 win in Kinshasa in December 1973.

In recognition of the achievement, the man whose money had brought him to Zaire gave Vidinić “a sack of banknotes”: Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s authoritarian dictator.

Vidinić was recruited just as “Mobutisme”, a crude personality cult, was being instilled in Zaire, and the national football team did not escape from it – in fact, the international exposure it gave the country made it a key tool for Mobutu. The team suddenly became known as the Leopards, Mobutu known for his leopardskin hat.

Vidinić called up his new friend Horst Dassler, and Adidas got to work on a design for the country’s shirts that displayed the desired identity, in brilliant fashion:

In the lead-up to the World Cup, Vidinić oversaw Zaire’s victory at the March 1974 Africa Cup of Nations in Egypt, defeating Zambia in the final 2-0 in a replay.

In West Germany for the World Cup in June 1974, the political pressure from home – with expectations raised and the presence of a phalanx of officials created an uncomfortable atmosphere for the team – was hardly helpful as they prepared to play in a group containing reigning World Cup champions Brazil, and fancied teams from Yugoslavia and Scotland.

Vidinić’s team first faced Scotland at Westfalenstadion in Dortmund on 14 June, with the Scottish entering the game with expectations of winning by a double digit margin against the unknown Africans – skip to 5:49 in the video below.

While the Scots lined up nervously, Zaire looked dandy in their Adidas three-striped warm-up tops.

Zaire unsettled Scotland early in the game, Vidinić chain-smoking on the sideline as his team stroked the ball around. The breakthrough came, to considerable Scottish relief, in the 26th minute, a free kick leading to a header by Joe Jordan – marked weakly by Mwanza Nel Mukombo – landing perfectly on the foot of Peter Lorimer, the Scottish striker lashing in a volley from 15 yards out. The second goal came after an awful defensive lapse by Zaire only eight minutes later, as Joe Jordan ran in on goal completely unmarked from a free kick and headed straight at goalkeeper Kazadi Muamba, who could only fumble it ineptly over the line. Zaire, though, held on for the remainder of the game, a 2-0 defeat disheartening but not devastating.

Devastation would come in their next game against Yugoslavia on the 18th of June, with a 9-0 defeat. Yes: Nine, Zero.

As well as the humiliation of conceding nine goals, Zaire suffering the joint worst defeat in the history of the World Cup, there came with it a seemingly inexplicable minute of madness (hit 20:38 on the video above). In a bizarre move, Vidinić replaced Kazadi Muamba in goal with Tubilandu Ndimbi after Yugoslavia’s third goal, even though the goalkeeper himself had done little wrong in the game.

Ndimbi conceded a goal within seconds of arriving on the field from a free kick, Vidinić having curiously sent him on as Yugoslavia took their kick adjacent to Zaire’s penalty area, and in the chaos that followed with Zaire’s complaints about a supposed missed offside call, Ndaye Mulamba received a red card.

Sadly for Ndaye, and as an explanation for the vociferous protest that followed his dismissal, it was not him who had kicked the referee, but his teammate, Ilunge Mwepu. Later, Ndaye would say that “You can tell from the referee’s behavor that they can’t tell us apart. And they don’t try to either. I cried terribly when I was sent off. I told the referee that it wasn’t me, and Mwepu said “I did it, not he.” But the referee wasn’t interested. All the referees here are against the black race, and not only the referees. Scotland’s Number 4, the captain [Billy Bremner] shouted at me a couple of times during the match, ‘Nigger, hey nigger!’ He spat at me too, and he spat in Man’s face. Scotland’s number 4 is a wild animal.”

The game continued with Zaire down to ten men and at 5’4”,  Ndimbi provided an even weaker target for Yugoslavia’s shooting practice. Vidinić’s compatriots scored with almost comic ease, a very valuable result as their qualification to the next round would likely hinge on holding a healthy goal difference.

The Yugoslavian connection immediately raised questions about Vidinić’s decision-making. Why had he removed Muamba?

Vidinić provided a plausible answer that should remove concerns about his supposed collusion with his countrymen the next day. Vidinić explained that a Ministry of Sport official had ordered the goalkeeping substitution, and promised to never again accept such an order. The explanation’s veracity, one supposes, is proven by the fact that Vidinić remained in charge for the remainder of the tournament.

Meanwhile, in the background to the 9-0 defeat, an expensive billboard displayed a message paid for by Mobuto, with a word little associated with his country during the years of bloodshed he had overseen: Zaire-Peace. There would be no peace for the Zaire players following this result, though, and this would have even more memorable consequences.

Mobutu did not enjoy his country’s humiliation on the world stage in front of his billboard. The message was soon conveyed to the army of his officials in West Germany with the team, who had been busy greedily creaming off many of the gifts promised for the players – Vidinić already having had to quell one mutiny as a result.

Now, it was not gifts that Mubutu’s henchmen offered, but bald threats. Facing defending World Cup champions Brazil in their final game, Zaire were not to lose by more than three goals, they were ominously told. They would, at best, not be allowed home should that happen.

3-0 down to Brazil with just a few minutes remaining, panic and protest at the horrible situation the dictator had placed them in manifested itself as Brazil lined up a free-kick 25 yards out.

What followed is one of the most laughed-at moments in World Cup history, guaranteed to show up in the next blooper reel you see.

The context of it was not so amusing for Zaire’s players, pawns in what was no longer a game for them. Mwepu Ilunga’s inexplicable decision to rush from the wall and strike the dead ball down the field has added much to the legend of African naivety. Of course, it’s hugely unlikely a player with Ilunga’s experience would not know the rules on free kicks. Ilunga later told World Football that he kicked the ball as an act of protest: “I did that deliberately, I was aware of football regulations. . .I don’t regret it at all.”

Zaire kept the score down to 3-0 and were able to return home, but most of them faced futures far less grand than Mobutu had promised them before their departure to West Germany.

Vidinić, meanwhile, had been busy repaying his debt to Horst Dassler, with some interest.

On 11 June 1974, two days before the World Cup began, the FIFA Congress held in Frankfurt elected Dr. João Havelange  of Brazil as the first non-European president of FIFA. It was the first time two men had stood for the FIFA presidency, and Havelange’s defeat of incumbent Englishman Sir Stanley Rous dramatically altered the course of the sport’s history.

It was a result that, if it hadn’t been for Vidinić, would have surprised Horst Dassler, who until the day before the election had been backing his old ally Rous, thinking his victory was inevitable, still chagrined that Havelange had previously refused an approach from Adidas to outfit the entirety of Brazilian national sport. Dassler, though, had underestimated the deservedly bitter feelings towards Rous in Africa, and was perhaps unaware of just how successful Havelange’s “little gifts” had been in wooing African votes. The night before the election, Vidinić and Dassler met, and the Zaire coach told Dassler all the African federations had met and agreed to back Havelange. Dassler was backing the wrong horse, an unappetising prospect for Adidas.

