The Gurugu Pledge

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  People played football on Gurugu to keep warm and busy, for the hours were long and football enabled them to lose track of time, but in a different set of circumstances, they’d have read all day and into the night. And in a different reality, a team of African scholars would have come to Gurugu mountain to talk to the inhabitants and to ask them to comment on Peter’s father’s poem. Charon, bring hither that boat / we’ll away to the lake’s end / reach the exact point of femininity. The African scholars would have doubtless been surprised by what the people on Gurugu had to say on the subject. The first two lines would have been discussed for hours on end, and then there would have been the little matter of what the poet meant by the exact point of femininity. Some of the mountain’s inhabitants were illiterate, never having had the opportunity to learn to read or write, and they would have had a good deal to ponder when one of the scholars explained who Charon was. It would have given them much food for thought and several among them would have felt inclined to retrace their steps, the hundreds of miles of steps through the desert that led back to their home towns. The story of Charon, an old man with a boat who was paid up front with a coin, would have saddened them a great deal, because it would have made them think of their own journey, and that it didn’t deserve to end in tragedy. From the Sahara to the Zambezi, there was surely too much to eat for them to end up at the mercy of a surly, scrawny, temperamental old man. Those first three lines would have forced them to reflect on their own lives and plans.

  The scholars didn’t come, but the second verse nevertheless gave the Gambians more means to argue with the Malians:

  ‘What do you think the poet meant by the heathen eunuch, hey? I’d say it refers to the despicable custom, practised in your country, I do believe, whereby you must avoid women until your mother decides it’s time you got married, and the fact that some men go their whole life without knowing what lies beneath the ten feet of fabric you force your women to wear in your parched and dusty land.’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ a Malian laughed. ‘You’re very funny, but your nervousness betrays you, for the bit about false faithfulness and the eunuch clearly refers to you. Everyone knows no good can come of a young man tying the knot with a woman presently past her expiry date, and here we have the tale of a eunuch loyal to a deposed queen with a dry womb. You speak of our mothers, when yours must weep on your wedding night imagining the sweat you have to work up … Well, you know what I mean, I shan’t go into the details.’

  ‘Hey, you don’t have to go into the details, but tell me, how come you speak English?’

  ‘Bah, I spent two years working on a boat from your country, brother.’

  ‘I thought as much! Two years on a boat hoping to catch the eye of an English lady …’

  ‘Come on, please, my culture does not allow me to go with a woman who’s presently old enough to be my grandmother. I would rather give blood in a hospital than have it sucked out of me by a grandma.’

  ‘So you’re telling me you’d rather die of thirst in the desert than get on a plane and go visit your London in-laws?’

  ‘Do I look like a man with no self-respect?’ said the man from Mali. ‘I’m not going to Europe to beg, I’ve got a profession.’

  ‘Hey, are you suggesting we Gambians don’t have professions?’

  ‘Bah, professions you may have, women your own age presently you do not. Now I have to go and get water for my group. But before I go, let me say that what goes on in your country is best described in Latin!’

  There was much discussion on the mountain following the cancellation of the football tournament, and there was laughter too, nervous, genuine and forced. The Gurugu inhabitants were clearly troubled by something that had happened in their midst, the most obvious consequence being the suspension of the first match. Smaller games went ahead and fended off the cold, but did nothing to temper the unrest. This became evident in the tone and topics of conversation, for although everyone on the mountain knew where everyone else was from, it was considered best practice to keep your nationality secret. The fewer clues you offered the Moroccan forestry police the better, or any other police force for that matter, and so the rule of thumb was that the closer you got to the gates of Europe, the more you disposed of anything linking you to a concrete African country. On Gurugu you revealed your origins only to those you truly trusted, and yet the origin of one African is hardly an unknown quantity to another. That conversation between the Malian and the Gambian could, therefore, be read as playful banter, but it was also a symptom of the simmering tensions. The two men had spoken clearly and at length about their own countries, and this just a few miles from the first flag of the European Union. This was not an incident without precedent, for the Gurugu inhabitants had learned their lessons the hard way, following a curious incident that ended as it did because of an article of faith.

