AfricaIs aCountry

Playing for the home team

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Playing for the home team

By
Davy Lane

Most national teams that made it to the 2013 African Cup of Nations in South Africa play in Europe. Ethiopia is one of the few teams composed of mainly "home" based players.

Image: Ondřej Odcházel, via Flickr CC.

It is a positive that major cable networks are bothering to relay the results of the African Cup of Nations, though it is a shame their offerings remain annoyingly Eurocentric. After Alain Traoré equalized for Burkina Faso yesterday, CNN gleefully reminded the viewers at home that Traoré played his club football for Lorient in France! Adane Girma’s inspired response for Ethiopia drew no such parallel reference. For the record, Girma plays for St George FC in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia’s premier football club was formed in response to Italy’s invasion in 1935 and has long been a symbol of Ethiopian nationalism. Now that I would have thought is information the average CNN viewer could share with their cappuccino.

Ethiopia is one of the few teams composed of mainly “home” based players. A significant number of South Africa (in fact, the majority of their squad and team), Angola, the DRC, Tunisia and Morocco’s squads, play for domestic clubs.

There are plenty of home based players, but when western media comment on their contribution they almost never acknowledge the home based club, whereas when a player who plays in France, England or elsewhere in Europe scores, we are bombarded with references to the European club. Tuesday’s Ivorian goals were almost trademarked as the property of Manchester City and Arsenal, respectively. However, when, for example, Tresor Mputu clawed a great goal back for the DRC, there was no mention of TP Mazembe despite their seismic contribution to African and world club football. It’s tiresome and disrespectful, and also says much about control of the “product”. It is unfortunate anchors and commentators of various backgrounds and genders representing all the major western media seem to stick to this script.

Post Script: That the St George FC’s stadium was largely bankrolled by Mohammed al Amoudi, a Saudi businessman who according to Forbes Magazine happens to be the richest black man in the world may be material for a whole CNN special or campaign. (BTW, below a reader, Arriam, reminds us Al Amoudi is partly of Ethiopian descent.)

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.