“Here’s Havelange’s room number,” Vidinić told his friend. “Tell him you had been backing Stanley Rous but you have been defeated, and from this moment you will be at Havelange’s disposal.”

Dassler took his advice, met Havelange, and came back with champagne for Vidinić.

In fact, according to Andrew Jennings,Vidinić had good reason to be so sure of Havelange’s impending victory based on African votes: “Vidinic was in Frankfurt in 1974 paying cash for votes to elect Joao Havelange President of FIFA,” Jennings writes.

Following Havelange’s victory the next day, Dassler and sports marketing whizkid Patrick McNally quickly met the new FIFA president for dinner, and the multinational transformation of the World Cup was roadmapped for the first time.

The partnership between Dassler and Havelange, between Adidas and FIFA, would transform world football. As Tomlinson puts it in FIFA and the Contest for World Football, Dassler was the pivotal figure “that would catapult sport into a new phase of economically and financially lucrative transnational practice.”

It would not be Vidinić’s last act in what had rapidly become the murky world of FIFA politics. Jennings again: “Sixteen years later, in April 1990, Vidinic was with Havelange in Guatemala City at the CONCACAF Extraordinary Congress to make sure Jack Warner was imposed as President of CONCACAF.”

By that point, Vidinić was working directly for Adidas in Strasbourg with frequent trips back to North America, his final coaching spell with Colombia in the 1970s having come to nothing, and he would stay involved with Adidas until his death in 2006.

Vidinić had moved from enmeshment in one murky world to another during his globe-trotting career, curiously changing the course of sporting history in the process.

Though I’ve written previously on Pitch Invasion about women’s soccer in Africa, I don’t claim any special expertise on this specific event—particularly as I write from my distant home office on another continent.  But given all the attention to the men’s World Cup in South Africa last summer, and various vague claims that the event would help develop the game at all levels, I do find myself intrigued by the women’s championship as an opportunity to fulfill that promise.  Also, given the many social, historical, and structural obstacles to the women’s game in Africa, I just admire the pluck of many African women’s players who do succeed.

Nevertheless, although it will determine Africa’s two representatives to the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany, the 2010 African Women’s Championship promises to be a relatively modest endeavor (the eight competitors are South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria, Mali, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Algeria, and Ghana). Not only are none of the 2010 men’s World Cup stadiums being used, but almost all the games are being held at one 15,000 seat stadium in the far eastern townships of the greater Johannesburg area.  That stadium was refurbished for the men’s World Cup and served as the training base for New Zealand—though it’s most notable World Cup moment may have been when cooking smoke from the nearby township forced the Kiwis to modify their training. (Another small neighboring stadium will be used for two of the last group stage games, presumably to accommodate concurrent kick-offs).

Even these arrangements were only made public last month—a circumstance Peter Alegi rightly identified as an “inexcusable delay [that] makes it more difficult for fans and media to participate in and cover the premier event in women’s football on the continent.”  As if to substantiate that point, as of the week-end before the tournament begins the official tournament page on the Confederation of African Football (CAF) web-site had only been updated once since September—and ironically that update was to announce that the deadline to apply for press credentials had been extended.

CAF does have the excuse of not having much practice in hosting continental championships for women.  Though there were official competitions in 1991 and 1995, those were played on a home and away basis, so the first centrally hosted tournament was played in Nigeria in 1998.  Since that event, the African Women’s Championship has been hosted biannually in either Nigeria or South Africa—with the lone exception of the 2008 tournament hosted in Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea also happens to be the only country to win the continental women’s championship besides Nigeria—which had won every African women’s championship prior to 2008, and is the only African team to attend every Women’s World Cup.  In my mind, this raises two interesting questions: why has Nigeria been so good, and how could Equatorial Guinea be their only competition?

The Champions

The reasons Nigeria have tended to be so good is probably at least partially attributable to the simple fact that Nigeria is a populous place with a lot of talented women.  According to a 2003 case study by Martha Saavedra, “women have been playing football on a regular basis in Nigeria only since 1978” but since there have been several iterations of reasonably successful women’s clubs and leagues—which is more than can be said for many African nations.  In addition, Saavedra notes, the relative strength of Nigerian women’s soccer may relate to a more general “history of activism among Nigerian women, especially in the South.”  More recently there has been some concern that the full women’s national team has lost some of its dominance, and that broader problems in Nigerian soccer may hurt further improvements, but there are also signs of hope: as was noted here on Pitch Invasion over the summer, the Nigerian U-20 women were an impressive success ending up as the first African team to reach the final of a FIFA World Cup of any sort.

The case of Equatorial Guinea is harder to figure, partially just because it seems to be a generally curious place.  I’ve never been there, and don’t feel able to fully pass judgment, but in the world of African politics Equatorial Guinea is known mostly for suspicious oddities.  A former Spanish colony comprising a tiny set of islands and land near the coasts of Cameroon and Gabon with only around 600,000 people, it has massive oil income that the United Nations computes to a GDP per capita higher than that of Italy or Bahrain (at $30,627), but a human poverty index worse than Haiti (according to IRIN News, estimates suggest that “60 percent of its population lives on less than US$1 a day”).  This extreme discrepancy is often attributed to massive corruption, particularly among its dictatorial ruling family—whose son Teodoro Obiang is known for buying a $35 million mansion in Malibu and paying $700,000 for a spin on a yacht to impress sometime girlfriend/rapper Eve, and whose patriarch has been in the news for promoting a multi-million dollar UNESCO prize to publicize science and perhaps distract people from his poor human rights record.  The problems of the ruling family even emboldened a group of mercenary South African plotters with few local connections, linked famously to Margaret Thatcher’s son, to attempt a (failed) coup in 2004.

So how did a place like Equatorial Guinea end up hosting a women’s African championship tournament, and becoming the first winner other than Nigeria?  The event generated so little media attention that it is almost impossible to know, but I’d be interested to learn.  I’m particularly intrigued by how a country of only 600,000 people—which wouldn’t even qualify as one of the top ten most-populous cities in Nigeria—manages to produce a continental class football team.