  The weight of destiny became too much to bear for some on Gurugu: it was dreadfully cold, the Moroccan police had clamped down on anyone going into the villages to beg and their provisions had run out. Hunger grated. It had come to the attention of some of them that part of the mountain was the natural habitat of the Barbary macaque, and they thought: monkey, meat, food. Their situation was desperate and so they decided they must take matters into their own hands. They went out into the forest, to a section that was some distance away from the camp, and they managed to catch one. How? It’s a valid question, because monkeys are not easy to catch. The hunters had a fair amount of luck, it’s fair to say, but the only meaningful answer is that hunger, especially hunger suffered collectively by hundreds of men, and a few women too, inspires ingenuity: they caught the monkey thanks to the ingenuity of several among them. They hunted down that monkey and they caught it and then they set about preparing it to be cooked and eaten, to appease their wretched hunger. First, they skinned it. Or half-skinned it, for they were in the middle of doing so when the Moroccan police arrived and caught them red-handed. For a police force as conscientious as the Moroccan forestry police corps, it was no longer a simple matter of a bunch of black Africans occupying a mountain that didn’t belong to them, that in fact belonged to Morocco, for they had now killed an animal, and a protected species at that. This was the accusation that weighed most heavily against them, for the Barbary macaque was protected, they’d killed one, and the Moroccan authorities were strict upholders of the law: the consequences would surely be dire.

  But in the end they weren’t, and it was the very fact that the Moroccan authorities were such strict upholders of the law that saved them. Upholders of Islamic law and firm believers, for the offence went unpunished because of Sura 2, Verse 65 of the Koran: ‘Be ye apes, repugnant and hated’. The Barbary macaque may well have been a protected species, but such protection, whether genuine or invented, and no matter how necessary, contravened the official religion of Morocco, a country where the king himself was Commander of the Faithful. There was some debate about whether the macaque was an ape or a monkey and whether it mattered, until it was decided that any beast implied to be repugnant by the Koran simply could not be defended. The hunters were released, but the conscientious Moroccan police still felt it their duty to punish them and so they were summarily beaten, in a secluded spot lest anyone see the police avenging an animal reviled by His Most irrefutably Merciful, the highest authority of all. The monkey hunters eventually returned to the camp, alive and at liberty, but with very visible signs of the repugnance they’d caused and the words of Sura 2, Verse 65 ringing in their ears.

  This should have been a cause for celebration, for the hunters had returned with the monkey meat and hunger was rife on the mountain. But there was no such cheer, indeed the poachers were greeted with considerable hostility: many of the Gurugu inhabitants were themselves Muslim and although they felt sorry for their bruised companions, they also thought the police had done right. Such was the sense of unease, word soon spread that the men who’d been caught with their dirty hands in the dirty meat were from Cameroon. Of cou
rse, the faithful said, they come from the jungle, they’re heathen, such vile deeds are only to be expected. But it was rare for an incident to be accredited to a concrete nationality and it would lead to important lessons being learned.

  The Muslim faithful departed and left those of a different persuasion to roast the monkey meat and indulge. The Cameroonians tried to claim, continuing the line of defence they’d adopted with the police, that the animal they’d been caught with was not a monkey, but a rabbit, and that it had been given to them in charity at the Beni Enzar souk. But the Islamists wouldn’t buy it, and the whole episode had anyway left them feeling repulsed. Besides, good Muslims that they were, they would surely have known that a rabbit’s head is much smaller than a monkey’s. And good Muslims they may have been, but the mountain air still informed them of how succulent the barbecued haram meat was as the Christians and atheists enjoyed their feast. Bon appetit, they would have said as human beings, but as followers of Mohammed they went hungry.

