Cameron Duodu Letter from the North By allowing “Eric the Eel” (Eric Moussambani, the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea) to take part in the Olympics Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has done Africa a great favour. But I doubt whether that was their original intention. You don’t need to be a genius to realise that the Games were conceived by northern sportsmen for northern sportsmen, with the south “addendumed” into them as an afterthought. Hence, the fact that the first seven days of each Games are devoted to boring sports events in which few southern countries hard-strapped for cash can participate. So someone must have told the IOC: hey, find a black African to take part in the swimming. And we have Eric setting two world records in his first swim – one for managing to stay alive in the water when everyone thought he was going to drown; and two for taking the slowest time ever to reach his destination. Actually, he set a third record too: for being the naivest competitor ever to grace the Olympics. Man, he continued to smile cheerfully for the cameramen when he must have known they were secretly laughing at him. He did do his best to explain that this was the first time he was seeing an Olympic-sized swimming pool. But who cared? He was a spectacle. Comic relief par excellence.
So how come I say he’s done a favour to Africa? Well, if we were clever, we would use his case to tell a few home truths to the IOC. We would tell it that we need some of the huge sums of money the IOC gets from the sale of TV rights to establish Olympic- sized swimming pools all over Africa. And gymnasiums; tennis courts; ice rinks. Hey, don’t let me forget the horses or any of the other events which you cannot even begin to think of taking part in unless you have pots of money. Next, we shall demand that the IOC introduce events in which Africans can excel without having to pay through the nose.
First event: swimming ashore at high tide from two miles out in the boisterous Atlantic Ocean. Preferably to be held at Labadi Beach in Accra or Bar Beach in Lagos. All fishermen to be declared automatically qualified. Referees to be white tourists previously rescued from drowning on those two beaches. Second event: pulling nets ashore from dugout canoes. Again, all West African fishermen – from Dakar to Denu – to qualify automatically. Referees to be Japanese fishermen accused of using ultra-thin nylon nets that trawl the sea catching everything in it, including fish eggs not yet hatched. Third event: carrying a heavy load on the head and walking long distances with it. Handicaps to be awarded against pregnant women carrying babies on their backs. Fourth event: Ludo. If chess can make it to the Olympics (to say nothing of bridge, which I believe is on the way) then why not Ludo, the villager’s television set? Fifth event: sangoma dancing. This will teach the synchronised swimmers that it isn’t they alone who can baffle spectators with what they are doing. In order to be qualified, each sangoma must become possessed for no less than three hours, during which he must force a leopard to urinate and then drink the liquid. Each sangoma must also be capable of shouting in Soweto and being heard in Guguletu. Sixth event: brewing 100%-proof alcohol out of palm wine, sugar-cane molasses or maize without adding soap powder, batteries or other additives that erode the lining of the stomach. Seventh event: catapulting, using only pebbles thrown out of a piece of forked wood with motor-car inner tubes tied to its ends and a piece of leather attached to hold the stone. Whoever can fell a robotic Goliath with his catapult will be the victor.
The point I am making is, when the Olympics were first started, we Africans were not thought to be even capable of taking part! The Kenyans were being chased around the high altitude as Mau Mau terrorists, by Ugandans recruited into the King’s African Rifles. Some type of racing was going on all right, but it most certainly wasn’t Olympian.
Even in football, where we could show some ability, it was thought that wearing boots was not “natural” to us. Hence, the first football team to go to England from Ghana, in the early 1950s, played in their bare feet in the cold English weather. Not only were they thoroughly frost- bitten before play, but also, they got stamped upon with the English players’ boots during the games. They lost heavily, which proved that “Africans weren’t good footballers”.
Yet a mere couple of years after our independence, when we had taken charge of our own expenditure and had begun to spend money on football, the English top team, Blackpool, came to play in Accra and we gave them a 4-0 drubbing they will never forget.
So, of course, when we were allowed to compete in the Olympics, we were so flattered we forgot to take a hard look at the Games themselves. Another thing: natural flair does count a lot in sport, yes.
But most important of all is facilities and training. Remember: Venus Williams, who has just won Olympic gold in singles and doubles, would probably still be distributing telephone directories in the ghettoes of Los Angeles for a dollar a day, had her parents not sacrificed their meagre earnings to help her and her sister, Serena, on to the lawn tennis courts of lily-white America. And just ponder what would have been lost to the world of cricket if the likes of Viv Richards, Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Gary Sobers had been born in Soweto instead of the West Indies.