Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 252
July 6, 2018
BaGhana BaGhana
The scene was a World Cup quarter-final between Ghana and Uruguay. It turned out to be perhaps the most traumatic evening in the history of African football. With the score at 1-1 at the end of extra time, a header which was about to make Ghana���s Black Stars the first African team to reach the semi-final was handled on the goal-line by Uruguayan Luis Suarez. ��The resulting penalty was missed by Ghana���s striker Asamoah Gyan and Uruguay won a penalty shoot-out 4-2 to eliminate the Black Stars and Africa���s hopes of a top four finish. As Cameroon had done in Italy 20 years before, a talented African team had psyched itself out of reaching its potential.
Almost a decade later, the night remains a painful memory. Some of us have never forgiven Saurez and probably never will. The desire to blot it out of our minds may be one reason why no-one has ever remarked on the strange Pan-Africanism. ����
Ghana was the only African team left in the competition. The hosts, South Africa, were eliminated in the group stage (weaker host countries tend to face easier opponents in the group stage ��� Russia this year faced Egypt and Saudi Arabia ��� unless they are South Africa, which had to contend with two former World Cup winners, Uruguay and France) along with the continent���s other contenders. And so local support moved firmly to Ghana.
This was less obvious than it seems. South Africans��� attitude to the rest of the continent is deeply ambivalent: it is common to invoke Africa in arguments, less common to take seriously its people. Hostility to African immigrants is at least as virulent as in Europe. Ghanaians might be embraced as footballers but were unwelcome as new residents.
What made the solidarity more remarkable is that it crossed racial barriers. White South Africans, who attended the match in numbers, were almost universally cheering loudly for Ghana. This produced, inevitably, some odd sights.
I watched the match in a corporate box (they thought I was a journalist and I was no hurry to correct them) next to a financial journalist of British origin who did not seem a natural recruit to the anti-colonial struggle. He was wearing a Ghana scarf and shirt. My son, who supports the English team Wigan Athletic (he has an off-beat sense of humour) insisted on wearing his blue Wigan shirt whenever he watched a match featuring one of the team���s players. Since Ghana���s goalkeeper, Richard Kingson, played for Wigan, he wore the shirt. A very large white man in the next seat, who looked like he would be far more comfortable at a right-wing rally lamenting the end of apartheid, mistook it for a Uruguay shirt and harangued him for betraying Africa.
Anyone with a working knowledge of South Africa will know that a deep love of Africa���s people is not the norm among white citizens. Africans and their governments are often derided as warnings of what can go wrong when white people are not in charge. Inevitably, mainstream white attitudes also colour attitudes to African sports people ����� in those where whites still dominate, notably rugby and cricket, black players are often denigrated as beneficiaries of racial quotas. Football is often dismissed as a black sport and white interest in local leagues is low.
And yet that night���s show of white sporting Africanism was neither the first nor the last. In 1990, when Cameroon was the outstanding African team, tales were told of whites with strong Afrikaans accents (in the early 1990s these had much the same connotations as white Americans with broad Southern drawls) cheering loudly in bars for the African teams. In this tournament, the performance of African teams is discussed in anxious tones on white-run media which usually ignore the continent.
How to explain this? There are two reasons.
First, the point made earlier ��� that Africa is often a symbol. For many black South Africans who ignore the continent, it expresses black identity. To many whites, it lays a claim to part ownership of the country. During the last days of apartheid, it was common for government ideologues to insist that whites were as African ��� and so as entitled to be here – than anyone else. Much earlier, the first apartheid head of government, DF Malan, had tried to set up a Pan-African organisation ��� ��all the other members were colonial governments. So laying a claim to Africanness is important to the identity of many whites.
The second, which flows from the first, is that South Africa differs from many other racially divided societies in an important way ��� mainstream whites and blacks identify with the same country and continent, while harbouring very different ideas of what that identity means. They sing the same anthem, wave the same flag (white racists sometimes wave the old flag but this is now quite rare) and insist they are ���proudly South African���. But for whites this means keeping alive as many of the patterns of the past as possible, for most blacks it means changing them.
Much the same can be said of attitudes to Africa. For blacks, it may be the continent of a constant struggle against domination ��� for many whites it is the place of game parks, wide expanses and a colonial lifestyle kept alive by money rather than armies.
The pan-African unity of that night hid very deep divisions ��� while it was common at the time to talk of the World Cup as a ���unifier���, within weeks the racial divisions were back and Africa was again a counter in political arguments, not an object of sporting solidarity.
In South Africa, cheering for country and continent is common but the divisions which this hides remain. Whether that makes it easier or harder to end racial hierarchies is a debate for another time ��� but one which is urgently needed. ��������
Not Socrates��� Brazil
Image: Scott MacDonald (via Flickr CC)
Still celebrated in those lands without an equivalent object of pride of their own, in Brazil, the Sele����o may no longer bring the same gleam to national eyes. The country���s organic crisis has served to dull the glow of that iconic yellow jersey. A national symbol, the shirt has become an object of dispute in an intensely polarized Brazil. Would success at the World Cup go a way toward redeeming it?
It is heartening to see images of celebration on Lebanese or Jamaican or Haitian streets following another victory for the Sele����o in Russia, another step towards the Hexa. It may be the benefit of geographical distance, but that footballing gusto seems so much more uncomplicated than it does here in S��o Paulo. In this football-mad megalopolis, as elsewhere in Brazil, excitement about the World Cup has until recently been muted. Three weeks before kick-off, two-thirds of Brazilians claimed to have little or no interest in the Cup, according to a survey. Fifteen percent did not even know where it was to be held.
It may be that the most passionate Sele����o fans are anyway found elsewhere. For most Brazilians, it is club success that really gets the passions racing. It is also notable that the greatest enthusiasm for the national team is found precisely in those parts of the country without big clubs to carry their dreams of glory. The metropolises of the South-East of the country, of which S��o Paulo is the largest, is not the best gauge for national team zeal. Nevertheless, the diminished standing of the national team demands explanation; the confluence of historical, social and footballing factors laid out.
Every day another ���7×1���
If anyone abroad had to guess why we might all be down on the team, they would probably point at the albatross of ���the 7-1���; when Germany embarrassed Brazil in the semifinal of the World Cup–in Brazil. A defeat comparable ��� but still lesser in magnitude ��� to the Maracanazo of 1950, the Mineira��o of 2014 weighs on footballing psyches. However, it is not just for footballing reasons that passions may have lessened. After all, anyone who watched Tite���s Brazil storm through qualifying – beating Argentina 3-0 in Belo Horizonte or Uruguay in Montevideo 4-1 ��� could hardly fail to be a little enthused by the performances of a rejuvenated team.
Instead, the causes are more deeply rooted than the valence of recent results. As attested to by innumerable vox pops on news programmes that questioned passers-by about the lukewarm feelings, ����� a crise, n����� (it���s the crisis, innit). And what a crisis! A concatenation of street protests, economic depression, political disarray, the exposure of massive corruption, all culminating in a parliamentary coup, has left Brazilians reeling.
What began as broadly democratic but inchoate protests in 2013 and 2014 (remember that backdrop to the Confederations and World Cups?) morphed into a right-wing campaign to impeach the (by then unpopular) Workers��� Party president Dilma Rousseff. The banner raised was ���fighting corruption���; the mood, deeply anti-political; the consequence, to take down the Left ��� and perhaps democratic politics as such. Befitting protesters claiming, ���my party is Brazil��� ��� a way of casting themselves as defenders of the national interest, contra partisan leftism ��� they draped themselves in the iconic canary-yellow Brazil jersey.
Massive street protests, cheerled by most of the media, suddenly gave the shirt a new symbolic incarnation. Wearing it in 2015-16 positioned you, politically. If you were even vaguely on the Left, you wouldn���t be caught dead in it. (In the most heated days before the April 2016 impeachment, wearing a red t-shirt could conversely see you given the side-eye, or worse). But it wasn���t just a question of politics, but of class. The most visible figures ostentatiously wearing the shirt were notably richer (and whiter) than most the population. The anti-corruption protests did have a broad base of support, well beyond the protest���s upper-middle class vanguard. But the class dimension could hardly go unnoticed.
One instance went viral beyond Brazil. A white, middle class couple dressed in commemorative gold and green shirts of Rio club Flamengo (normal colours red and black), trailed by their black maid pushing the stroller. Meanwhile, huge pro-impeachment protests saw masses of (on average better-off) people wearing the official Brazil shirt. The irony of it all was that these ostensible ���anti-corruption��� warriors were flaunting the shirt of one of the most corrupt national institutions. Meanwhile, for that part of the population that remained sceptical, seeing these protests for what they were ��� or were becoming ��� this was just another hypocrisy. And the biggest hypocrisy was yet to come.
Brazil deforms
Brazil today finds itself with an unelected President with a 3% approval rating, possibly the least popular leader of a formally democratic country in the world. Following the impeachment, the government installed to purportedly fix the country and free it from its corrupt predecessor proved itself to be significantly more corrupt than the last. It has been attempting to take Brazil 20 years backwards in two.
Elections loom this October. But with the most popular candidate, Former President Lula, imprisoned and ineligible ��� and a seething anti-political mood seizing the country ��� rejection rates are stratospheric. Blank or scratched ballots lead opinion polls. Add in the ���don���t knows��� and something like 42% currently prefer no one rather than any given someone. A near-absolute majority of Brazilians believe the impeachment was a coup. And what ushered us to this point was mass mobilisations of people wearing the national team shirt.