I do know what the Nigerians said: that the Equatorial Guinea women’s team succeeds by not limiting itself to women.  In another curious twist that was mentioned by Jennifer Doyle here on Pitch Invasion, and discussed in a bit more detail on the TransGriot blog, the Nigerians claimed at least two of Equatorial Guinea’s players were men (a claim that doesn’t seem to have any evidence other than appearance).  Sadly, these claims seem to get flung around fairly casually in African women’s soccer—in a 2009 story that TransGriot described as “Nigerian Gender Chickens Coming Home To Roost” a Nigerian women’s player was excluded because “while being given her medical exam for the national team they discovered she was intersex.”  These and other events led to the claim that CAF was going to institute ‘gender testing’ before the 2010 championship—something that I’ve not seen any news of since 2009, and suspect fell prey to the realization that ‘gender testing’ in sports is far from an objective scientific process (something particularly loaded in South Africa after last year’s messy Caster Semenya controversy).

So barring the gender bending argument, my best guess is simply that Equatorial Guinea has actually decided to support women’s soccer—possibly as a part of a larger strategy of soccer diplomacy that includes its status as a co-host of the 2012 men’s African Cup of Nations (with Gabon—another oil rich neighbor).  If you’re rich and dictatorial, what better PR boost than good old-fashioned sport success?  Though this is just a guess, it is supported by the silver medal performance of a youth women’s national team from Equatorial Guinea at last summer’s Youth Olympic Games.  How else could a tiny oil dictatorship whose prior athletic fame derived entirely from mocking ‘Eric the Eel’ have turned itself into a presence in African soccer?  And that is not meant only as a rhetorical question—does anyone out there know the whole story?

Other Stories and Legacies

One other curious story from the 2010 African Women’s Championship that may actually get some documentation is the first appearance of Tanzania’s ‘Twiga Stars.’  In fact, the only two films I know of about women’s soccer in Africa are both set in Tanzania: in addition to an excellent 2007 documentary on women’s soccer in Zanzibar (which combined with Tanganyika in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania), it now seems another film-maker has been following the Tanzanian women’s national team (if you’re curious, check out the goal around 1:02 of the trailer—it’s a cracker).  As part of their reward for qualifying the team earned a sponsored trip to Seattle to train and play local teams—ending up with a mixed record against amateur women’s teams from Washington state.  Given their record against the locals in Seattle, the Twiga Stars may not yet be world class on the field—but the fact that they were there at all, and that Tanzania seems to be starting to take women’s soccer seriously, seems well worth documenting.

Ultimately I suspect that each of the eight women’s teams at the African Women’s Championship in South Africa represents many more fascinating stories that we’ll never see.    Even South Africa, with its relatively developed infrastructure and a history of some support for women’s soccer, is struggling to get Banyana Banyana to an international level (at last summer’s U-17 Women’s World Cup South Africa finished the group stage with 2 goals for and 17 against, including a 10-1 drubbing by Germany).  So, as Peter Alegi notes, beyond its limited press attention perhaps the most important question of this particular tournament is: “what will be the impact of this tournament on the development and growth of South African (and African) women’s football at junior, amateur, and elite levels?  This is a crucial question given that the number of female players — mostly black — continues to grow alongside their ongoing marginalization and exclusion in a male-dominated football world.”

Because if the legacy of the South African World Cup isn’t to develop the game at all levels, we’ll not only miss some good soccer stories—we’ll miss good soccer.

Settling into tepid beers and a winter’s warm dusk, it only took twenty minutes for South Africa to score.  The fan park erupted.  It was mass paroxysms of joy: leaping, dancing, hugging, and vuvuzelas of all shapes and sizes.  Then, with the game beginning again, our new friends turned to us and screamed in exclamation: “CAN YOU FEEL IT!  IT IS HERE!”

“Feel it!  It is here!”  With each word carefully enunciated, that catch-phrase was everywhere around South Africa 2010.  It was on TV, on the radio, in advertisements, on street banners, incorporated with concerts and stage shows.  It was, as far as I know, a marketing slogan promoted by either the South African Broadcasting Corporation or Brand South Africa to generate enthusiasm for the tournament—so my initial response was to think there was something inauthentic to its parroting.  At least that’s what I thought rationally, intellectually.  Then South Africa scored a second goal on an inchoate France team, and that Hammanskraal fan park erupted anew.  I suddenly realized that despite my intellectual resistance to uncritical branding—yes: I could feel it.

The beauty and the torture of soccer fandom, I came to appreciate during South Africa 2010, is the way the game simultaneously titillates very different parts of the mind.  The rational and the irrational.  The cognitive and the affective.  The intellectual and the emotional.  I loved this World Cup because it allowed me to try and think hard about globalization, culture, urbanity, inequality, nationalism, identity, sports in society, and many other incarnate ideas that have fascinated me at least since I first travelled through South Africa nearly 15 years ago on my way to two years in Peace Corps Malawi.  But I also loved this World Cup because it allowed me to scream from the bellows of my soul when a ball crossed a line in the grass.

This not-particularly-profound realization has been banging at me in this post-World Cup lull as I reflect back on my all too brief trip to South Africa for the group stage.  Two memories stand out.

One was a day touring Johannesburg with a kind stranger who had stumbled upon one of my pre-World Cup posts and was provoked by my surprise “at how little interest there seems to be in the real soccer experiences, and ‘normal’ daily experiences, of 47 million South Africans who somehow manage—as most of us do—to muddle through.”  The idea of us all ‘muddling through’ struck him as funny, and he offered to show me what he could: I rode three mini-bus taxis to make my way from Pretoria to Sandton, where he picked me up at the mall in his Land Rover (he’d never tried the mini-bus taxis himself, and found it quite amusing that I’d figured the route out).

A many generation South African of Indian descent, an engineer / IT professional who used his vacation time to go off-roading, he was about my age—apartheid ended when he was in secondary school, and he became one of the first students to integrate a prestigious (white) public school in Durban.  But he was more interested in talking about soccer, music, economics, cars, his skateboarding phase complete with dyed blue hair, and his daughter.

At the risk of sounding like a stereotype, she was a vivid emblem of the “new South Africa”—her mother of Afrikaner descent, her father a Muslim, herself an angelic four year old with impeccable manners and grace.  As the father, the daughter, and I toured around downtown Johannesburg—partially just to prove that we could—he talked about the pleasure and pride of having attended South Africa’s opening World Cup game (his wife had never before been to a soccer game, and was a bit surprised to learn that unlike rugby it was legal to make a forward pass), about having experienced more racism on trips to the US than when living in South Africa, and about the ubiquitous question for professional-class South Africans: should he consider looking for greener pastures abroad?  For me the very idea of the day, the confluence of stories, questions, meanings, histories, and identities within a coincidental meeting spurred by a soccer tournament, engaged all the intellectual faculties I ever try to exercise.