  That the Cameroonians had been singled out generated considerable discontent in the camp, for the most zealous practitioners of Islam continued to claim they’d got their just deserts for having disregarded Verse 65, Sura 2. That’s when the veterans from the lower reaches of the Gurugu camp intervened. From that moment on, it was declared that matters of patria would be the private business of individuals and that this was to be observed for the good of everyone. If you had a flag, a recording of the national anthem, a photo of the president, or the president’s wife, or Miss wherever you were from, or anything personal and non-transferable, such as an original and genuine passport, you were to keep it hidden and make sure no outside agent ever found it, for it linked you to who you’d once been and could therefore be used against you by the powers that be, powers that would one day rule on your future. Nobody was asked to renounce their own countries, towns, customs, folk songs, militant tendencies, national heroes or anything like that. You were just asked to use discretion, and you were told that if a particular souvenir felt like an amulet to you, then you’d do well to query its efficiency, for such querying would serve you well in the long run. Viewed from a distance, such precautions may seem excessive or even cynical, but not when seen from within. They were merely the logical conclusions reached by one of the veterans, a man who was over forty years old and had known nothing of his village for five years, five years in which he’d not worked, aside for the odd job to ensure his survival.

  As has been stated before, no team of professors or learned scholars came to the mountain to discuss the poem or ask the inhabitants about their immediate and non-immediate concerns, but if they had come, they would have talked about profound matters and they would have broken the poem down into a thousand pieces and said very profound things about each and every part, with the African continent as the constant backdrop, leading them to say a thousand more profound things about change as experienced by the good men and women of Africa. Yes, if the scholars had come to Gurugu, they would have had a fruitful time of it and left feeling intellectually nourished. But before they had quite departed, indeed with the bulk of the party having already set off, one of the scholars would have paused and made a passing comment, and that comment would have led to another long debate. For the learned man would have observed all the running around on Gurugu and felt compelled to say something to one of the footballers, and this would have been met with a frown by one of his well-read colleagues.

  ‘You may sneer, professor,’ the scholar would have said, ‘and it may be true that honourable and erudite men of letters don’t talk about football, but I believe it deserves a lot more attention than it gets. I mean intellectual attention, of course, for it certainly gets enough of the other kind.’

  ‘Is the good doctor really saying that footer, an activity as simple as two men chasing after an elastic ball, deserves the attention of the academic community?’ his colleague would have replied.

  ‘Firstly, professor, football is much more than two men, or even eleven men, or indeed eleven women, or boys, or girls, chasing after a ball, be it made of elastic, as you said, or any other material. Are you really sure they make footballs out of elastic?’

  ‘Well, if they don’t, they should.’

  ‘I’ll make a note of that. But back to what I was saying: football is not just a bunch of men chasing after a ball, the classic pejorative description used to trivialise the sport. No, football consists of a formation of men, or sometimes women, endeavouring to get the ball into the opposition’s goal while conforming to a set of rules – rules I emphasise, lest complacent intellectuals underestimate the game’s complexity.’

  ‘I see you hold footer in extremely high regard.’

  ‘Footer, if that’s what you wish to call it, deserves our scientific attention, for there’s much more to it than meets the eye. Twenty-first century man, hominis XXI, typically dwells in an urban agglomeration of over five million people. He suffers from all the hatred, tedium, neglect, pressure, bitterness and stress one might expect in such a mass of humanity, and if there wasn’t somewhere for him to go and scream from time to time, to go and shout insults, cry and generally let off some steam, life would become perilous. It’s hard to predict what would happen.’

  ‘But it is possible to predict now, because of football?’

  ‘Football has discredited previous human behaviour theories based on religion, the occult and politics. Researchers and philosophers ought to be mesmerised by a phenomenon that is neither mysterious nor confers power, because for millions of people, there is literally nothing more important than football.’

  ‘I suppose, doctor, that at some point in your discourse you will recognise that football is big business.’