The Brazil that may still gleam in the eyes of some countries in the global periphery and semi-periphery ��� that country symbolically exported by the Sele����o of the 1950s till the 80s ����� perhaps does not exist anymore. It is a much more sarcastic, maybe cynical place, worn down by the dashed disappointments of yet another unrealised future. Where the modernist optimism of the late 50s/early 60s was dashed by military coup, the inclusive growth of the 2000s under a benign government crashed into the wall of still-frustrated expectations, economic crisis, rising violent crime, and political ��� well, I believe this is the technical term ��� clusterfuck.
In footballing terms, this too may be a more sardonic, even angrier Brazil. To the extent one can read something into memes ��� and Brazil loves meme-ing everything ��� its visible in its new mascot Canarinho Pistola (pissed-off canary). Compare the happy-but-na��ve support/mascot/manager/Neymar of the 7-1 versus that of today.
What happened to us?
This more dogged, organised Brazil may very well win the World Cup. It may even do so with dashes of the old beauty. But it will be in moments. It is a garnish; at best, a seasoning. The Sele����o that was a world-famous testament to Brazilian innovation, technique and success, exists only in the memory. The Hexa will be won by what would merely be a successful football team; one that beat its opponents by being just a bit better than them.
What those eulogised teams of old exhibited to the world was a national style. Not only did it inaugurate a holistic way of playing, but also echoed something in the country itself, and paraded its virtues. There was verve, invention, a musicality to the play. Moreover, the teams were also in the vanguard of technical and medical preparation. Brazil today, in contrast, plays much the same as many European nations. Indeed, it feels the need to imitate in order to succeed, often to the consternation of traditionalists in Brazil. And worse, it tails European ways, always five years too late.
Of course, it may be that the aspiration to creating a national style is a vain one in today���s age of globalized football. Yes, perhaps the Spain of 2008-12 managed it ��� the only national team to achieve the sort of success and admiration conquered by the Brazil of 1958-70. But that was FC Barcelona���s creation. Spain merely nationalised it.
For a feat like that to be accomplished again would require a single club to assume a centrality in the national game impossible in Brazil. This because it is too divided by big club loyalties. But also, and more importantly, because nearly all its top talent gets exported. The Brazilian league is now just a place for interns and decrepit grandees, for promising teens and over-the-hills. Those in their prime are not those with potential. Given all this, it is hard to see Brazil creating a truly unique and beautiful footballing thing of its own that might propel the Sele����o; and win friends and influence people.
A similar feat is beyond the ken of most top footballing nations now too. But perhaps what jars so much in Brazil���s case is that this mirrors a more fundamental failure: the absence of a national project. In social, economic, political terms, the country, one feels, is up for sale. Key assets are sold to foreign investors or hoovered up by unscrupulous domestic entrepreneurs (read corrupt politicians and corrupting enterprises); all this, much like with its footballers.
Winning the country back
Now that Brazil has entered the latter stages of the Copa, your senses can not deceive you: the World Cup is on. You can see the flags, hear the honk of horns and buzz of vuvuzelas, smell the fireworks and barbecues. It���s Brazil, after all, we couldn���t help but get wrapped up in it all. And it might be a nice consolation to know that the team can still perform on the greatest stage, that something in Brazil still excels.
It is also nice that it might inspire. The admiration from Jamaica or Haiti or Lebanon is welcome. But this can only inspire an amour propre, a relational sense of self-worth. If anything, Brazil has for a long time been over-attuned to how it is seen abroad, too ready to glory or admonish itself off the back of coverage in a European or North American newsweekly. What it needs is a sense of conviction and confidence, driven by internal necessity: an amour de soi.�� Perhaps Brazil might once again be able to pursue excellence, not by imitating, but by creating something that gives voice to so much suppressed, confounded creativity.
July 5, 2018
#MeToo, Africa and the politics of transnational activism
Image Credit: International Women's Health Coalition
When #MeToo first broke on Twitter in October 2017, it focused on workplace sexual harassment in the United States, particularly against white women in the entertainment industry. As the campaign spread, some African women also joined in, particularly in Nigeria and South Africa (where it was picked up by progressive, leftist social movements). But not all African countries joined in, as the BBC showed in this report on #MeToo in Mali. To date there has been little detailed analysis of #MeToo���s impact on the African continent or how Africans relate to it.
A number of articles in international media and other publications have labelled #MeToo a ���global��� movement capable of freeing women from sexual violence. For example, in the UK���s conservative Telegraph, reporter Louise Burke wrote that #MeToo ���exposed an epidemic of sexual assault and harassment across every corner of the world and unbottled a collective fury which can no longer be contained. Any notion that it is a short-lived Western fad can safely be dismissed.��� Burke referenced the case of Jennifer Ferguson, a former ANC MP and also a singer, who had accused ANC politician and South African Football Association (SAFA) president, Danny Jordaan, of raping her 24 years earlier.
Separately, a piece in Time.com noted that #MeToo had brought hope to women in other countries. ���In far-off places, thousands of miles from Hollywood or Washington, D.C., expectations are rising among millions of forgotten women that today���s scandals might effect positive change in their workplaces. From Vietnam to India, women want this galvanizing moment to spark a global movement.��� The piece, by Michelle Nunn of CARE USA, a humanitarian NGO, proposed that more men be involved in campaigns against harassment. ���In Egypt, Tuk Tuk taxi drivers notoriously harass women passengers and those they pass on the street. We recruit these young men drivers to send a different message: that abusing and harassing their country���s sisters, wives and mothers isn���t just wrong, but a violation of their own values. Today, increasing numbers of drivers are becoming champions for women ��� a key to change.���
But the majority of international media coverage of #MeToo has been dominated by major news outlets like CNN whose framing of the word ���global��� has centred on the involvement of certain countries���notably the US, the UK, France and to some extent India and China, with scarcely a mention of Africa and the Middle East. In its early coverage, CNN did not cite a single African #MeToo champion in a piece in which it sought to show how the movement was traveling globally. The Washington Post committed a similar faux pas by highlighting women change agents from all major regions of the world except Africa in an article on the ���global wave��� of #MeToo. Africa has tended to feature in global media coverage either in vague references or via stereotyped images of poor, helpless women whereas the reality is complicated. The question thus begs, how global is a Western-derived movement that purports to save women everywhere without understanding fully the intersections and narratives that embody their diverse experiences and positionalities, both within and across countries?
Cormac Smith, in a post on this site, has suggested the sexual harassment crisis is more acute on the African continent than anywhere else: ������ The prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence in Africa has been deeply troubling with significantly higher rates of prevalence compared to Western countries.��� ��Smith pointed to lack of access to internet facilities (and by extension social media) or essential health services, as reason for the absence of continental movements on sexual harassment.
Another, larger, problem is that movements that start in the ���West��� take it upon themselves to speak for and set free oppressed people in other parts of the world. These Western movements have the capacity and capital to shape debates. Humanitarian and environmental campaigns are good case studies. Many of these campaigns that begin in African countries are later co-opted in the process of transnationalisation; ie they are taken over by Westerners. The Blood Diamonds campaign, written about here by Liberian journalist and media scholar, Lansana Gberie, is a clear example. The writer Teju Cole has been more direct. He referred to this phenomenon as the ���white savior (industrial) complex��� (at the time of the Kony 2002 campaign). In the case of #MeToo, tagging it as the vanguard in the global fight against sexual harassment implies that the problem didn���t come into sight until ���the West��� named it.
Spotlighting movements like #MeToo has a way of obstructing our vision of longstanding mobilisations on the ground in other parts of the world against the same issues.�� As much as transnational activism agendas are set in the ���West,��� a lot of significant movements tackling the same issues���even long before #Metoo���went on or are going on elsewhere.�� A ban on miniskirts in Uganda in 2014 led to men assaulting women in public for being ���indecently dressed��� and the subsequent #MyDressMyChoice protests, including in Kenya, against the sexualisation of women���s bodies and sexual violence.
In Nigeria in 2015, #BeingFemaleinNigeria galvanised conversation among Nigerian women (including in the diaspora) about everyday experiences of sexism. It inspired the creation of the Facebook group Female IN (originally Female in Nigeria) by Lola Omolola, a US-based Nigerian woman, where women in at least 17 countries (as of mid-2017) shared experiences of sexual harassment and violence, among other things, and began to stand up individually and collectively take action against it in real life.
Also in 2015, South Africa���s #NakedProtests by mainly Black women confronted university authorities��� inaction on campus rapes within a broader frame of resistance against high rates of sexual violence in the country. And in July 2018 in Uganda, women marched under the hashtag #WomenMarchUG.
In their own ways, each of these actions framed the same issues around violations of the female body that go to the core of #MeToo but did not receive the same international support or attention. Global media coverage has an undisputable influence on what gets people���s attention, but beyond that, global protest audiences should not take this disparity for granted.��Digital activism can make it easier to spot and synchronise parallel debates on similar topics. It may also help locate the origins of activism and prevent agency appropriation.