Several days later it was my emotion’s turn, sitting in the stands at Loftus Versfeld waiting out an increasingly tense 90 minutes between the US and Algeria.  I had bought the tickets through the US Supporters Club, and found myself amidst the American hard-cores: fans in red, white, and blue body suits and Uncle Sam tuxedos.  I’ve never been a particular fan of Landon Donovan, thinking he got too much too easily in his career, but when he stroked that ball into that net 50 yards from my seat I felt a moment of sheer, irrational ecstasy.  Shrieking.  Fist-pumping.  Shaking.  There would be time later to reflect on whether I was swept up in jingoism, whether my subjectivity had fallen victim to corporate sponsored bread and circus, whether I was experiencing reaction-formation to the anomie I feel in most of my life.  At that moment I found myself trembling with unknown joy under a giant American flag unfurling over my head, watching through blurry eyes while strangers hugged as if meeting family members they thought they’d never see again.  It was, as the kids say, raw.

I’m not sure whether I should be proud of these reactions.  My fascination with the lives of others sometimes feels voyeuristic, my joy at watching a ball cross a line often feels misplaced.  But I do know these things are why I am a soccer fan—for me the game is a perfect place for my intellect and my emotions to reach a symbiosis.

It all reminds me that while Freud was not right about many things, he was right that the human mind is fundamentally conflicted.  We are conflicted between intellect and emotion, between prudence and pleasure, between id impulses and superego strictures.  The challenge is not to eliminate those conflicts, but to find ways of negotiating between them in reasonably healthy ways.  Following soccer mostly works for me.

In that sense South Africa 2010 was a personal fandom apotheosis.  It may not have produced the most entertaining soccer, it may not have been the most prudent use of funds for a country facing daunting inequalities, African teams may not have availed themselves of anything like a home continent advantage, South Africa may still be balancing deep internal divisions, but such limitations are only ledger marks in the fascinating and ongoing negotiations of sports and society.  They are counterbalanced by other marks such as the elegance and symbolism in the performances of teams such as Ghana and Germany, the architectural inspirations of stadiums including Soccer City and Moses Mabhida, the clarity with which this World Cup sent the message that Africa can manage the most lofty of challenges, and the fact that South Africa is a country of nearly infinite vibrancy, talent, and potential.

Feeling comfortable with such potentially conflicting marks was subtly endorsed and illuminated for me by a variety of local commentators I read while in South Africa.  Several journalists noted that the nature of life in South Africa, the legacies of apartheid and the reality of inequality, promotes a degree of comfort with paradox and contradiction (explaining, for example, why many South Africans felt no hypocrisy in supporting both Bafana Bafana and Ghana, or Germany, or Brazil, or whoever).  South African author Mark Gevisser went one step further in a recent Guardian essay: “Indeed, there is a manic-depressive streak to the South African psyche; an after-effect, perhaps, of having once been so favoured after the “Mandela Miracle” transition to democracy. If we are not “the Rainbow Nation” – or the successful hosts of the first African mega-event – then we are another African failed state; Zimbabwe-in-waiting.”  But Gevisser himself is cautiously optimistic: “the power of a grand national pageant [such as the World Cup] is its myth-making potential: whether we were in cars on the way down to Bloemfontein or dancing on the side of the highway, we will tell our children and grandchildren about it and it will become the measure, for years to come, of the Rainbow Nation we imagined we were bringing into being in 1994.”

In fact, in defining fandom as born of psychological contradiction and conflict I find it interesting to look back at my own patterns of writing here on Pitch Invasion around South Africa 2010.  After offering tongue-in-cheek predictions about who would advance from each group ‘if there were any justice in the world’ (a method that resulted in me correctly picking 8 of the 16 teams that would advance—exactly what you’d predict on random chance, furthering my suggestion that there is rarely any justice in the world.), the last post I wrote before I left was full of sentimental defensiveness.  I was bothered by the fear and pessimism surrounding much pre-World Cup media, and offered alternative media sources that I hoped might be more sophisticated and real.  Then while in South Africa, in an effort to find a niche, I wrote about topics such as my unease with the security apparatus around the stadiums, about xenophobia, about the under-development of grass-roots soccer, about what Franz Fanon might think of Soccer City.  In other words, I mostly wrote things that were intellectually critical.

I tried to focus any criticisms on global forces victimizing South Africa, but it just became much easier to offer pseudo-intellectual deconstructions rather than emotional effusions.  The irony is that while it may not have come across in my posts, I loved every single day of my trip to South Africa.  Loved it.

So while some of what I wrote was about xenophobia and inequality and misunderstandings, I want to go on record stating that in my mind South Africa 2010 was a grand success.  It was a tournament that allowed us to intellectually engage with South Africa as a place that matters in global society, and it was a tournament that allowed us to emotionally immerse ourselves in a beautiful game.  It was a tournament that allowed me, ever so briefly, to love Landon Donovan with all my heart.  It was a tournament that made me happy to parrot a marketing slogan for the sake of a brand: FEEL IT!

Tessema’s remarkable story intertwined with deconolisation, the fight against apartheid in South Africa and the battle for respect and opportunities for African soccer in the face of a Eurocentric FIFA.

Tessema, born in 1921, was a hell of a player (scorer of 318 goals in 365 games for Saint-George SA) and a coach: in the latter role, he took his native Ethiopia to their sole major tournament triumph, at the 1962 Africa Cup of Nations.

But it was as an administrator that Tessema left his true imprint on the sport. In 1953, four African nations attended the FIFA Congress for the first time: Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa and Sudan. At first, FIFA resisted African claims for representation on its Executive Committee; in The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt says “Initially their efforts had been brusquely rebuffed by FIFA’s European majority on the grounds of a barely disguised and contemptuous racism.”

The African nations, though, found support from the Soviet bloc and South America, and it gained representation on the Executive Committee in 1954 (Engineer Abdelaziz Abdallah Salem of Egypt became the first African to sit on it) and earned the right to set up its own FIFA Confederation.

That confederation, the Confédération Africaine de Football (CAF), was formed at a Constitutional Assembly on 8 February 1957. Tessema (still a player in his mid thirties) was one of the delegates there representing the four countries present: Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan and South Africa. The Statutes of CAF were drawn from those proposed by Tessema and Sudan’s Abdel Rahim Shaddad. Tessema was voted onto the body’s first executive committee, with Engineer Salem the first president.

Immediately, CAF faced a major crisis, with founding member South Africa under its Apartheid regime stating it could only take either an all-white or all-black team to the first Africa Cup of Nations to be held that year; CAF excluded them from the competition and threw South Africa out of CAF altogether in 1961. It was, according to fellow founding CAF delegate Abdel Halim Mohammed, Tessema’s “firm stand” at CAF meetings that South Africa must field a mixed team that had ensured the confederation was the first international organisation to isolate South Africa in the sporting world.

