Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Roger Milla later said that the image of the World Cup he treasured most was that of Paul Biya, the Cameroonian president, shaking hands with other heads of state after Cameroon had beaten Argentina. “Do you appreciate that?” Milla asked France Football. “An African head of state who leaves as the victor, and who greets with a smile the defeated heads of state!” The magazine objected that this was not an image of soccer. “It’s thanks to soccer that a small country could become great,” retorted Milla.

  Cameroon lies at the corner of West and Central Africa, almost due south from Britain, but the cheapest flight there goes via Moscow and Malta. I spent twelve hours in Sheremetyevo airport, another hour in Malta, and on arriving in Cameroon I was pleased to be greeted by a porter. He threw my backpack on his back, and rushed me straight past the customs officer.

  Out at the other end I tipped him, and he said I owed him another ten pounds. He had, he explained, bribed the officer to let me pass unsearched. “But I didn’t ask you to do that,” I protested. “I have nothing to hide and am happy for him to search my bag.” The fact that I was carrying nothing illegal was irrelevant, replied the porter. If a customs officer wants to make trouble, he makes trouble. In any case, the official would be wanting his money. If I did not pay up, he, the porter would have to. I handed over the money.

  Then I opened my backpack and found that my travelers’ checks were gone. Ah, said the porter, one of the baggage handlers must have taken them, but not to worry: his own brother was head of the handlers and would find the checks for me. It seemed a happy coincidence—I only found out later that a Cameroonian’s “brother” is simply any man from his village.

  The theft shocked the porter’s brother. “There is nothing you can do with travelers’ checks! All the boys know that!” he told us. He asked around, but failed to identify the culprit, and the porter and I proceeded to other business. The task at hand was to get me from Douala to Yaoundé, Cameroon’s political and soccer capital. The porter, by now motivated purely by kindness, advised against going by train or road, since as a white man I would probably be robbed. I flew to Yaoundé.

  Yaoundé is a cool, hilly city, quite how large no one knows. The last map of the capital dates from 1972, and that one is unfinished, because the Swiss technician who was drawing it left when the money ran out. It is thought that Yaoundé has 650,000 inhabitants, but no one has gone into the slums to count. Of the inhabitants at work, most are civil servants, soldiers, or drivers of the yellow Toyota taxis that form the Yaoundé public transportation system.

  No one in Yaoundé seems to produce anything. There are few shops, among them a clothes emporium named “Bobby Robson”—the memory of Italia ’90 lives on—and there are hundreds of unemployed people selling junk at the central market. As one of the only whites who ever went about on foot, I was their main hope, and every time I ventured into the central square the joyous cry went up, “Le petit français!” Back in London later, it was odd to pass shops without causing comment. Many men on the streets wear soccer shirts, and some Cameroonians wear political clothes: dresses, for example, with President Biya’s face printed on front and back. “L’impossible, ce n’est pas camerounais,” as the saying goes.

  Yaoundé is poor, but could be much poorer: no one starves in Cameroon, a fact due less to enlightened rule than to the rainy season. There are always enough bananas to go around. Yaoundé even has its rich suburbs, including one known as “Santa Barbara,” because it looks like a Hollywood film set. One Santa Barbara family owns twelve Mercedes.

  On my first morning in Yaoundé, I discovered why Cameroonians are good at soccer: they play it a lot. Forget all the nonsense about African suppleness. To explain the Lions of the 1990 World Cup, all you need to know is that at lunchtime, in the evening, and all weekend, Yaoundé turns into a soccer pitch. Some kickarounds draw dozens of spectators, and the quality of play is rare.

  On the small, bumpy playground next to my hostel I watched matches at least as fast, as violent, and as sophisticated as lower division professional soccer in Britain, except that the style of play reminded me much more of the Lions in Italy. Had Massing and Milla donned old uniform and turned up they would have slotted in nicely. All players attacked and defended and clattered opponents into the perimeter fence, from which bits of wire protruded frighteningly inwards. Close control was perfect, as it had to be in that space, and as well as the total soccer on show, the sudden switching from one wing to another would have enchanted a qualified coach. A scout would have run out of notebooks.