As a survivor of sexual abuse and a Black African feminist activist and intellectual, my own reactions to #MeToo and the journalism around it on Africa and #MeToo were mixed. I felt some shock that a successful Hollywood career did not shield women from abuse, particularly in a context where women appear to have more liberties than most and on the surface appeared more powerful. But on another level I was also not surprised, knowing as I do that Nigerian women have resisted oppression and violence both publicly and privately for many decades.
#Metoo doesn’t seem to have created the same breadth of space for public debate across Africa as it did in the ���West.��� Although national media outlets across Africa picked up the stories, the depth of public conversations seemed to vary according to the scope of the sexual violence problem per country. Thus coverage seemed more diffuse and intense in South Africa compared to Ghana, for example. Other factors that came up in a public dialogue at Webster University-Ghana in mid-April 2018, include cultural practices that normalize sexual aggression toward women and girls, a lack of effective structures and redress, and some level of ignorance or indifference to everyday sexism by women themselves. Of equal weight are the vicious backlash and victim-blaming and shaming that can derail women���s quest for justice. This is what forced 19-year-old Ewuraffe Orleans Thompson to withdraw rape allegations against Ghanaian entertainer Kwasi Kyei Darkwah in January 2015.
It is also difficult to establish #MeToo as a catalyst for national-level debates about sexual violence in some contexts. In Ghana, for example, young feminist group Pepper Dem Ministries has been leading conversation around signs of gender inequality since September 2017���at least one month before #MeToo was first tweeted. The group picked up on the debates surrounding #MeToo numerous times on Facebook and Twitter. In one instance, it used #MeToo as a prompt for Ghanaian women to share their own stories (it didn���t get many responses). However, the group is largely a continuation of a long history of gender activism and feminist politics in Ghana that stretches back to postcolonial times.
Since we don���t yet know enough about how digital activism influences state policy and action, expectations that #MeToo will catalyse global change are at best tenuous. As South African activist Makganwana Mokgalong writes in a reflection on #MeToo in her country, revelation alone doesn���t bring change – persistent on-the-ground confrontations of misogyny does.
I���m also left with another question about reciprocity in transnational activism. Would white women in the US have supported #MeToo in the same way if it had been started by women elsewhere in the world? Why was international support for #BringBackOurGirls poised on the West saving girls and women living under Muslim law and not as the making of a global movement around sexual violence in conflict? Is it enough to translate hashtags like #MeToo into local languages? Or do we need we need a better language ��� not a hashtag ��� ��to discuss effecting real change?
The search for football talent in Africa
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A Football Dreams tryout in Thie��s, Senegal. Image by the author.
One of Senegal’s breakout stars in their unlucky Russia 2018 World Cup campaign (like the other African teams in the Cup, they didn’t make it to the Round of 16; in Senegal’s case, because they had more yellow cards than Japan), was Moussa Wague. In Senegal’s second group match, a 2-2 draw with Japan, 19 year old Wague announced his presence in international football with a thumping shot in the 71st minute to give Senegal the 2-1 lead. Meanwhile, Nigeria picked another 19 year old in goal:��Francis Uzoho. He was impressive in Nigeria’s 2-0 victory over Iceland and was unlucky against Argentina. Wague and Uzoho have a lot in common. They both play for a small Belgian club KAS Eupen, a club with mostly African players in its first team. And Wague and Uzoho got to Belgium via Aspire Academy, an elite sports academy in Qatar. What does Eupen have in common in Aspire? KAS Eupen is owned by a Qatar sheikh. So is Aspire. The journalist Sebastian Abbot’s new book,��The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer’s Next Superstars��(the UK edition was published today by Arena Books), traces these connections, especially the story of Aspire Academy, and their impacts on African football, especially in West Africa. (Wague and Uzoho are not its only standout graduates; others are the Senegalese��Diawandou Diagne, briefly at FC Barcelona, and Nigerian Henry Onyekuru at Everton and Anderlecht). What follows is a conversation via email.
You write that your book is “not simply a story of European scouts chasing future African stars. It’s also a tale of rich Arab sheikhs who play football on their place grounds, South American wonder kids who grow up to become legends, and small town European fans worried about the takeover of their little local club.”
Football Dreams is the largest talent search in football history (likely in the history of all sports). It started in 2007 because one of the world���s richest men, Sheikh Jassim Bin Hamad Al Thani, heir to Qatar���s throne at the time, was desperate to help his country produce a world-class football team. Sheikh Jassim was a massive football fan and had his own private, perfectly manicured field inside the royal palace complex in Doha.
Qatar, which is rich in oil and gas, had no shortage of cash, and Sheikh Jassim began his quest by spending over a billion dollars to build one of the most high-tech sports academies in the world called Aspire. But the tiny desert kingdom only had a couple hundred thousand citizens at the time and was seriously short on players.
To solve the problem, Sheikh Jassim enlisted the services of a Spanish scout, Josep Colomer, who helped launch the career of one of the greatest players in history, Lionel Messi. Colomer, a former youth director at football juggernaut FC Barcelona, was convinced he could find the players Sheikh Jassim needed in Africa, a continent with a billion people wild about football.
While Africa has produced some of Europe���s biggest football stars in recent years, including Cameroon���s Samuel Eto���o and Ivory Coast���s Didier Drogba, Colomer believed these players were just the tip of a massive iceberg of talent. With Qatar���s backing, Colomer launched Football Dreams in 2007 and over the course of the next decade held tryouts for over 5 million 13-year-old boys, mostly in Africa, looking for potential superstars.
Each year, the scouts selected a handful of boys and trained them to become professionals. While at the academy, the boys took on the world���s top youth teams, like Barcelona and Manchester United, and often crushed them. In fact, one group beat Brazil���s Under-16 national team even though the Brazilian squad featured Neymar and Coutinho, two of the glitziest stars at this summer���s World Cup.
To spur the players��� development, Qatar also bought a small club in Belgium that could serve as a farm team for the Football Dreams kids and prepare them to play at Europe���s biggest clubs. The residents of Eupen, a town of only 20,000 people, woke up one day to discover that their local team, the Pandas, was now owned by an Arab country they knew little about and filled with African teenagers. That definitely didn���t go down well with everyone.
Football Dreams was like nothing the sports world had ever seen.
Football Dreams tried out 430,000 players from seven African countries and��in the end��picked 24 players. From that it whittled it down to 3 infield players from each country and 3 goalkeepers. Can you go over how the project picked those players?
Before launching Football Dreams, Josep Colomer spent months traveling across Africa to set up the vast network of nearly 6,000 local staff needed to carry out the project. That���s the same number of people needed to operate an aircraft carrier. During the first year of Football Dreams, Colomer and his team scouted over 400,000 13 year-old boys in seven African countries by holding over 26,000 games at nearly 600 fields, many of them nothing more than rough patches of dirt.
At each field, local organizers registered 800 kids for the tryouts. Many of these organizers were local coaches who ran the thousands of small, informal football schools that dot neighborhoods across Africa. To enlist their support, Colomer and his team distributed thousands of dollars of free Nike gear at each of the fields where they held tryouts. Volunteers were also given a free trip to Doha if one of their boys was selected for the final tryout, a big perk since many had never traveled outside their countries before.
These volunteers held initial tryouts to identify the best 176 kids at each field before foreign scouts arrived to pick the top 50 players from across the country for a four-day final in the capital. Aspire then flew in another set of foreign scouts for the finals so they could provide an independent assessment and pick the three best field players from the country for the last tryout in Doha, which lasted several weeks. They also picked the three best goalkeepers from across the countries for the final tryout.
One of the disappointing stories in the book is that of Bernard Appiah, a young midfielder who is compared to the Ghanaian legend, Stephen Appiah (no relation), who played for Juventus and Fenerbache. But Bernard’s life ended in disappointment and highlights the role of football agents and local club owners who believe they’re owed a stake in a player’s contract if he presumably makes it with a big European club? It also implicates the��Ghanaian Football Association, whose chairman,��Kwesi Nyantakyi, was exposed for taking cash bribes. He is gone now. Will things improve?
I don���t see things improving anytime soon given the desperation of players to make it to Europe and the vast sums of money at stake if they do. Local coaches in many parts of Africa prowl schoolyards and other neighborhood pitches looking for the best young players they can find and often buy the rights to them at a very young age, hoping to strike it rich if one of them makes it to Europe.
Bernard Appiah is a prime example. Here���s an excerpt from my book about his background:
Bernard first began turning coaches��� heads as a young child in the dirt courtyard of his school in Teshie. The large open space was an oasis for kids seeking an escape from the chaotic web of humanity and commerce outside. The area where Bernard grew up was dominated by a sea of small ramshackle homes and shops made of wood, concrete, and metal. They were set along a maze of red dirt roads shared by a tangle of cars, bikes, wooden carts, pedestrians, traders, chickens, and goats. Noxious green sewage seeped down some of the town���s dirt alleyways. The assault on the senses was softened only slightly by the presence of an occasional palm tree. The ocean and its cooling breeze weren���t far away, but it was easy to forget amid the bustle.
A local coach, Seth Ali, first spotted Bernard playing football at his school in a pair of old tennis shoes when he was about 8 years old. Even then, he stood out for his speed, control in tight spaces, and ability to take on players with his dominant left foot. Ali convinced Bernard and his parents that he should join his team, the Top Stars, and the midfielder quickly impressed his new teammates. Tornado, they called him, because of his work rate in practice. It was a nickname he shared with one of Ghana���s most famous players, Stephen Appiah, a midfielder who played for Juventus and captained Ghana���s national team, the Black Stars, in the 2006 World Cup. Bernard also dreamed of playing for the national team one day. A red, yellow, and green Ghanaian flag with its distinctive black star waved in the courtyard of Bernard���s school, where the Top Stars practiced.