Tessema at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden

In 1963, Tessema became the Vice-President of CAF, and led the move to form Africa’s first continental club competition, the African Cup for Champion Clubs. In 1966, Tessema (fluent in French, English and Spanish) joined FIFA’s Executive Committee, at a critical moment for African football in FIFA’s halls of power. As its membership grew, so would — theoretically — its voting power in the halls of FIFA.

FIFA operated under (and still does) a one member, one vote policy at the FIFA Congress: meaning for every African country taken in, the power of its original European members was weakened. Sir Stanley Rous, head of FIFA, put bluntly the fears this brought up for the existing powerbase:

Many people are convinced that it is unrealistic, for example, that a country like England, where the game started and was first organised, or that experienced countries like Italy and France, who have been pillars of FIFA and influential in its problems and in world football affairs for so many years, should have no more than equal voting rights with any of the newly created countries of Africa and Asia.

Writing in the 1980s as that sentiment lingered on, Tessema had an eloquent response for this:

Although we acknowledge the role played by certain continents in the creation of FIFA, its development and their moral, material and financial contributions, we estimate that democratic rule dictates that all rights and duties that form an international organisation should be the same for all. This is why in the framework of legitimacy, and by following a process consistent with the interests of world football and its unity, a progressive equilibrium of the representation in the heart of FIFA and its competition is required.

CAF’s rise in the 1960s, meanwhile, was tightly linked to the wave of pan-Africanism sweeping the continent. National pride became linked to joining the African community of football in membership of CAF. Politics and football were seen as reflections of each other. And this led to an almighty fight between CAF and FIFA over both politics and football as African demands for more power within FIFA reflected the demands of decolonisation politically in the international arena. And Tessema’s fight against racial discrimination in the African continent became a part of this struggle.

It was at this time that CAF fought its battle with FIFA to gain an automatic place for Africa at the World Cup finals. CAF had 30 members by the mid-1960s, but only half a place at the World Cup finals: the winner of the Africa Cup of Nations faced a playoff against the Asian Cup winner to qualify. The costs of competing and the low likelihood of qualification for the World Cup meant many poorer countries did not enter CAF’s premier competition. And this in turn, in a clever sleight of hand by FIFA’s existing European and South American powerbase, threatened their use of their growing membership in FIFA’s sovereign Congress: FIFA decreed that “National Associations which do not take part in two successive World Cups or Olympic tournaments will be stripped of their right to vote at the Congress until they fulfil their obligations in this respect.”

Tessema and CAF’s leadership, with the global voice of Ghana’s first post-independence leader Kwame Nkrumah supporting them, announced a boycott of the 1966 World Cup unless Africa received one full place at future finals. FIFA’s response was to fine the threadbare boycotting nations 5,000 Swiss Francs each. Tessema wrote a furious letter to FIFA pointing out the absurdity that only one World Cup place was awarded to a total of 65 nations in the continents outside Europe and South America. FIFA relented, and Africa was awarded a full place for the 1970 World Cup finals (Morocco becoming the first African nation to play in the World Cup since Egypt in 1934). This was to the dismay of Brain Glanville (still a World Soccer columnist today), who wrote that “It is quite true that football in countries such as the U.S.A. and Ethiopia would be encouraged by World Cup participation, but only at the expense of cheapening the World Cup, a pretty heavy price to pay when this tournament is, or should be, the very zenith of the International game.”

Not coincidentally, politics as well as World Cup positions were dividing CAF and FIFA: led by Sir Stanley Rous, FIFA secretly supported the establishment of a new, second Confederation in Africa, the Southern African Confederation, a South African puppet clearly aimed at giving the Apartheid regime legitimacy, as South Africa had been suspended from FIFA against Rous’ wishes in 1961 under pressure from CAF (FIFA’s Executive Committee had lifted the suspension in 1963 following a visit by Rous to South Africa, only for the FIFA Congress to reimpose it the next year). Led by Tessema, CAF’s delegation threatened to walk out on the FIFA Congress in London in 1966 if FIFA’s leadership backed the reinstatement of South Africa again.

Meanwhile, internally in CAF, Tessema continued to modernise the organisation and expand its role in Africa, even as he faced challenges in a power struggle for CAF leadership.  He led a key Organising Committee that led to a restructuring of CAF in 1972, and the same year was elected as its president (a position he would hold until his death in 1987). The continent’s first youth competition was soon instituted, as was an African Cup Winners’ Cup tournament. CAF’s revenue grew, with television and marketing rights to the Africa Cup of Nations profitably sold for the first time in 1982, and it became less reliant on outside support and focused on continental development of the game.

Tessema had worked hard to grow Africa’s standing globally, particularly in the face of intransigent European leadership at FIFA. One key strategy he employed was to cement ties between the African continent and South America, with an African select team appearing at the 1972 Brazilian Independence Cup, for example. Tessema then played a key role in the victory of Brazilian João Havelange over the reactionary Sir Stanley Rous for the FIFA presidency in 1974: for all his later corrupt dealings, that victory by Havelange was crucial for orientating FIFA beyond its previous Northern European pole and led to unprecedented opportunities for African teams.

Notably, rather than Havelange manipulating CAF to gain their support to defeat Rous, it was Tessema who had used the leverage of the forthcoming 1974 election to force Havelange to withdraw Brazil from a 1973 multi-sports festival in South Africa aimed at giving the Apartheid regime international credibility. As Rous himself wrote: “The Brazilians withdrew, I am told on good authority, because Tessema, the president of the African confederation threatened that Mr Havelange would lose the support of the African associations in his fight against me for the presidency of FIFA.”

Paul Darby, in his excellent book Africa, football, and FIFA: politics, colonialism, and resistance, explains Tessema’s sophisticated strategy:

The fact that Tessema was in a position to threaten the withdrawal of African support for Havelange’s presidential challenge illustrates that CAF was not only gaining confidence to assert itself within world football politics but was also beginning to recognise the potential that its voting powers offered the African continent. Indeed, it is clear from African accounts of the 1974 FIFA Congress . . . that the African nations did not see themselves merely as pawns in a power struggle for the control of FIFA. Instead, they saw Havelange as the means through which to achieve a realignment of the distribution of power and privilege within world football which would more adequately reflect their growing stature.

At the same FIFA Congress, a motion by Tessema required the automatic expulsion from FIFA of any country that practiced ‘ethnic, racial and/or religious discrimination in its territory’, thus ending — to the chagrin of Rous — the ambiguity that surrounded South Africa: Rous was still pushing to end their suspension. But Havelange’s victory ended that hope, and under his leadership, South Africa were expelled from FIFA in 1976.

In 1978, the number of World Cup places Africa should hold came up again at FIFA, but this time, it was an easier fight for Tessema to win some numerical justice for Africa: their number of places doubled at the 1982 World Cup to two.

