In the past year or so, I have come across several books about football, many written with an eye firmly fixed on the 2010 Soccer World Cup tournament. Nothing wrong in that, but a significant number show haste, obvious in rather ungainly presentation, and extensive use of the wonder that is the internet.
Ian Hawkey’s Feet of the Chameleon: The Story of African Football (Wild Dog Press) is an exception, showing much thought, old-style research (by which I mean one-on-one interviews) and the sense of having been written over a long time. This, plus its lovely prose, methodical structure and great presentation makes it a fine read.
Winner of Britain’s Best Football Book Award in 2010, it begins on Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish dominions, even though they are actually part of Morocco. Around 150 000 people live on Ceuta and Melilla; the enclaves’ most famous citizen is Mohammed Ali Amar, formerly a Tottenham Hotspur and Real Zaragoza player in the 1980s. A victim of racism during his time in the “real” Europe, Amar is proud of his dual heritage: “I am proud to be African and proud to be European.”
From the shores of his home, thousands of Africans try to make it into Europe. That’s not so easy because “the fences get built to tower up ever higher … and the corkscrews of razor get tightened to look more and more menacing”.
From Ceuta and Melilla, Hawkey crosses into Morocco where he focuses on Larbi Ben Barek, “Africa’s first global superstar”, the player who made a name in Europe in the late 1930s. Hawkey examines the phenomenon exemplified by these two players. He accurately describes the exodus as “barely disguised imperialism”, the way young boys are lured into Europe, most ending up as menial labourers.
Hawkey excavates Nii Lamptey, a player whose fate I have long wondered about. In the early 1990s, when Lamptey appeared on the scene, he was thought to be the player who would replace the Ghanaian legend, Abedi Ayew Pele. Crooked agents and fatigue killed a nomadic career. Lamptey was to play his last game for Ghana in 1996, aged 21.
“The White Witchdoctor”, chapter two, examines the origins of football on the continent and the phenomenon of the foreign coach. The “white witchdoctor” has his ardent critics, among them Jo Jo Bell, Cameroon’s iconic keeper, who received instruction from several European coaches in the 1980s. Bell wondered to Hawkey why, after decades of African football, “a child has not been born who has played football and is deemed to understand football like a European”.
He continues: “For me, they are imposters. They have no value. They don’t offer or show anything. But usually one of them ends up winning, so it’s taken as proof we need foreign coaches.” Hassan Shehata, the Egypt-born coach, has won the last three Africa Cup of Nations for his country, so perhaps the white witchdoctor’s magic isn’t so potent after all.
Hawkey — once a sports reporter for the Sunday Times in Johannesburg — has recorded many of Africa’s notable football stories: Ivory Coast’s famed academy run by ASEC Mimosa, the school that churned out Chelsea’s Didier Drogba, Arsenal’s Emmanuel Eboué, and several others.
He writes about the-then Zaire’s hapless adventure at the 1970 World, including a 9-0 thrashing by the-then Yugoslavia. Featured too is Zambia’s improbable rise from the ashes following the death of most of their team in a 1993 aircraft crash off the coast of Gabon and their astonishing progress to the final of the 1994 Africa Cup of Nations, which they lost to Nigeria.
Football’s ability to unite disparate people has long been used by Africa’s rulers. Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, early on realised that football could be harnessed as a nation-building tool. That term now leaves an ugly aftertaste because of the abuse it has suffered at the hands of cynical politicians. But back then, it was a laudable task, uniting “nations” that had been hastily drawn up by colonial overlords who didn’t care for ethnic and religious differences.
Hawkey notes that although other footballing nations named themselves after beasts: “Ghana seized on a most evocative name for West Africans”, calling themselves the Black Stars, after the shipping line formed by Pan Africanist and black intellectual Marcus Garvey.
Among the book’s best moments is Hawkey’s take on the Desert Foxes, Algeria, and how some of that country’s players based in France sacrificed their careers and the 1958 World Cup for the cause of their motherland’s independence. The Algerian war of independence, one of the most brutal wars ever fought on this continent, was about to reach its bloody nadir when some chose to play for this nation-to-be. Ahead of the World Cup in 1958, the liberation movement, Front de Liberation National, set about recruiting a team, mostly from the French championnat, of people with an Algerian heritage.
“OK, I would have to give up my club. And yes, I was thinking about the World Cup, but what did that count for in comparison with my country’s independence?” asks Saint-Etienne’s star player Rachid Mekhloufi.
It was an amazing sacrifice, something you don’t expect from today’s breed of pampered footballers. It was a gesture that resulted in arrest for some, torture, beatings and aborted careers for others. The renegade team toured and played with sympathetic nations, all the while drawing attention to the war going on in their homeland. After they beat Vietnamese opponents, a veteran of the Franco-Vietnamese war declared: ‘We beat the French and you’ve just beaten us. Now you must go and defeat France!”
Perhaps my lukewarm response to veteran South African journalist Joe Latakgomo’s book, Mzansi Magic (Tafelberg), has a lot to do with the fact that I began reading it soon after I finished Hawkey’s masterpiece.
Latakgomo is the kind of writer who can say: “I was there, I reported about this in 1970,” a pedigree that not many writers can boast. For instance, about the moves to form what later became Kaizer Chiefs, Latakgomo writes: “A telephone call was promptly made to [Kaizer] Motaung from our offices.” This was not just any call. This was a telephone conversation that later resulted in the United States-based Motaung deciding to sever his links with Orlando Pirates and start his own football club.
The book is rather heavy on the politics and light on the actual story of South African soccer. It’s understandable, seeing how the fortunes of football in South Africa were intricately interwoven with politics.
A rigorous editor could have made Mzansi Magic a much better read. For instance, Latakgomo writes that “at a seminar a few years ago Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe described sport …”. A few years ago? It’s a book saddled with many facts, showing a lot of research, but the way these have been presented, at crucial points in the book, doesn’t make for easy reading.
Latakgomo’s book is quite exhaustive, containing the many idiosyncrasies that typify the South African game: the violence, the muti men, the monikers imposed on the players and the movers behind the teams.
I wished, though, that separate chapters had been devoted to Orlando Pirates, Kaizer Chiefs and Moroka Swallows, the biggest teams from Soweto.
That aside, it’s a welcome account, informative, and deriving its authority from that “I was there” feel.