Titled The Feet of the Chameleon, Ian Hawkey’s recent book on African football could equally be dubbed the “feat” of the chameleon.
That’s because of the way soccer players on the continent have had to change their national colours in building their careers in exile — and usually against great odds.
This book reckons that some 2 000 Africans have made it to currently work as professional footballers in Europe. As evidence of the colour-change, Hawkey cites the 2002 World Cup, where “the Senegalese team-sheet showed every single player had an address in France, all employed by clubs in the French league”.
Feeding this pipeline, according to the book, are thousands of small African football “academies” — perhaps 450 in Côte d’Ivoire’s capital alone. Some big foreign-owned talent-spotting clubs and agencies are also in on the trafficking.
The system preys on aspirations of African youth to get out of poverty. It’s an economy that works off what Hawkey describes as “images of African boys, shoeless, chasing balls on an unkempt surface”. (The story of African soccer, it seems, barely touches the girls).
This is a book about African (male) brain-drain, although it also chronicles an ironic colonial mindset that seeks a very particular brain-gain, namely by importing expatriate (male) coaches.
In 75 years, only about a third of the African teams to play at the World Cup have had African coaches, says Hawkey.
The mystique of “white witchdoctors” is still often deemed to be what the continent’s players need in order to compete internationally. To supplement that Western medicine, domestic superstition is sometimes brought in through potions and fetishes.
What is thus portrayed in this book adds up to a pretty sad image of the continent. Football in Africa is certainly vibrant, but at root it is a cameo of the continent’s wider subservient status.
To riff again off the tome’s title, this sobering perspective on a sporting history reveals a chameleon-paced climb to playing in the World Cup.
It took till 1982 for Fifa to expand the tournament to 24 finalists and then allocate the grand total of two places to African countries. But in 2006, Hawkey notes, half the players in the Angolan team still earned their living in Portugal. Even with internationalised team members, however, not one African team made it to the quarterfinals.
You need a book like this if you want to put the coming Fifa event into context. The rhetoric of the 2010 tournament being played for the first time on “African soil” is pure public relations guff. But it has a measure of resonance if you set it against the marginalised background of African soccer in a global context.
The troubled economics that shape African football also come through in Hawkey’s recounting how poverty and corruption put Zambia’s national squad at the mercy of an aged military plane. It meant the team at one point took 24 hours to get from Lusaka to Mauritius. Then, in 1993, the aircraft crashed off Gabon — killing all the players aboard.
Money issues have also often hampered players from concentrating on the game. After Togo’s fraught participation in the 2006 World Cup, “the Sparrowhawks flew home without either a win or a draw, having spent many hours negotiating how much they might be paid should they achieve a point or more”.
Politics of African football
Hawkey also covers the politics of African football — such as how politicians like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Liberia’s Samuel Doe saw advantage in patronising national soccer teams. More progressively, however, we learn that South Africa’s Albert Luthuli himself was a self-described “fanatical football fan”, and that Liberia’s footballer-politician George Weah proved ultimately to be factor for local peace.
The book also tells of the case of Algerian players who sacrificed their prospects with French clubs in order to form a national team under the FLN liberation movement. Although designated at one point as the “Brown Diamonds”, they nevertheless missed the chance to play in the 1962 World Cup. Fifa not only refused to recognise them then, but also threatened a ban on any member who played against them.
Over the decades, Africa’s chameleons have adapted to these many obstacles. But Hawkey’s book also points to a whole new challenge. Attendances at games have declined over time, and televised European football is becoming an increasingly effective way of building African audiences.
The metaphor of the “feet of the chameleon”, according to the author, was coined by South African announcer Zama Masondo, who also created the “Lad-u-u-uma” call. In the early days of South African TV, the phrase served to signal to viewers when they were about to watch a slow-motion replay.
Hawkey’s book itself is a careful step-by-step replay of a history that’s colourful, but definitely uphill.
It’s unlikely that the six African countries at this year’s World Cup will fundamentally change the trajectory. But if they are true to chameleons, they could just show the world a new range of colours.
The Feet of the Chameleon is published by Wild Dog Press. R160.
This column is made possible by support from fesmedia Africa, the Media Project of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Africa, www.fesmedia.org. The views expressed in it are those of the author.
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