As the years went on, some began to question Tessema’s long tenure, and the divisions between African nations hampered the realisation of the Pan-African dreams of the 1960s. But Tessema remained a force for the good of the sport until his death in 1987: he was a lone voice at keeping alcohol and tobacco sponsorship out of African football, and he warned against the growing trend of young African talent leaving for European shores. He spelled out the latter concern clearly in the 1980s:

African football must make a choice! Either we keep our players in Africa with the will power of reaching one day the top of the international competitions and restore African people a dignity that they long for; or we let our best elements leave their countries, thus remaining the eternal suppliers of raw material to the premium countries, and renounce, in this way, to any ambition. When the rich countries take away from us, also by naturalisation, our best elements, we should not expect any chivalrous behaviour on their part to help African football.

One wonders what Tessema would make of African football today: a World Cup host, with numerous world stars, but still struggling for domestic development in the game.

Shortly before his death, Tessema, according to Darby, “reiterated his belief that CAF must continue to struggle to ensure that Africa procured within FIFA, ‘the place which is ours by right and which would allow us to play the role of a real respected partner and not that of a puppet’.”

Few have done more to propel Africa towards its proper place in world soccer than Tessema.

References: Darby, Africa, Football, and FIFA; Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round; Le Sueur, The Decolonization Reader; Mangan, Europe, sport, world: shaping global societies; Rous, Football Worlds. Photos courtesy of The Tessemas website.

Africa is a football-mad continent but has only ever sent three teams to the World Cup quarter-finals. It had six sides at the 2010 tournament but mustered only four wins – the strong showing of Ghana, a country with a good FA and innovative clubs, cannot mask the general trend of underachievements, including by Cameroon and Nigeria, countries who boast bountiful talent but finished bottom of their groups. When it comes to African football, tales of corruption, incompetence and infighting remain more common than success stories.

“Too many national associations are failing African football,” Nicholas Musonye, general secretary of the Council of East and Central African Football Associations, says. “We cannot have strong national teams without strong leagues but we do not have strong leagues because too often the associations are run by the wrong people, people who get involved for politics or money, not for football. Until we sort ourselves out, we will have the same old circus.”

To tackle this, Doyle explains, the Kenyan Premier League was formed, and significantly, it is owned and run by the 16 Kenyan clubs themselves.

The KPL represents a great example of African football sorting itself out, a successful rebellion by people who genuinely care about football against the powerful people seeking to hijack it for their own ends. Over the past decade the hijacking has at times been so blatant as to be farcical – an investigation into corruption in the Kenya Football Federation (KFF) in 2005 found that from the first eight matches played by the national team following the arrival of a new president “there was not a single penny banked by the treasurer as proceeds from gate receipts”. There were also reports of top KFF officials acting as unregistered agents to sell players abroad and embezzling funds given by Fifa. Even 30 computers donated by Fifa disappeared.

Kenya’s clubs, sick of being hindered rather than helped by their federation, began agitating for reform and, in the face of repeated sabotage and intimidation by the KFF, eventually took over the running of the domestic league, forming, in 2008, the country’s first professional league, the KPL, and only the second one in the continent, after the South African Super League, to be owned entirely by clubs.

“When you have a company that owns the league and the 16 clubs are equal shareholders and equal decision‑makers, then you automatically have three things,” Bob Munro, chairman of Mathare United and a KPL official, says.

“First, you have complete accountability, because you basically have 16 auditors as every shilling that comes in belongs to the clubs together and they sit and decide how best to allocate it – how much goes to the clubs, how much to a common pool for staff, referees, marketing and so on. Secondly, you have complete transparency because there are no secrets when there are 16 owners. And, thirdly, you automatically have fair play – if any official or referee tries to favour one club, the 15 others will fire them. Fair play, financial accountability and democratic transparency, that’s all you need to have good football management.”

At the end of the piece, though, Doyle raises a point that is worth considering further in global terms: when politicians attempt to stamp down on corruption within the national associations that run the sport, should they always automatically be chastised and threatened with a ban from international competition by FIFA?

Doyle raises this point with regard to the much-mocked move by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan two weeks ago to wipe clean the slate in Nigerian soccer by banning the national team from play.

But, as this BBC article explains, this was not simply a populist move by Jonathan; he was attempting to deal with a serious crisis in the institutions of soccer in Nigeria, run not for the good of the game but with a strong whiff of corruption pervading the air.

The actual banning and un-banning of the team is irrelevant,” says Churchill Olise, owner of elite football academy Ebede FC in Shagamu.

“What matters is that at last the powerful have realised the seriousness of our problem.

“Sport is the one area where we can compete internationally – and win. We simply cannot continue to waste our young talent.”

In theory, an abundance of gifted young players ought to make Nigeria a global super-power in the game.

But insiders point to squandered talent, a national sport strangled by poor infrastructure, and football officials obsessed by gaining re-election for themselves. There is also evidence of corruption.

“The sackings just scratch the surface,” says Wilson Ajua, a lawyer and owner of Rainbow FC in Lagos.

“The president should take it further. The structures must be cleaned out and rebuilt.”

He points to problems deeper than corruption.

“Many of these local clubs are like empty shells without good players,” he says.

“I believe the state of football in Nigeria is dead. The clubs are run as political tools, not as businesses.”

Jonathan’s extreme action suddenly made more sense just days ago when it came to light FIFA had been warned the Nigerian team was “at risk” of involvement in match-fixing; and, as Declan Hill discussed, this will continue to be the case when players are not paid for their participation in the World Cup directly, but often see their money disappear into the pockets of corrupt national officials (this, incidentally, doesn’t only happen in Africa). Significantly, Jonathan’s more important action was not the headline-move of banning the national team, but his demand that the Nigerian Football Federation be dissolved and its books opened to anti-fraud police.

Jonathan had to back down from his action when FIFA intervened. But the idea brought up above by Olise that Jonathan did not go far enough as the entire sport’s infrastructure needed cleaning out raises a serious question: who, exactly, is going to be able to clean out a corrupt or incompetent national association of a sport if a national government is not allowed by FIFA to do it?  FIFA, obviously, does not do it. And once entrenched, changing the guard at national association level from the grassroots up is extremely difficult. Isn’t it, indeed, in part the responsibility of national governments to ensure their national associations of their national sports are following good governance principles?

That, at least, is the conclusion of Doyle’s insightful piece. In Kenya, he observes, while the national league appears to have enlightened leadership, no such change has taken place at national league level, with the existing dubious leadership of Football Kenya Limited still in place, despite the urging of reform from the national government:

This week Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga, requested that the FKL step aside and let clubs vote for new officials. It was only a request, mind, because Odinga knows that any more forceful move by him would incur the wrath of Fifa, who are fundamentalists when it comes to upholding their ban on governmental interference in football – sometimes with the effect that they prevent reform.