  ‘I will, but first let me say that the difference between football and other sports, for example Formula 1, is that football doesn’t use up vital natural resources and contaminate the environment: football is clean, quiet and cheap. With no more than, say, eight hundred footballs, elastic or otherwise, the game could be played everywhere in the world. It does, it’s true, eat up a little electricity if played at night under floodlights, but it needn’t be, and it does require some nice grass, and that can be expensive to maintain, but that’s really only for the big teams. Generally speaking, football is clean and cheap and profitable.’

  ‘Finally he says it!’

  ‘Apologies, professor, a poor choice of word on my part, I did not mean financial profits, I meant that society benefits from football being played.’

  ‘But profits are made. You say it’s cheap, but goodness, matches aren’t free to go to, stadiums aren’t cheap to build!’

  ‘It is indeed true that stadiums are expensive to build, but I would also say that their construction provides work to a lot of people and that once they’ve been built they last for many years. Furthermore, they are necessary, because you can’t very well ask thousands of men to stand on each other’s heads, one on top of the other, forming giant columns, in order to watch the spectacle, and it is necessary that the game be played and watched because, and this is my main point, football breaks down society’s class structures: football is played by plebeians and venerated by aristocrats; football opens the nobility’s palace doors to street urchins and outcasts.’

  ‘That sounds somewhat overblown.’

  ‘Professor, don’t mock something so serious. Millions of people live in cities that are physically and mentally overcrowded and if there were nothing to placate them, they’d snap. We’d return to the days of the Roman circus, but with genetically modified elephant-tigers developed in the most sophisticated laboratories on the planet. Men and women imprisoned for who knows what petty crime would be led into the arena and forced to take on the elephant-tigers. We occasionally hear of young lovers somewhere condemned to be whipped or stoned for having had relations before marriage, and there’s an international outcry. Now imagine those young lovers being thrown to the elephant-tigers!’

  ‘You mention laborator
ies, doctor. Maybe you’re thinking of doping, so prevalent among our footballers.’

  ‘I will not rise to such provocation. But I will say this: there’s no way that a few grams of whatever it may be, some substance you’ll be more familiar with than me, can turn someone usually only capable of hoofing the ball, into a player of great talent and flair. Do you really think drugs could have made Thomas Gravesen play like Zinedine Zidane? Turned Marco Materazzi into Andrea Pirlo? You can’t possibly believe that even a kilo of chemicals could have helped Fabien Barthez become as good a goalkeeper as Peter Rufai?’

  ‘Can you explain the relationship between football and the occult?’ one of the Gurugu inhabitants would have interjected. ‘I didn’t understand when you mentioned it earlier.’

  ‘It’s quite simple, lad. We used to think people behaved in a particular way towards certain things because those things were mysterious or governed by a hidden power. The idea of a hidden power is very attractive, hence religion and occult sects. But football turns the theory on its head: football fans behave exactly as if devotion will bring them salvation or eternal life, and yet football celebrates its liturgy out in the open. Not even the Pope can compete with football these days.’

  ‘A panacea, dear doctor,’ the professor would have said, with a touch of sarcasm.

  ‘A complete sport, dear professor. Football combines the best of athletics, judo, American football and swimming.’

  ‘Care to add any other virtues?’ the professor would have said with a snort.

  ‘Certainly I would. Go to a tollbooth on any European motorway, or to a hypermarket, or simply switch on the TV: you won’t see them. You won’t see them driving their cars, doing their weekly shop or presenting a programme, and if you do, they will be the exceptions that prove the divide-and-rule. I’m sure you know what I’m referring to, professor, for there are millions of people in the world who never study geography, and without studying what lies beyond their immediate surrounds, they never learn that black people exist. But we do, and against all the odds, we are there for all the world to see at any international sporting occasion. It’s the only reason millions of people know black people exist. There is no other way: do what you will, you won’t be seen. There are fewer of us thus exposed than there might be, for sure, but there are still some, and when you consider that nobody can love what they don’t know exists, it’s reasonable to say that those few blacks seen chasing after a ball on TV achieve a good deal more than any number of conferences on Africa organised by the world’s leading universities.’