Africa Is a Country

Boss Player

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

Boss Player

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

The Newscaster Komla Dumor loved sports, basketball (he had skills), and, above all, the beautiful game. He especially loved his Ghana's Black Stars.

Ghana v England in a friendly match at Wembley Stadium in London, 2011. Image credit Akira Suemori for FIA Foundation via Flickr (CC).

The BBC news presenter Komla Dumor, who passed away this weekend from cardiac arrest, was an exceptional broadcaster; read Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie’s obit here. Everyone loved him. He was probably the most stylish newscaster, and he was well on his way to becoming the first globally recognized superstar news presenter originating from the continent. Dumor took journalism seriously. Just watch his last big interview where he took on Rwanda’s Ambassador to the UK about that country’s habit of murdering opposition figures.

Dumor, known as the Boss Player, also loved sports, especially basketball (he had skills), and, above all, the beautiful game. He especially loved his Ghana Black Stars.

For example, during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, he ripped his shirt open in Superman style to reveal his true identity.

Or last November, when he celebrated Ghana’s qualification for Brazil 2014 by donning a lekarapa. And he seemed genuinely happy—like a fan—around footballers, like when he met Victor Moses (Liverpool and Nigeria) or thanked Sulley Muntari (AC Milan and Ghana) for gifting a signed shirt for his (Komla’s) son.

But it’s this video, in which Peter Okwoche, the BBC Focus on Africa sports presenter, challenges Komla to a game of keepie-uppie—that’s my favorite memory of the Boss Player.

 

Further Reading

On Safari

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The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.