/ 18 June 2010

Malema and the vuvuzela: The shocking truth!

Malema And The Vuvuzela: The Shocking Truth!

Football Muti, a photographic book by Robin Goode, Matteo Bottanelli and Kabir Javier (Jacana), is not, as you might guess from the title, a tome that examines the use of potent roots, herbs and barks — a practice popular in Africa football.

The beautiful book is, according to a press release, “both a social documentary and photographic journey” highlighting “not only Africa’s passion for football but also the maladies that beset the continent, and football’s potential role as a balm for those maladies”.

Grandiose ambitions, indeed.

The first photograph is of a boy, presumably Ethiopian as the image was captured in the Ethiopian highlands, with small, mud-caked feet, without a doubt because he doesn’t wear shoes. The images — most of them expertly shot, I must say — are accompanied by commentary. This text doesn’t adhere much to punctuation or the other rules of grammar by which everyone else is bound. “i found this little boy in the ethiopian highlands/ he was about two coke bottles tall,” the text goes. Two coke-bottles tall?

And then there’s another image of bare feet, on which an imaginative boy has drawn, using chalk or something, shoelaces. “the laces never untie and the soles never wear thin on these football boots,” the commentary drawls.

Another image features an ashen, bare foot caressing an old leather ball and there’s more of that lazy commentary, in faux poetic accents. “the ground was hard/ some played without shoes/ others with shoes given to them by rich countries/ a few countries have stopped shoe and clothing donations./ why buy when you can get it for free./ why work when you don’t have to buy anything.”

It would have been better if the photographers had just taken images and shied away from the patronising, sometimes downright stupid, commentary. For instance, there is a lovely image of a beautiful Ethiopian woman clad in a football shirt, beads and a ritualistic animal-skin skirt to which beads are attached. Next to this picture is a sentence, “this woman is from a forgotten place/ at the edge of the earth/ her culture is ancient/ how she came to wear a Juventus shirt I will never know.” Forgotten by whom? By Italians? Fellow Africans?

The Italians would certainly remember that Benito Mussolini, the man who got them into a disastrous war, once occupied “Abyssinia” in the 1930s. In a world as connected as ours, it seems arrogant and parochial to think that a piece of clothing — and not even Italian designer clothing — is beyond the reach of a peasant girl whose forebears were lorded over by the selfsame power.

Go to Mali, Senegal or any other Francophone country, and you will see how many people are wearing replica shirts, probably fakes made in the Far East, of French clubs.

The photographers seem to have an unhealthy fascination with the bare foot: the encrusted, parched foot that rarely puts on shoes. Most of the photographs are beautiful, to be sure, shot in black and white and, sometimes, from startling angles.

Playing around with light and shadow with something of the spontaneity that is typical of sports photography, they achieve wonderful effects in monochrome.

What riles me most is its lazy commentary in those depressing, fake poetic tones, romanticising the poverty of Zambians, Tanzanians and Ethiopians, sometimes even blaming the inhabitants for the situation in which they find themselves.

In one photograph, featuring a boy with a plastic ball at his feet, the commentary drones: “i wasn’t sure what was more/ weathered, his feet or the ball/ africa has a habit of wearing out things prematurely/ machinery/ architecture/ people”.

According to the press release, apparently the “Muti project aims at raising money to supply children’s charities with much-needed medicine”. Wow! Where would Africa be if we didn’t have such do-gooders? But it would be infinitely more helpful if the book treated its subjects with respect.

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