Ali had more enthusiasm than resources, a constant problem for football coaches in Africa. He only had two balls for the 50 kids he was training, so they spent a lot of their time simply running around in the dust. But he clearly knew who his best player was. ���People were always talking about Bernard,��� said Ali. ���He was the best player in every game, always the best player.��� It was clear to his teammates as well. ���He was raised from nowhere to become a star,��� said his good friend and teammate Joshua Lartey. ���His free kicks, penalties, passes, are all incredible.��� But Ali had a problem. He needed money to buy jerseys and equipment. That���s how Justice Oteng, the coach who first told Bernard about the Football Dreams tryout, came into the picture.��
Oteng was putting together a new team, Unique FC, to play in Ghana���s youth Colts League, and he needed players. He spotted Bernard playing in the schoolyard and approached Ali to buy him and over half a dozen other players from the Top Stars for his team. It was an example of the booming economy for even the youngest football players in Africa. Local coaches, many of whom have no formal training, hope to get rich by finding a kid who is good enough to play at a top club in Europe. Some people see these coaches as villains out to exploit young players. Others believe they���re vital because they help fund grassroots football throughout Africa. There���s truth on both sides, but the potential for abuse is very real.
Unfortunately, conflicts can surface over time between what���s best for players and the local coaches seeking to profit from them, and these conflicts can hamper players��� careers, as happened to Bernard.
Is it a fair criticism to suggest football academies prevent national associations to get their houses in order. Basically, that the academies do the hard work of developing players that the associations can’t or won’t do. As evidence for this argument: so many Aspire Academy players ended up in national youth teams.
I guess that���s one way to look at it, although private academies in many places in the world play a huge role in preparing young players who eventually play for their national teams. Think of how many players on Spain���s winning World Cup team in 2010 came from Barcelona���s academy. Of course, national academies can also play a large role, like Clairefontaine in Paris which helped set the stage for France���s World Cup victory in 1998 and also developed several key players on the country���s current World Cup squad.
The problem in Africa has historically been that there haven���t been significant resources at either the public or private level dedicated to developing young players to represent their countries, although that is slowly changing with the proliferation of private academies in some parts of the continent like Right to Dream in Ghana and G��n��ration Foot in Senegal.
Can you talk about age cheating? It is a big character in the book. Everyone seems to know about it. What is your view of it? Is it an inevitable part of the game. Of course, Africans aren’t unique in this, but it does seem to be present disproportionately in the African game.
Age cheating is a huge problem as outlined in this section of my book:
One of the biggest problems in youth football in Africa, and in many other parts of the developing world, has been age cheating, kids saying they���re much younger than they are so they will have an advantage over other players. Imagine throwing a college-age player in with a bunch of middle schoolers, and you get the idea. Age cheating is so common in Africa that it���s not unusual to hear coaches say things like, ���The boy is 17, but his football age is 13,��� although not when they���re worried about being overheard. Using birth certificates or passports to verify a player���s age is often futile because they are so easily faked, or real ones are generated using false information.��
Many football officials believe age cheating has been one of the biggest impediments to an African country winning the World Cup, as Pel�� predicted would happen decades ago. Although several African nations, especially Nigeria and Ghana, have had great success at the Under-17 and Under-20 versions of the tournament, many of the players who participated were never heard from again because they were much older than advertised. They couldn���t hack it when they tried to compete against world-class players their own age.��
The problem continues to plague African football because players are so desperate to make it to Europe they will do anything it takes, including lie about their age to appear better than they are. Others who stand to benefit are usually onboard as well, like their coaches, families, and even federation officials who might make a bit of money from a transfer. Piercing this veil of lies can be difficult, especially when it comes to determining a player���s exact age. But it���s usually possible to deduce whether a player is significantly older than he says by asking him and those around him enough indirect questions that help peel back the lies. Still, it���s a huge problem. ���Age fraud is more serious than doping,��� said Saer Seck, one of the founders of Diambars academy in Senegal.��
Again, given the money at stake in the sport, I���m not surprised players will do anything it takes to give them a chance to make it to Europe. I think age cheating will remain an issue in Africa and other parts of the world until digitization of public records makes it much more difficult to falsify a player���s age.
Pele predicted that an African team would win the World Cup by 2000. That came and went, including at this World Cup. What are some factors why not? And what are things that need to be in place for that to become a reality?
As I mentioned above, age cheating has definitely been one of the factors holding the development of African players and teams back. Another problem has been the relative absence of high-level youth academies. Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski came to this same conclusion in their book Footballnomics: ���To win at sports, you need to find, develop and nurture talent,��� they wrote. ���Doing that requires money, know-how, and some kind of administrative infrastructure. Few African countries have any.�����
Most African kids train at the thousands of informal football schools that dot neighborhoods across Africa, under the guidance of coaches who often have no formal training and very few resources. There aren���t many high-quality academies offering the kind of training a young player might find in Europe.
The shortage of top-notch academies is mainly driven by a lack of resources, a problem exacerbated by corruption at all levels of African football.��That corruption was in full view ahead of the Russia World Cup as Nyantaki was caught on film taking a bribe and resigned.
Until African officials stop lining their pockets with money that could be spent identifying and developing the best young talent the continent has to offer, dreams of an African nation winning the World Cup will remain elusive.
It would also help if African nations had more spots at the World Cup. Currently, only five African teams make it into the tournament compared to 13 from Europe. That will rise to nine from Africa in 2026 (and 16 from Europe), but some have called for even more spots for African teams which would increase the chance of a team from the continent winning.
Aspire Academy is an extension of Qatari soft power. However, it doesn’t seem to be doing as well as the kingdom’s other soft power instruments like the TV channel Al Jazeera (including BeIN SPORTS) or��the kingdom’s past association with FC Barcelona.
Qatar has used its immense wealth to buy a place on the world stage in many different ways. As you reference above, the country launched Al Jazeera in 1996, and it quickly became the most important news service in the Arab world. Qatar also engaged in a flurry of international mediation efforts in places like Libya, Lebanon, and Yemen; snapped up some of the world���s most iconic businesses and valuable real estate, like Harrods department store in London and Europe���s tallest skyscraper, the Shard; and became one of the world���s biggest buyers of art, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on works by major artists ranging from Paul C��zanne to Damien Hirst.��
These were certainly effective ways to attract attention, but media, politics, business, and the arts weren���t enough. What Qatar���s rulers truly craved was success in the world���s most popular game. International football is in many ways the ultimate soft power instrument. It offered Qatar a route to market the country to billions of people around the globe in a way that could transcend differences in politics, culture, and religion. Qatar���s rulers knew that if the country could make a splash in international football, the rest of the world was bound to stand up and take notice. Aspire Academy and Football Dreams fit squarely into that vision, as did Qatar���s bid to host the World Cup, its acquisition of PSG and its decision to sponsor Barcelona.
Qatar���s forays into international football have had varying degrees of success. The country of course won the bid to host the 2022 World Cup, but it turned into a PR nightmare for the country. Its acquisition of PSG and sponsorship of Barcelona were arguably more effective, although PSG has yet to take home the ultimate prize, a Champions League trophy, and Qatar is no longer Barcelona���s sponsor following unhappiness from fans at the club���s affiliation with the country.
It���s fair to say that Aspire and Football Dreams haven���t had the impact that Sheikh Jassim and Josep Colomer initially dreamed. Qatar once again failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, and Football Dreams has yet to produce the superstars the organizers initially imagined. The bottom line is that money can buy many things (expensive art, glitzy real estate, top European clubs and maybe even a World Cup), but building a world-class national team out of a tiny population and uncovering the next Messi in Africa are extremely difficult even with seemingly endless wealth.
Can you talk about Qatar’s football history. You suggest there is not much there? Does this mean Qatar would break new records for a World Cup host’s performance in the World Cup? (South Africa currently holds that record)
Qatar���s football history is indeed pretty limited as outlined in this excerpt of my book:
Foreign oil workers first brought the sport to the country in the late 1940s. They played in the sand near the western city of Dukhan, where the first well was located, and reportedly used oil to line the field. The country officially started its league in 1973, but relatively few Qataris played. Football had to compete with traditional sports like camel racing and falconry. Many players in the league were from other Middle Eastern countries and the Indian subcontinent, definitely not football powerhouses. Over time, football became the most popular sport in the country, but that mainly meant locals watching European games on TV. There were still relatively few Qataris who played or watched the country���s mediocre clubs. These teams often competed in front of a couple hundred fans in gleaming stadiums built for much larger crowds, even after the government pumped millions of dollars into the league in the early 2000s to attract aging stars like Pep Guardiola, the former captain of Barcelona who would go on to become the club���s most successful coach in history.
By failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, Qatar has already ensured that it will break one record. It will be the first host country to never have qualified for the World Cup. How it does in the tournament remains to be seen. Russia, ranked 70th in the world by FIFA, has surprised many people by doing much better at the 2018 World Cup than predicted. But Qatar is much lower in the rankings, at 98th, so it would need to beat some very long odds to do well in 2022.