And as he quotes Elias Makori, sports editor of Kenya’s biggest newspaper The Nation:

“What Fifa needs to do is stop insisting on no government interference and instead insist on good governance,” Makori says. “It needs to help the right people and thwart the opportunists by drawing up a model constitution for all its associations and demanding that it is respected. If the status quo remains, it is hard not to be pessimistic.”

This is a brilliant suggestion by Makori, it seems to me; sure, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to ensure model constitutions were implemented properly, but their mere existence — and an end to a blanket ban on government “interference” in soccer by FIFA — would set standards for each national association to be held up to by a country’s clubs, players, fans, regional confederation, FIFA and government officials alike. There is simply to much money in world soccer in every country, too many people involved, to simply trust a few officials to run the sport right with no serious system of standard principles and oversight to be in place for national associations.

Past results suggest that going through a period of dictatorial government is almost a sine qua non for a nation to be a champion.

Brian at The Run of Play did a very good job crushing that idea.

… [C]orrelation doesn’t imply causation; the fact that two things occurred simultaneously doesn’t prove that one caused the other without a mechanism to demonstrate the cause. Fetter gestures toward such a mechanism—“soccer prowess proved a national morale builder for the dictatorships of the last century”—but while it holds up in some specific cases (Mussolini, et. al.), as a general theory it’s just silly, especially considering that, as Fetter himself points out, most of the World Cup-winning countries that have had dictators since 1930 weren’t actually dictatorships at the time when they lifted the trophy.

The idea memed, nonetheless. (I’m shocked that highbrow soccer dorks — my favourite phrase this World Cup, used by The New Republic’s Goal Post to describe their ideal reader base — appear not to check RoP before coffee.) Laughable, snobbish solipsism — it’s not just for FIFA anymore, kids. The soccer blogosphere has no shortage of writers doing sterling work dissecting the politics of the World Cup and men’s football in thoughtful, moving ways (Occasional Pitch Invasion writer Jennifer Doyle, of From a Left Wing, is just one of them). But who needs all that when the USA’s finest journalists are sitting around a table writing football stories that are the intellectual equivalent of those Hitchens-Amis word games where they mad-libbed book titles with ‘sex’ and ‘prick’?

Last week, the phenomenon’s most high-profile instance was a piece by Roger Cohen in the New York Times called ‘Özil the German‘, an op-ed ostensibly exploring the multiculturalism of Germany, and the shattering of its team’s power structure with the absence of ‘Big Man’ Michael Ballack.

Perhaps it’s not a bad thing that the first African World Cup has seen stars fail where they were not backed by teamwork. Cameroon, with its Big Man Samuel Eto’o of Inter Milan, and Ivory Coast, with Big Man Dider Drogba of Chelsea, are both out. Ghana, meanwhile, has endured through discipline and coordination.

Africa needs more of that kind of spirit.

Ignoring the warning bells that usually ring in my head when the word ‘Africa’ appears in a newspaper that takes ads from the Government of Sudan and has in the past reported extensively on the Congo civil war without once mentioning its international backers, I read on.

Since decolonization began in the second half of the 20th century, it has too often been the continent of “The Big Man.” That was the sobriquet V.S. Naipaul gave in “A Bend in the River” to the African dictator plundering the city of Kisangani in Congo through mercenaires granted license to run amok.

The colonizer’s plundering merely gave way to the Big Man’s impunity in stripping Africa’s assets bare.

Many things about African football became clearer at once to me. Unlike the rest of the world, African football runs on the transitive properties of morality. Losing because of bad tactics and positioning, like Cameroon, conceals the deeper flaw of playing their best player — an inspirational, talented, eloquent man with almost all the qualities of a great leader — at all. How dare manager Paul Le Guen attempt to shoulder the blame for setting Eto’o adrift in a formation where his co-ordination with Webo failed repeatedly and his ability to track back was severely limited by his having to run between left and centre? The blame is Africa’s for producing a player who is celebrated back home as much as he is in white cities like Barcelona and Milan. Memories of the Barnes Theory Of Socialist Righteousness pierce the heart.

As for Cote d’Ivoire, it’s all very well for white people to give a man credit for stopping a civil war in his country. But ask him to play with a broken arm in order to bolster a team in a challenging group and reap the whirlwind, CIV. Given the paucity of Big Men in the rest of the group — no seriously, Kaka? Ronaldo? No civil wars! No Big Manhood! Oh, and Jong Tae-se who? — this was just as indicative of ‘African tragedy’ as any history of dictators in the Congo. Mobutu Sese Seko, your football Nazgul have failed you. Africa won and you lost.

Cohen is merely patting his column into shape at this point. The blissfully oblivious New York Times enjoys supporting the idea that the post-colonial world is self-sufficient and self-determining to such an extent that the origins of the ‘Big Man’ phenomenon in the support of African extremists by their former colonisers doesn’t seem to merit the status of rumour, much less truth, in their pages. Rest easy, readers; coltan wars, oil genocides and repeatedly invalidated democratic elections happen because Africans are just reverting to type. On the other hand, Cohen points out,

[South Africa] has resisted the devastating “Big Man” syndrome. Over the past 16 years, South Africa has had four free elections and four presidents … [a] robust judiciary and free press … [t]he interaction, under the law, of various interest groups … This is its great lesson for a continent where, by 2025, one in four of every person under 24 will live.

From which statement we infer:

1. All African countries have the same history.
2. All African countries have the same set of problems.
3. Big Men are okay with us if they are Big Men by Committee, which is to say that they are Big Men who can be safely invited to speak at G20 gatherings.
4. It’s fine that he brokered the most incredible nation-building negotiation in the last fifty years and possibly ever, but what would really symbolise a betrayal of big man Mandela’s anti-Big Man policies, more than Zuma and the ANC’s drift away from his vision, would be if Siphiwe Tshabalala were a thirty-a-season goalscorer for Manchester United.

At this point Roger Cohen is satisfied with the lesson he has just taught his African readers, and returns to the subject of multicultural Germany and the meaning of Mesut Özil.

A Social Democrat once told me that the country’s ultimate victory over Hitler would lie in the reconstitution of the Jewish community, then being pursued by luring Jews of the former Soviet Union. I always thought that was a vain, slightly kitschy idea.

