Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
Sometimes I can’t help feeling that the “education” that we got in school was invented by a con artist, sold by a charlatan and taught by a mountebank.
In my day, for example, we were often forced to memorise “recitations” containing high-minded maxims that were supposed to guide us through our lives.
So I remember, offhand, being taught:
“And when the great reaper comes/ He will not ask whether/ You won or lost;/ But how you played the game.”
Balderdash! Go and tell that to a fan of the Indiana Pacers, who lost the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship to the Los Angeles Lakers this week. Or for that matter, go and tell it to the fans of the victorious Lakers. About 20E000 of them massed outside the venue of the game, unable to get in (tickets were going for up to $10E000 each).
As soon as the Lakers fans heard that their team had won, they went wild. Cars were burnt, shop windows smashed and everything happened that you associate with a normal Los Angeles summer riot.
Now, the mayhem happened after the LA Lakers had won the game. Suppose they had lost? And someone has the idiocy to say that it is not winning or losing that matters but …?
Another poem I remember makes it look as if the captain of a team is the great reaper himself:
“And it is not for the sake of a ribboned coat/ Nor the selfish hope of a season’s fame/ But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote/ Play up, play up and play the game!”
Now, do you think Herschelle Gibbs and the other South African cricketers led down the garden path by a certain captain Hansie Cronje learned this poem in school, or at their cricket club? If so, what do these cricketers now think of Sir Henry Newbolt’s canonisation of the captain’s hand? Please don’t tell me that Newbolt did not know that the hand that “smote” could also be the hand that “took”, or I’ll tear my books of poetry to pieces. After all, poets are supposed to know better than everyone else, aren’t they?
Similarly, before I ever set foot in England, I had been led to believe by a combination of spin in books and word-of- mouth renditions by those who claimed to know that the English were a most polite and cultivated people, whose language and social manners were to be emulated. I began to entertain doubts about this later, for I once got a holiday job as the garden boy of an English agricultural officer who lived near our village.
He and his friends spent every evening, from about 4pm till 11pm or so, quaffing beer. They rotated their drinking venues – they would do their drinking one day near our village, and move to a house in another village about 11km away on another, and on the third day, go 5km away.
I know all about it because I used to double as “car boy” for the bloke, and I very often got trapped sitting in the car and waiting while the drinking went on. My man couldn’t string two words together without putting a “bloody” in between them: bloody car, bloody beer, bloody house, bloody coffee. Yet, at school, we were being taught that English usage demanded that you say, “Could you please very kindly” and that type of jazz.
I recall these early experiences because the past week has, once more, given cause for the English and non-English alike to ponder the qualities of the English people. Before the football match with Germany, the country looked as if it was on a war footing.
The English flag (red cross on white background) and not the Union Jack was to be seen on motor cars, pub fronts and all manner of unlikely places. All that was lacking was the stern-faced man on a poster saying, “Your Country Needs You!” For the Third World War, of course. To be acted out, again, on European soil.
The build-up was so intense that if I were a German living in England, I am sure I would have stayed at home until after the match. When England won the game 1-0, one of the British tabloids had a banner headline saying “HUN-NIL”! And yet they call the Germans their “European partners”.
The pictures of the English smashing up Brussels that were brought to the world’s TV screens were positively revolting. How could a nice game like football produce such bad-mannered spectators? Everyone says that the more notorious hooligans are known to the police; indeed a BBC Panorama Special programme on TV picked out some of the hooligans and alleged that the police knew of them.
Yet these people were able to travel outside Britain to go and carry on with their racist singing and riotous behaviour. According to Panorama, most of their taunts were against “the IRA”! Why abuse the Irish Republican Army in Europe when you live with them? Perhaps the IRA couldn’t retaliate in Europe whereas it can do so in Britain? Strange.
In the end, it seemed curiously appropriate that England should be kicked out of the competition, not because Uefa couldn’t tolerate the brutish behaviour of some of the English fans, but because England conceded a penalty goal to Romania as a result of a rough tackle in the England box on a Romanian forward by the English defender Phil Neville.
English sports commentators hardly ever condemn such tackles, choosing instead, to describe them with euphemisms like “cynical” or even “professional”. So such violent play has become acceptable in “the English game”. And they took it to the theatre of the Third World War in Europe. Well, it walloped them. Maybe, there is poetic justice after all. Sorry, Sir Henry Newbolt.