Is it fair to argue that Aspire Academy’s search for an African Messi was quixotic from the start?
It���s incredibly difficult for a player to make it to the sport���s top level at all, much less go on to become a superstar. Only half a percent of the kids who join a Premier League academy at the Under-9 level end up making it to the club���s first team. That���s one in 200 kids. The numbers aren���t much better for young players hoping to make a living in the sport at any level. Only around 1 percent of the 10,000 kids in the entire English academy system will make a living in the game, and two-thirds of those given a professional contract at age 18 are out of professional football by the time they���re 21 years old.
These odds show just how difficult it was for Football Dreams to find the next Messi in Africa. Even though the program held tryouts for millions of boys, they only ended up taking about 20 a year into the academy. Given how difficult it is to identify which young player has the potential to become a star, producing the next Messi out of this pool would have been akin to winning the lottery.
Qatar has naturalized top sportspeople to compete for the nation in the Olympics and in some other sports like handball. Why not football? It seems they tried in individual cases, but not systematically? Right?
Qatar has actually naturalized quite a few foreign players from Africa and South America. When the country surprisingly won the 2006 Asian Games, its best players were a Uruguayan striker, a Senegalese defender, and a Senegalese goalkeeper. This process has continued, and when Qatar���s team takes the field for the 2022 World Cup, there are bound to be a significant number of naturalized players on the squad. These players won���t necessarily come from Football Dreams though because Qatar faced so much pressure to let the kids play for their home countries. It���s easier for Qatar to naturalize African players who aren���t in the Football Dreams spotlight.
The book emphasizes the impact of pickup football on a player’s ability to succeed in the top flight. Can you talk about that?
Researchers have found that one of the most important predictors of a young player���s success is game intelligence. After all, being the fastest dribbler on the pitch or the best passer isn���t going to do a player much good if he doesn���t know what to do with the ball or where to position himself to be effective.��
One of the best stories illustrating the power of game intelligence involves Diego Maradona. It was told by Jorge Valdano, who was on the field when Maradona scored his famous goal in the 1986 World Cup by dribbling through half the English team. As Maradona sprinted from the halfway line to goal, Valdano kept pace alongside him in the center forward position, expecting a pass but never receiving one. After the game, Maradona came to see Valdano in the locker room and apologized for not giving him the ball. Maradona said he had originally planned to pass, but as he neared goal, he remembered a similar situation against the English keeper seven years earlier. He failed to score then, and as he weaved through the English team at the World Cup, he realized where he made his mistake. Maradona concluded he didn���t need Valdano and could score by himself. Amazingly, he was able to call up this memory, process it, and execute the right decision in just seconds, while dribbling at full speed in one of the highest- pressure environments in football. The story, published by the football magazine The Blizzard, prompted a former Ajax team manager to note that ���the seconds of the greats last longer than those of normal people.���
Stars like Maradona build up the database of memories needed to drive this game intelligence, as well as the technical skill to put it to work, by playing football for thousands of hours. But not all play is equal. Scientists have discovered that one type of training in particular is most useful in developing game intelligence and preparing young players to become professionals. They have found that the key ingredient is not how much formal practice or how many official games players had as kids, but how much pickup football they played in informal settings like the street or schoolyard. Researchers believe this type of training helps build game intelligence and hone technique because it creates the opportunity for players to experiment with different skills and tactics in an unstructured environment, leading to better anticipation and decision making.
How difficult it is for an African player to get into a European club system before he is eighteen?
Due to FIFA���s regulations, players from Africa are not officially allowed to move to Europe to join a club until they���re 18. The main exception is if a player���s parents move to the new country for non-football reasons. But many clubs have been known to dance around the regulations or break them outright to get underage players they want. The NGO Foot Solidaire estimates that thousands of underage players are shuttled out of West Africa every year with dreams of making it at clubs in Europe and elsewhere. Almost all fail, and many find themselves stranded in Europe. FIFA recently started cracking down on the flow of underage players and handed transfer bans to Barcelona and Real Madrid. But it remains to be seen how much this punishment deters the practice.
Despite the racist outburst by West Ham’s director of player recruitment in January 208 about African players��(he said African players “cause mayhem” when they are not in the team),��European clubs who used to be reluctant to sign African players now have African players at the heart of their teams. What changed?
Hopefully it means racism has declined despite the continued outbursts. It���s also impossible to deny the transformational effect that African players like Samuel Eto���o, Didier Drogba, Yaya Tour��, Sadio Man�� and others have had on their respective teams in Europe, so any club with a reluctance to sign African players would be at a severe competitive disadvantage. ��
Brazil is an Island
Image by the author.
200 Jamaican dollars [US$2.00] can get you a flag of any of the competing nations in the FIFA 2018 World Cup on the streets of Kingston. Some have flexible white plastic poles anchored by suctions that allow fans to proudly display their favorites from the roofs of their vehicles. Most will spend their short lives loosely fitted with cellophane tape to radio antennae or bonnets or simply splayed across dashboards. The delicate dance of the players looking for passage to their netted destination on pitches across Russia now has parody on Jamaica���s busiest streets, as Argentina taxis zig-zag their way in between muscular French SUVs and mid-sized German panel vans. Jamaicans are a football obsessive people and flag displays indicate just how far that devotion runs. Some of the Chinese-made flags were fluttering worn and weary by day two of the tournament.
Flag love can betray the progress of the competition. German flags have all but disappeared after being seen in profusion in the clutch of stoplight sellers as early as May. Those who live in denial still keep their Argentina flags close to hand. And then there are the wagonists, those whose football patriotism���and flags���change with the outcome of each fixture.
Wagonists and displaced nationals alike save their most demonstrative love for Brazil. Brazilian flags outnumber all the others by a considerable margin. Some motorists display up to four or more flags on their vehicles, in the spokes of motorcycle wheels and aloft their roadside cook shops. The real obsessives go even further. Shirts, wrist-bands, jerseys, wigs; you name it. Someone has fashioned something out of the Bandeira. It helps that Brazil���s colors are close to the Jamaican black, gold and green. The colors all blend naturally in the hot blue summer.
Jamaican devotion to The Golden Squad runs deep into twentieth century past. If one could date it, it would be the 24th of June 1958. On that warm night Jamaicans pricked their ears to scratchy radios to hear British commentary of a 17 year old wizard simply named Pele, deftly dribbling past the French defense and into the history books. They had to imagine what his play looked like. TV was still a few years into the future. Pele was collectively formed out of voice and emotion. His hat trick and the rush of ecstasy that poured through the speakers and into the Jamaican imagination made him from the first unworldly. Above all these black British subjects���Jamaica was still a colony then, four years away from independence��� celebrated the dazzle that emitted from black feet drifting through European columns. From then Brazil became fused with Jamaica for enchanted football lovers.
Those with long memories remember well when the man himself played in Jamaica in the fall of 1975. It was his second visit to the island. Pele was then a member of the New York Cosmos and the beautiful game���s most revered ambassador. His easy smile, which always made him seem as if he was your best friend even if you had never met him, won over Jamaicans. It cleverly camouflaged his natural talent filed sharp by relentless practice. In his mid-thirties he may have been past his prime but still regarded as the greatest footballer of all time.
Pele and Allan ‘Skill’ Cole, Jamaica’s greatest footballer of his generation.Pele���s 1975 trip to Jamaica was one of several goodwill tours with the Cosmos. Before Kingston he played two games in Haiti, another Caribbean place that sees Brazil whenever it looks in the mirror. Jamaicans gave the king a hero���s welcome. From the airport, where he arrived on private jet, he went to visit Prime Minister Michael Manley, passing lines of adoring fans along the way. He met the press and public afterwards where an awestruck young fan asked, him, ���Is there any footballer greater than you?��� Pele���s response: ���Only one, my father.���
The match, which took place on the night of September 21, was billed as the ���Battle of the Giants.��� Pele led the Cosmos on one side. On the other, Jamaica���s giant: Alan Cole. A legend in his time, Cole had earned his stripes as a magical schoolboy player and then an astonishing club forward. His talents were enormous. Cole had an unmatchable ability to read plays before they occurred, and was always in total command of the field. He had also reached further than any other Jamaican footballer of his generation. Cole had experience in the North American league in the late sixties. In 1972-73 he briefly played for Nautico in Brazil alongside Marinho, Brazil���s star left back of the 1974 World Cup. Cole could have gone further still but decided to return home. He helmed Jamaica���s Santos FC when they first met Pele on home turf in 1971. He was only 21 years old then. More mature, seasoned, and famous in 1975, ���Skill��� as he was popularly known, was the ���Golden Pearl��� to Pele���s ���Black Pearl.���
The thousands of Jamaican fans who filled up the seats in the National Stadium believed they were seeing the closest thing they would ever experience to a World Cup match. The roar that greeted Pele and Cole when they touched the field was deafening. For all its hype the game was lackluster. The King was not in fine form, nor was his team. An hour into the game Pele, predictably, fell victim to a hard tackle.�� He limped off the field, leaving fans to endure the rest of an aimless game that saw Santos take the trophy with a 1-0 scoreline.
