Shyaka Kanuma
What are Joe Nkosi and Lawrence Ngubane doing on the Bafana Bafana technical bench?
New South African head coach Jomo Sono chewing on a chicken drumstick at a media conference last week said no African should ask such questions about muti people; or “special projects” men, as Nkosi and Ngubane have euphemistically been dubbed. According to Sono, an African should know such things without asking.
Quite right, coach. But neither do you need to be African to understand what the monkey-skin-clad Gabon-ese waving a live bat over his head at six-minute intervals is trying to do at the game between his country and Burundi.
The question is: other than the (often harmless) touch of colour muti rituals add to games, how useful, or how effective is muti at games?
One who has watched the African game most of his life would find no reliable way to quantify this. For teams that reputedly use muti will as likely win as lose a game, a champion-ship or a tournament.
In cases where their teams lose, aggrieved African fans will vehemently proclaim this was because the opponents used very potent muti; in other cases the crestfallen fans will grudgingly admit the visiting team won because they employed the services of a superior medicine man; at stadiums, individuals with hawk-like eyesight will be on the lookout for marauding muti people who might cast a spell on their team, and so on.
So other than a few heretics here and there, belief in the power of witchcraft to affect the outcome of games, or the fortunes of an outfit, is such that no football administrator in Africa would think of running a club side, or a national soccer team sans the muti man. Mistake number one by Carlos Queiroz?
Perhaps, perhaps not. What is certain is that there is much food for thought here for any future non-African Bafana Bafana tactician.
This writer who, admittedly, will never be coach of anything harbours some doubts about the waganga (as the medicine men are called in East Africa), though, doubts that set in long ago at secondary school in Uganda when despite a humdinger of a workout with a waganga the school football team lost 0-6 to detested rivals!
But even the strongest believer in muti must harbour doubts about whether Ngubane and Nkosi will find a concoction with a potent enough kick to stop Fernando Hierro, Ismael Urzaiz, Raul or other red-hot Spaniards from turning a badly prepared Bafana into whipping boys.
Overcoming Jose Luis Chilavert’s Paraguayans will need no less strong muti, and the plucky Slovenians won’t be a pushover, contrary to some funny assumptions that South Africa are in an easy group.
Upon deeper reflection, maybe the Bafana technical bench could consult their Cameroonian counterparts on where the most effective muti men on the continent can be found, Cameroon being the only African side to have attained a World Cup quarterfinal place. All that business about Thomas Nkono, you know, being arrested by Malian police for sprinkling a sinister looking white substance on the pitch.
On the other hand, the best lessons Cameroon could impart are that muti only seems to work for countries whose soccer federations are run in a mature manner; where the fruits of years of careful nurturing of young talent are legions of talented players that command starting places in Europe’s best leagues; where club side coaches don’t repeatedly frustrate the national head coach’s efforts to build a cohesive team by refusing to release players for national duties; where, in short, much care is taken to avoid all bad practices in football administration.