Parsing issues aside, since vanity and kitschiness are things that Hannah Arendt, the great analyst of European totalitarianism, would have resisted in her political philosophy, this seems sound. Reconciliation and reparation, as Arendt knew, are overwhelmingly difficult, and sometimes even tragic ideas. (Guernica Magazine recently posted a horrifying exploration of how, in the context of some African history, they can simply be another form of torture.) They can be begun by legislation, but history’s best hope is only ever that such acts may go on to form a new chapter. They cannot erase or change the one that has already been made. That is indeed the cause and effect of kitsch and vanity.

But the Germany of Özil and Aogo is such a victory over the Big Man who destroyed Europe.

Which is to say: thank you Turkey and Nigeria for bearing the brunt of the history of European imperialism in your own distinct ways. Directly or indirectly, we dismantled your countries in our world wars, plundered your resources, broke up your nations, sold off the pieces, put your worst enemies in power over you, treated your people like shit when they came to Europe looking for work, and continue to do so. But our football teams are now full of brown kids and black kids. So Hitler lost and you lost, but we all won. So we’re cool, right? We’re cool.

Roger Cohen says:

Africa, take note

Thank you for taking note, New York Times, and other ‘highbrow’ American soccer writers. We know now that you see the currents of history where the rest of us are trying — sometimes for painful reasons of our own — to see football games. But please remember that if other people wore the same smug-coloured glasses as you, your theories would undergo a fundamental shift. Where you see models of correlation/causation between dictators and football victories, others would see the run of play as the rest of the world knows it: of a history of possession dominated by those who wrote the rules, of enforced migrations and unwilling recruitments, of fallouts of totalitarianism where there is no such thing as an ‘almost sine qua non‘; of contests that we must always resist seeing as wars, because they can only ever be only fought — and won — on the field.

The other side of globalization, however, is the possibility that hyper-connectivity and piqued curiosity can create opportunities for diverse voices to propagate.  The possibility of stumbling on African perspectives that enlarge and enrich the conversation about soccer and society should be one of the great opportunities of this World Cup.

And while the sanitized big media version of the World Cup (and of globalization) seems to have maintained its hegemony in recent weeks, there are hints of the alternative possibility.  I’ve been interested, for example, to follow dispatches from well-known African writers and intellectuals dispersed across the continent during the World Cup for a project called Pilgrimages, or to read stories from aspiring writers in South Africa exploring the realities of their daily lives through Global Girl Media (as discussed by The People’s Game).  In addition, during my final few days in South Africa last week I was lucky enough to stumble upon “Twenty Ten: African Media on the Road to 2010 (and beyond).”

Described as a joint initiative by World Press Photo, Free Voice, Africa Media Online and lokaalmondiaal, with funding from the Nationale Postcode Loterij in the Netherlands,

“The Twenty Ten project focuses on strengthening the journalistic skills of African reporters in the fields of the printed word, photography, radio, internet and television.  The intentions are to encourage these media professionals to creatively produce reports about football in Africa and to help sell their products throughout the world.  Twenty Ten also aims to create an opportunity for the results of the project to have lasting effects on African journalism far beyond the World Cup.”

I was tipped off to the project by a fellow Oregonian now living in Amsterdam and working as the web editor for Twenty Ten.  She introduced me to some of the young African journalists and senior media professionals being sponsored to work in South Africa during the World Cup, and offered me a copy of the book that makes up one part of their work (a book with selections from pre-World Cup journalism workshops around the continent, available from KIT Publishers in Amsterdam).  They explained that in addition to the book they’ve been working collaboratively to produce journalism available on the web for reading or for purchase by larger media outlets.  While the original intention was to focus on presenting positive visions of Africa, something they do well in many pieces, the reality of South Africa 2010 has also led them to offer local perspectives on critical issues such as FIFA’s treatment of low-level workers and unemployment in South Africa.

The value of having young and promising African journalists engage with this World Cup is evident in the alternative lenses work from the Twenty Ten project offers on familiar issues.  On the diversity of Bafana Bafana, for example, Ugandan journalist Joseph Opio moves beyond the familiar and artificial black/white dichotomy to consider the integration of South Africa’s large population of Indian descent.  Or on prostitution, for another example, Nikki Rixon offers “A day in the life of a sex worker” as a powerful and humanizing photo-essay.

Likewise, the book (fully titled Africa United: The Road to Twenty Ten) offers intriguing local perspectives on stories that would likely be somewhat familiar to followers of African soccer: the role of Didier Drogba and the Cote D’Ivoire national team in national reconciliation (by Selay Marius Kouassi), the tragic plane crash that killed most of the Zambian national team on its way to a World Cup qualifier in 1993 (by Kennedy Gondwe), the inspiration provided by George Weah to war-torn Liberia (by Emmanuel Geeza Williams).  But particularly when the stories are told by journalists from the country at hand (which is not always the case in the book), the pieces offer rich local insights: on Cote D’Ivoire we hear from observers as diverse as Drogba’s mother and government ministers, on Zambia we get the contemporary story of widows struggling to support their families since promises of endowments in tribute to the crash victims have been unfulfilled, from Liberia we learn what it was like to listen to Cameroon’s legendary 1990 World Cup victories on the radio while living in a refugee camp.

There are also stories of African soccer I hadn’t heard before; I particularly enjoyed reading Joe Opio on how Idi Amin, for all the problems he caused in Uganda, managed to convince Pelé to make a three day visit in 1976 that enthralled the nation:

“The Pelé visit is remembered as a landmark event by every Ugandan with a passing interest in football.   But it isn’t the sole reason Amin, despite such an infamous contribution to humanity, holds a treasured place in the hearts of football lovers in Uganda.  Come to think of it, it isn’t even the crowning legacy of Amin’s patronage of local football.  In a success-starved nation, Amin’s reign, for all its faults, is remembered among fans as a golden era of sorts.”

Who knew?

The book is also particularly strong in its photojournalism.  The series by Joseph Moura, for example, on ‘Mother Malou,’ identified as “the first woman referee from Congo to make it to the international level,” makes for a fascinating picture of a parallel Congo where strong women dictate male worlds.  Similarly,  the series by Simone Scholtz titled “Transformations,” showing Ghanaian fans before and after painting themselves with national colors and a black star, offers evocative images of fandom as simultaneously exotic and familiar.

The work does have its limitations—the journalists are often young professionals and they start with many different languages—but the project as a whole strikes me as the type of thing we should hope for more of from this first World Cup on African soil.  “Just imagine,” suggest the book’s editors Stefan Verwer, Marc Broere and Chris de Bode, “what it would mean to the people in Africa if an African team won the World Cup.”  On the field, unfortunately, all we can do for now is to just imagine.  Off the field, hopefully, amidst the limitations and possibilities of globalization we can learn to expect more.

NEXT, published in Lagos, Nigeria. 1 July, 2010.

Photo credit: Axel Bührmann on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.