None of this did anything to daunt Jamaican attachment to Brazilian football. In fact it expanded after that. The 1978 and 1982 World Cup squads were lionized. Schoolboys could recite on the spot the names of every player on the sela����o and their positions. Parents passed their Brazilian devotion unto their children. Some even named their sons after the players, spawning a generation of ��ders, Zicos, and much later, Ronaldos. Even Bob Marley, a renown football fanatic, player, and Skill Cole���s close friend, proclaimed to the world his ���Jamaicanness��� by wearing a Brazil team jersey onstage.
Jamaicans, to be sure, are not blind followers. They cursed in between winces at the team���s destruction by Germany on home soil in 2014, a leveling all true fans would rather forget. They cheer on African teams every four years. They rallied behind homeboy John Barnes who played for England in 1986 and 1990. They chanted loudly for their own Reggae Boys squad in 1998 and Trinidad and Tobago���s Soca Warriors in 2006. This is more than national, Caribbean or racial pride. It is the eternal thrill that comes from holding breath for the victory of the formerly ruled over their former rulers. Few expect other black teams to advance past the first round, so they also expect the first round infatuation to fade fast. Brazil, always counted among the formerly ruled, has supplied more victories than any other side: five wins and it is today the leading goal scoring nation in the tournament���s history. This legacy strengthens the bond Jamaicans have with Brazil.
In World Cup 2018, the most unpredictable contest in recent memory, teams and their flags come and go but Brazil love reigns supreme in Jamaica. Overheard in a local restaurant was the opinion of a young man who decided he would champion an underdog nation for no other reason than as an act of rebellion. Supporting Brazil, he said, would be ���too Jamaican.���
Brazil���s advance to the quarter finals after its victory against Mexico���the team���s most impressive performance so far in the tournament���may turn those like him back to their Jamaican roots. Hours after the win Jamaicans on the capital���s streets were beating their chests assuring that this year ���tek we a go tek it home��� (we will be bringing the Cup back ���home���).
This week, Kingston���s street sellers are stocking up on Brazilian flags knowing they will sell faster than patties now. The quarter-final match with Belgium on Friday, July 6, will be tense and may even be surprising. Win or lose in the long view it will provide another occasion for Jamaicans to gather together in the middle of a busy day to cross their fingers, smile, hug each other, stay off the streets, text friends abroad, talk to strangers, cancel appointments, drink a Red Stripe, outwax the commentators, dance, sing and wave their flags. On this island, which is always in need of healthy distraction, football is King and everyone at heart is a Brazilian.
When the war is over
Damage from the Civil War in Duekou in the west of Cote d'Ivoire, February 2011, Image Michael Fleshman
���I���m so fed up, I would happily go and fight with the jihadists in Mali,��� a former Forces Nouvelles (FN) fighter declares to me during an interview in Korhogo, northern Cote d���Ivoire in November 2017. The interview was one of many in which ex-combatants expressed anger and frustration with the failings of the demobilization, disarmament and reintegration (DDR) program implemented by the UN and the Ivorian government from 2011 to 2015.
The FN were one of the main protagonists in a conflict fought against the government of Laurent Gbagbo and several of his militias between 2002 and 2011. The FN ruled the north of the country during this time and at its height comprised 33,000 members. The conflict, fought primarily as a result of the perceived marginalisation of northern people who were often viewed as not being ���Ivorian���, ended after a particularly brutal round of conflict in the aftermath of the 2010 presidential election. President Gbagbo refused to step down after the poll, which he was declared to have lost. This prompted clashes around the country, leaving around 3,000 people dead and eventually resulting in UN, French and FN troops bringing the now government, led by northerner Alassane Ouattara, to power.
In the most extreme cases these FN ex-combatants have called for revenge and violence against the current government because of their failure to adequately reintegrate them and keep promises made to them at the end of the conflict.
This feeling chimed with analysis made in a 2016 report by NGO Interpeace. The peacebuilding organization argued that ex-combatants who were demobilised in Cote d���Ivoire in 2011 remain a significant risk to peace.
The report added that ex-combatants who have been well-trained in weapons and poorly demobilized represent a breeding ground for violence and mobilization. ��
And yet, there is no evidence of large-scale remobilization taking place in Cote d���Ivoire. Also, despite there being a raging conflict over the border in Mali, there are very few reports of ex-combatants going to fight in that conflict either.
As my interviewee in Korhogo pointed out, fighting in Mali presents a fine opportunity for many demobilized ex-combatants who are desperate for money and a job. Many Malians fought in Cote d���Ivoire���s conflict before returning home and business and family ties are common between Ivorians in northern Cote d���Ivoire and Malians.
So, why is remobilisation so scarce? What is it that is preventing former fighters taking up arms again in Cote d���Ivoire? And why are ex-combatants threatening to remobilise if they are not actually doing it?
Based on research with around 30 former FN fighters in post-conflict Cote d���Ivoire, I have found that ex-combatants��� approaches to remobilisation are typically shaped by their experience of their first conflict. The primary combat encounter has a long-lasting impact on former fighter���s identities and their attitudes to violence, and in the case of Cote d���Ivoire, this creates something of a barrier to remobilization.
For example, most Ivorian combatants thought of themselves as peacekeepers, rather than rebels. They were the ones who had installed the current government in power, ending the nine year on-off conflict and bringing peace to the country. Rather than being unruly mercenaries, they viewed themselves as noble warriors. ���We are the peace,��� exclaimed one ex-combatant during an interview, clearly a sentiment that is at odds with the prospect of remobilization.
The ex-Forces Nouvelles fighters are eager to point out that they fought for a clear objective in the conflict in their own country. They wanted to end the oppression of northerners in Cote d���Ivoire, which they believe they achieved. They now have the impression that fighting in a conflict requires clear objectives, and much as they need the money, being a mercenary is perceived to be beneath them. This is particularly the case with regards to Mali, a conflict they struggle to understand and often see as synonymous with suicide bombings.
Another result of having fought in such a long conflict in Cote d���Ivoire is that, despite their many gripes with the government, ex-combatants are extremely patriotic. This feeling is heightened by the fact that they had fought in a conflict that centred around the right to have an ���Ivorian��� nationality. The connection these fighters have to their country reduces their interest in remobilization, which they feel would bring shame on Ivorians and on their government.
Perhaps the most obvious impact the conflict in Cote d���Ivoire has had on these ex-combatants is that they are war weary. It is often argued that ex-combatants struggle to return to civilian society because they are unable to accept the civilian way of life and are addicted to the drug-fuelled lifestyle of a rebel. But this is, by and large, not the case in Cote d���Ivoire. The former fighters told me that they were relieved to hand in their weapons at the end of the conflict in and that for them ���the time to fight is over.���
Moreover, the relationship that ex-combatants had with their primary mobilizer, the current government, has fundamentally altered their ability to trust remobilizing agents. Ex-combatants speak of how because the government allegedly failed to keep the promises made to them during the DDR program, they are unable to accept a remobilization offer from anyone else, because they fear they would not follow through with their payment offers.
An ex-combatant in western Cote d���Ivoire told me that he had been approached by Hezbollah to fight in Syria but that because the organization only offered to pay after the fighting, and not beforehand, he refused. He said that his experience of broken promises in Cote d���Ivoire had taught him not to trust such people unless they paid upfront.
Thus, repeated threats to take up arms again or to go and fight with armed groups in Mali appear to be empty. There is considerable reluctance to participate in another conflict, much less one with which they have no affiliation. Yet the threat to rearm is a way of trying to pressure the government to give them what they are owed from the DDR program. They are aware that they could present a threat to the peace if they wanted to and they are attempting to use this dynamic to their advantage.
This is not to say that ex-combatants in Cote d���Ivoire will never take up arms again: they are angry, betrayed men with many motives for revenge violence. Rather, these ex-combatants are not inclined to pick up a weapon at the slightest opportunity, they would much rather avoid further conflict if they can, and maintain their peacemaker identity. This is arguably why they have avoided becoming embroiled in combat for seven years since relative peace came to Cote d���Ivoire.
As we consider the DDR programs around the world at the moment, from Colombia, to Central African Republic, to Mali, it is important to bear in mind that ex-combatants are not as easy to remobilize as we might have once thought. As such, they should not be considered solely as security threats and spoilers to a peace process.
An intricate array of factors influences the decision to remobilize, not least the experiences that fighters have had in their first conflict. As in the case of Cote d���Ivoire, it may be that the primary experience of conflict has shaped ex-combatant���s identities and attitudes to conflict and trust to such an extent that they can act as a block on remobilization.
July 4, 2018
Can the private sector deliver quality public education in Nigeria?
Image: Wasi Daniju (via Flickr)
The greatest challenge facing Nigeria is rebuilding high-quality education for a future with jobs and opportunities for all its citizens. In 1973, a National Pledge guaranteed every child born from the end of the country’s civil war, compulsory free, quality primary education. It was later extended to encompass nine years basic schooling.
However, these promises have repeatedly been broken. In response, the private sector now promotes fee charging schools for elites, middle classes and the poor throughout Nigeria. The United Nations��� ���Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on Quality Education��� sets a target for free quality schooling for all children by 2030. Will the private sector support Nigeria���s historic promises?
Currently, about 18,000 private schools operate in Lagos, a 50% increase since 2011. This expansion of private schools has been supported by aid money. In 2014 the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom paid ��3.45 million to Bridge International Academies (BIA), a global chain of private education facilities which aims to deliver education services for the poor, facilitating their entry into ��Lagos.
Public development assistance to for-profit schooling
Nigeria is just one of the targets of Bridge, whose facilities have been shut down in Kenya and Uganda for violating their national laws. Uganda���s high court recently determined that the Bridge set out to operate illegally, with blatant disregard for minimum standards required by law.
In Lagos, however, where an extensive private school sector has burgeoned since the 1980s, and where DFID is funding the DEEPEN (Developing Effective Private Education in Nigeria) program to support low cost private schools and advocate for less regulation, the climate may have been ripe for the BIA model.
Whether low cost private schools in general and BIA in particular support Nigeria���s historic promises on education require investigation. We recently completed a study which looked at public schools and low cost private schools, including BIA, in three Lagos neighborhoods. ��
Whether low cost private schools in general and BIA in particular support Nigeria���s historic promises on education require investigation. We recently completed a study which looked at public schools and low cost private schools, including BIA, in three Lagos neighborhoods. ��
Higher cost, harsher penalties
Our study found that in contrast to tuition-free state schools in Lagos, BIA charges range from 16,000-18,000 Naira (N) for new entrants and then around 11,000N per term for tuition at primary level, excluding uniform and other fees. A family in Lagos ��reliant on one wage earner bringing home a minimum monthly wage would make 216,000N per year. The annual school fee for a single child attending a BIA school would thus represent 23% of such a family���s income, leaving scant resources for food, rent, clothing or transport. Further, a 2014 Lagos poverty report found that over 50% of people living in Lagos are unable to even feed themselves and their families due to lack of money.
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This is much higher than the other private providers we spoke to, who were charging between 3,000N and 5,000 N per term. Non-payment of fees at BIA schools is also more harshly dealt with than in other low cost private schools. At BIA schools, non-paying children are separated from classmates and labelled as ���NAIC��� (Not Allowed In Class). They may not sit exams or take home report cards. Other low cost providers were more flexible, stating that in cases where parents had financial difficulties they extended credit and a flexible fee structure.
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Our structured observations of children regarding uniforms, school bags, and whether or not children walked to school or were accompanied by an adult with transport (motorbike or car), showed children attending BIA schools are not the poorest in their neighborhoods.
In terms of education and training, teachers in state schools had the highest level of qualification. All had formal teaching qualifications and some form of in-service training.
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BIA prides itself on employing teachers without recognized teaching qualifications and instead provides a three-week training course in BIA methods.
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In other low cost private schools the situation is not much better. High school graduates with minimal training are employed. This goes against the Lagos State Minimum regulations which requires that all teachers in public and private schools have the requisite academic or professional qualifications. ��
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The hiring of unqualified teaching staff has an impact on teacher salaries. In public schools teacher salaries start at 52,000 N. For BIA schools, we were told that teachers earn just above the Lagos minimum wage (which is 18,000 NGN per month), are required to work long hours and are not allowed to join a trade union. ��
In the state schools, we found teachers views on quality were associated with child centered teaching and learning. One head teacher said:
Quality education is all encompassing: quality teachers and right teaching method and willing students and government and parental support delivers quality education.
In the low cost private schools, and particularly at BIA, the definition of quality education stressed narrow learning outcomes, access to work and what parents were paying for.
Public school teachers were more aware of inequalities and poverty than those in private schools. They mentioned the need to provide free school meals to help children learn, whatever their background, and to think about the diversity of languages spoken (on the latter, in an average school in Lagos, at least four languages would be spoken). None of the BIA teachers interviewed mentioned poverty or had reflected on issues around inequalities.
In 2016, the Ministry of Education in Lagos State (each of Nigeria���s 36 states has its own education ministry) changed guidelines to include more flexible regulations to be applied to community/low income private schools ���with a view to providing access to education for children living within the community and children of low income earners.��� ��The revised regulations require classrooms to be ���spacious and not inimical to total growth,��� but regulations do not require a particular culture of learning and teaching linking quality and equalities or support for the poorest. This suggests weakening oversight of quality. In state schools there was a strong sense of accountability to the Local Government Education Authority (LGEA) and regulations administered by the Lagos state government. Schools are regularly visited and audited. In the private schools, there was limited knowledge of accountability structures. Only occasional visits from a health inspector were mentioned. BIA teachers had a strong sense of responsiveness to fee paying parents whose children attended the school, but spoke less about education provision for all children in Lagos. ��
Teachers in public schools in Nigeria are often derided for failing to provide quality education, but we found teachers in these schools more oriented towards quality and equality and more in tune with the vision outlined in national and local policy, and ��the SDG 4 framework than those working in the expanding private sector. Our study highlights that private schools in Lagos are linked with reductions in aspects of quality and equalities -charging fees to poor children, employing teachers with inadequate qualifications and support. BIA and other low cost providers are providing education that is below the minimum standards with regard to teacher qualification required in Lagos State for quality education and, aid money to BIA is implicated in this. ����
July 3, 2018
Northern European Soccer Politics
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A��ija��nsuo stadium in Rauma Finland, 2010. Image by Groundhopping Merseburg (via Flickr.com)
I was recently in Finland and Estonia, arriving in the former the evening before Russia kicked off against Saudi Arabia to open the World Cup Finals. ��Before I left the U.S., I proclaimed to a friend that I was really excited to be heading to football-crazy Europe. But, he wasn���t so sure, cautioning me that the Finns aren���t exactly mad about the game. Their men���s team has never qualified for the World Cup Finals and the apex for the women���s team was the semi-finals of the Euro 2005 tournament��(where they lost to Germany 4-1). ��Moreover, I could only name two Finnish players: Sami Hyypi�� and Jussi J����skel��inen, off the top of my head. ��As it turned out, my friend���s comments were prescient. But I was right about Estonia, for different reasons.
The Helsinki airport showed no signs that the tournament was about to commence, even though a slate of games were to be held in nearby St. Petersburg. Even after the tournament began, World Cup fever had apparently stricken, well, really no one. ��The only tangible display of the tournament was a modest
outdoor seating/viewing area that Casino Helsinki had erected off to the side of a large square in the city center, though the venue was largely a means to attract potential gamblers and to sell overpriced beer.
As I settled in to watch an array of matches, the most striking feature of the audience ��� comprised of about 20 of us, who filed in and out depending on the match ��� was that none of us were Finns! ��I heard English (spoken by Americans, Brits, Irish, and New Zealanders) and Spanish (voiced by various South Americans and Spaniards), as well as German and Italian, but no Finnish. ��After a little digging and via further traveling around Finland, I learned and observed that soccer is reasonably popular from a participatory perspective. But the Finns just aren���t very good at, nor are they voracious consumers of the game. ��Indeed, although I saw playing fields, often busy with players, I never encountered a match on television in a bar or restaurant, nor any promotional material anywhere in any city that I visited. One of Europe���s few (only?) truly barren soccer landscapes.
Just a two-hour ferry trip from Helsinki to Tallinn, Estonia���s cozy capital city, across the Bay of Finland, one leaves a land of soccer apathy and enters a country with a palpable passion for the game. Walking around the medieval city center, known as Old Town, I encountered innumerable outdoor viewing areas. ��And, when I ducked inside for a beer, sure enough, the matches were on.�� �� Fans , both local and international, were exuberant: donning jerseys, downing pints, and enthusiastically cheering on one squad or another.
When I inquired why the country was so enamored with the game, my friends explained its political roots. Estonians use soccer to fight Soviet and now Russian imperialism. It is a reaction to the imposed Russification of the country during its (dark) days as a Soviet Republic and, more recently, the ongoing threat its eastern neighbor continues to pose, especially in the wake of the annexation of Crimea. ��According to this logic, the Estonians despise hockey (a sport in which Russia figures among the elite) and adore soccer (a sport in which Russia hasn���t fared nearly as well, until this World Cup, that is).
Although the Estonians aren���t any better than the Finns (the former is 94th in the current FIFA rankings and the latter 63rd), you wouldn���t know it by the divergent levels of interest among their respective fandoms. ��One can only imagine how crazed Estonians would be should their men’s squad ever qualify for the World Cup Finals. ��But, then, perhaps that accomplishment might even awake the Finns from their national soccer slumber? ��Chances are, we���re going to have to wait for a long time before either of those scenarios materialize. ��In then meantime, I’d recommend heading to Estonia to watch some matches!
African poets get their own documentary
The poets and longtime friends, Syl Cheney-Coker (left) and Niyi Osundare, drink their friendship.
The documentary film, The Poets, ends with its two protagonists, poets Syl Cheney-Coker and Niyi Osundare, sitting on a balcony at Osundare���s home in Ibadan, Nigeria with a tumbler of whisky in their hands. They toast to literature and poetry, to their long friendship, to their dynamic past and their futures. With their backs to us, they look out ahead as the pouring rain beats down upon a half-constructed building but keep turning around to recount something or the other. This retrospective positioning���looking ahead but simultaneously gazing back���is the precise mode of this literary documentary.
The film, directed by Chivas DeVinck, is a beautifully shot, spontaneous and lyrical journey down memory lane in the most literal sense possible. Director DeVinck brings together two prolific poets from West Africa and sends them off on nostalgic trips in their respective countries; Freetown for Cheney-Coker and Ikeri-Ekiti and Ibadan for Osundare. The documentary���s structure is deceptively straightforward and very well thought out. Symmetrically divided into two with the first half of the journey unfolding in Sierra Leone with Cheney-Coker as the interlocutor and then the second half with Osundare taking us through several parts of Nigeria, The Poets makes very particular, decisive stops.
Borrowing from the structure of a K��nstlerroman, the type of novel that explores an artist���s formative years and eventual coming to maturity, the documentary forces the two poets to return to their childhood homes, their schools and their universities. Along the way, impactful political traumas are also explored with short bursts of archival footage; the Sierra Leonian civil war, military rule in Nigeria and Hurricane Katrina are some of the examples. Not to be forgotten is the true protagonist of this documentary: poetry. Ever so frequently, both poets read evocatively as the camera pans across various related and unrelated imagery. The poems are simultaneously inscribed in the poets��� own handwritings onto the screen thus making this documentary a richly layered, intertextual and intermedial experience.
The filming begins in the cramped, intimate space of a car as it navigates the busy Freetown streets. Cheney-Coker is the dynamic, informative guide and Osundare is a teasing, affectionate and curious tourist. The tone is immediately jolly and infectious: here are two avuncular guys brimming with anecdotes ranging from serious to completely facile, needling each other but also learning from each other. As they make their way through the city, Cheney-Coker points out how the war in Sierra Leone has marked everything. Wide, panoramic shots of the densely populated and hilly city along with Cheney-Coker���s intimate memories of the space allow Osundare and the viewer to have an affective experience of the geography.
The next section takes us to Cheney-Coker���s childhood home built in 1936 which he has reclaimed since the end of the war. Books abound in the modest, crumbling interiors and soon, a visit to his school rounds out the importance of a truly literary education. The camera eventually turns its attention upon the sea. With the views of the Atlantic ocean, comes slavery���s omnipresent haunting. ���If there was no ocean, there would be no Syl Cheney-Coker���s poetry,��� Cheney-Coker explains. DeVinck gives us our first beautifully choreographed poem sequence as Cheney-Coker reads one of his well-known poems called ���The Breast of the Sea��� as a boat glides over gentle, sun-sparkled waves. The music sets the tone for a grim memorializing of ���our bloody century��� and the orphans, pain, tears and suffering it has left behind.
The film successfully seals the connection between place and poetry, and it is through reciting particular poems in carefully chosen public and intimate spaces that allow for evocations about history and humanity to emerge. The history of slavery in West Africa, the history of war, the centrality of the sea as ethos and identity as well as personal reflections on marriage and love are folded into the fabric of these sequences. An incisive montage also takes the audience through Sierra Leone���s brutal history of mining. ���Shameless stone, bloodletting woman, I could have loved you, but I give you up for the feverish lust of the world!��� Integral to several of these poems is the politics of Africa���s colonial history and its resounding, almost incalculable impact upon the present.
Without much warning, we are suddenly in the car again, this time in a traffic jam in Lagos. Osundare becomes the poet-guide taking us through Yoruba country. Familiar tropes and themes come and go���visits to schools and universities, the formative years in childhood homes and the profound importance of education. But Osundare���s Nigeria is more ceremonial and bustling. Several friends and family members crowd around into the camera. The welcome rituals are grander and longer. There is an international poetry festival where Osundare is shown as a revered and honored member of the community. We learn that just like the Sierra Leone war for Cheney-Coker, Hurricane Katrina figures as the psychic wound in Osundare���s life.
Our two poets turn into flan��urs as they make their way through a crowded marketplace brimming over with colorful produce. The serious and the banal, the traumatic and the carnivalesque, and the political and the frivolous are perfectly at peace in this film, and scenes such as the one in the marketplace are evidence of that.
In the second half of the documentary, there is a real deepening around the conversations about poetic form and political poetry, the debate on African languages, the literary canon inherited from colonialism and the many problems that plague their beloved continent. We are in Nigeria, so the poets are predictably perturbed by how to combat corruption and also poor governance in several African countries. The Poets is an impressive homage to storytelling. Tales weave and wind through the documentary, always engaging, delightful, and emotionally and intellectually rich. It is evident that poets are completely committed to and deeply steeped in traditions of orality and the act of recounting stories and reciting poems.
The poets also engage with the fraught relationship between poetic form and political engagement, a tension that remains at the core of Western understandings of poetry and literature, and one that they have clearly inherited from years of being marinated in what passes as canonical and classical. ���All literature is protest literature, in some form or another,��� declares Osundare. ���The most sublime form of art is the protest against silence. The real issue is what or whose politics. You know, I���ve been called a political poet. There was a time I used to be concerned about it. Now I claim it as Christians who say, ���and I embrace this.��� Oh yes, it���s political! Why not political? My very presence on this earth is political. My existence as a black person is political. The language I use itself is political. The choice is political.��� These declarations aside, it is the documentary itself that becomes evidence of the ways that the poetic and the political are fundamentally interwoven. Not only are the poets completely imbricated in a complex and demanding socio-political sphere, their poetic practice draws from it and simultaneously nourishes it.
Films about poets are not necessarily commonplace but the poetry documentary is a fairly established minor genre especially in the past decade or so with the rise in popularity of spoken word. Within that, any engagement with African poetry is particularly rare, if not non-existent. In fact, several generations of African poetry has not gotten the attention it deserves in academic and literary spheres, and The Poets reclaims and revives that space, and makes it pulse with life and potential. ��
At the end of documentary, the toast soon turns into a conversation with the film���s director and Osundare asks the question that the audience has been wondering for the past hour and a half. ���Why did he chose us two out of the pantheon of African literature?��� It is certainly a curious choice but manages to whet the appetite for a series-like project. Perhaps two East African poets will be the subject of DeVinck���s next film. The film fades to credits and the questions, hopes and poems continue to hang in the air.
July 2, 2018
Rio sur Seine
Ronaldo scores for Brazil vs Germany in the final of the 2002 World Cup.
International Stadium, Yokohama, Japan. June 30, 2002. Germany-Brazil.
World Cup 2002 was over as soon as it had begun for France: in the opening game, Senegal beat France 1-0. On paper, with three of Europe���s top scorers, with Champions League winners and arguably the best player in the world that year, France seemed unbeatable. So much for that. Although this victory alone did not guarantee France���s exit, it made clear that the team would not go far.
Senegal���s victory sent hundreds people to celebrate in the streets of Paris and notably in the 20th arrondissement where I then lived. Jingoistic French sports commentators and pundits who had scoffed at Senegal a week earlier now made a point of listing those players who���d either been trained, or been playing in France, claiming France���s defeat as a French victory of sorts. This was hijacking a somewhat more complex set of feelings: Senegalese players represented the Senegalese in their African and French homes and all of black France by proxy, so that even as you might have wanted France to win, you did not resent the outcome of the game. But Senegal lost in the quarter-finals, and soon here we were: Brazil would face Germany in the final.
On that Sunday afternoon, I crowded inside the bar at the end of the street to watch the game. Following the unspoken rules of proxy loyalty that characterize each new round of the World Cup, the bar was entirely given to Brazil. That is, until a woman ran in from the stifling heat outside, hair matted to her face, sitting down in a hurry in the one seat left in the entire place, next to me. ���Have I missed anything?��� she asked in a pristine French with unmistakably Germanic overtones. ���No,��� said a few voices, most eyes glued to the screen, a few casting side glances. Some minutes in and after ordering a beer, the woman, picking up on comments and cheers, felt like she had to ask: ���We���re rooting for Germany, right?���
The silence that followed was a treasure of comic timing. ���Right?,��� she asked again, as all made sure they would not meet her gaze. What could I do? She was sitting next to me, and seemed genuinely curious. So I took it upon myself to explain: ���Well no��� Not really, no.���
���We have a history������ I said, to a thousand nods. ���What?��� ���Seville! Schumacher! Battiston���
���What?���
Geopolitics aside, the football feud between France and Germany boils down to the grudge caused by German keeper Harald Schumacher���s infamous horror assault on Patrick Battiston in the 1982 World Cup semi-final. The French midfielder infamously left the field in a coma, with broken vertebrae and missing teeth, the referee granting Schumacher a goal kick for the effort. Four years later and just fresh from a heroic victory over Socrates��� Brazil, France lost to Germany again at the same stage of the competition. All of France���s frustration is contained in a fleeting scene that occurred in the dying moments of the game: arriving late inside Schumacher���s box only to see him smother the ball, Platini pretended to kick the prone German goalkeeper in the head. We all knew what that referred to. 1982 convinced the French that Germany owed us a resounding defeat.
���That old thing?! I barely remember. Aren���t you over it already?���
For the most part, surely, but then no, not really. We had hoped to wipe out that memory in yet another semi-final in 1998, but Germany had had the good taste of falling to Croatia first. While much of the hostility was gone, that story could still be seen ���hovering over the pitch,��� a lonely ghost all affected to ignore but plenty could plainly see.
���But��� we���re all Europeans! Don���t we root for European teams?���
And this was it: no we don���t. Not here, not us, not now. For most of the people in the bar that afternoon, some because of lineage and others by choice, allegiances and affinities extended South and West, across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic rather than the Rhine. In the second edition of the Carnaval Tropical the following week, the greatest cheer was in reaction to a couple waving a Brazilian flag at their balcony. And so comments got a little more subdued and a bit more fair to the neighboring team. But when Ronaldo scored, the whole place erupted as if it���d been a corner of Rio. And for two hours, it was.
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