  President Biya plays golf. In Yaoundé, there are many posters of Biya. To judge by the posters, he is a man with a moustache. The accompanying text describes him as “Courage man, Lion man.” Each day, to remind citizens what he looks like, the Cameroon Tribune prints a Biya snapshot and a wise Biya saying on its front page. The Tribune is the government newspaper. “Beyond your affiliations,” it quoted on my first day, “beyond your alliances inherent in a democracy, beyond all differences, I am, and will remain, the President of all Cameroonians without exceptions.”

  Biya was worried. Africa’s foreign aid donors had suddenly discovered the virtues of democracy, and tyrants wanting more money had had to hold elections. Biya had won 98.75 percent of the vote in the 1988 elections, but some felt that was because he had been the only candidate. Just before the 1990 World Cup an opposition party, the SDF, had been launched, and the month before I arrived, in October 1992, Biya had felt obliged to organize the country’s first ever multiparty elections. His CPDM lost to the SDF, though the government had prevented two million people from voting. A quick thinker, Biya then told local chiefs to throw away the votes they had counted. The nation found out and turned nasty. The Anglophones turned against the government, and a civil war looked possible.

  There are over 200 distinct ethnic groups in Cameroon—“a treasure house of cultures,” the tourist brochure calls it—but the main divide is between those who speak French as a second language and those whose second language is English. The Anglophones live in the west, and the Francophones, who make up three-quarters of the population, in the east, in the area that includes Yaoundé and Douala. The Anglophones call Biya’s CPDM “Chop People Dem Money,” and in the election they voted en masse for the Anglophone leader of the SDF, Ni John Fru Ndi. When Biya rigged the vote they rioted, and so he declared a state of emergency in Northwestern Province. Biya’s soldiers began to torture (Fru Ndi’s mother was one victim) and to kill in the rebel region. The British Embassy easily dissuaded me from paying a visit.

  Western nations began to demand new elections; there was talk that Biya would give up chopping people dem money, and would go and live in some of his houses in France, or in the USA, or in the hospital he owned in Germany; it was said that the treasury was finally bare; there was lots more talk.

  But Yaoundé was still quiet, and the only signs of the times were the smoking heaps of rubbish everywhere: the government could no longer afford to pay the garbage collectors, so the locals had tried to burn the refuse themselves, with little success. Chickens and tiny dogs grazed in the piles.

  I listened to the radio news in English at ten every evening, out on the Mission Presbyterienne’s porch with the proprietor, chiefly because I could do nothing else at night. Going out after dark, as a white man in those bad days, was thought an insupportable risk, like jumping off a cliff, or driving on the Yaoundé-Douala highway. The news was dull. The state of emergency was never mentioned, and almost all items (delivered in West African English) were announcements of official events, so that one night we would hear that, “A seminar on government work goes underway in Yaoundé tomorrow,” the next, that the seminar was up and running, and the night after, that it was into its second day.

  On my second day in Yaoundé I went to the Omnisports Stadium. It has an official capacity of 70,000, but (as custom once was in Britain) far more cram in for big matches, which in this city of 650,000 often draw 100,000 people. The ground is
one of just three or four grass pitches in all of Cameroon. That day, the Indomitable Lions were training on it.

  Each player was dressed in a uniform of his own choice; one even wore a Dutch national team shirt. It was a terrible training session. The squad practiced crosses, most of which went behind the goal, while the manager, a Cameroonian named Jules Nyongha, commentated from the center circle. The exercise was set up in such a way that only four of the 25 or so players could do anything at any one time, and they all grew bored. Two goalkeepers took turns in goal, one a competent performer, the other a fat, short, aging man who at one point ran ten yards out of goal to punch the ball backwards toward his own net. He may have been the team’s bus driver, but on the other hand he may have been the first-choice goalkeeper. Had I come to the right practice? My neighbor on the stone slabs (which in the Omnisports count as seats) reassured me. These were the Indomitable Ones.

  To get closer, I went to sit with some fans on the grass next to the athletics track. Then a small moustachioed man in formal white robes appeared, shooed the fans into the stands, and berated two passing workmen with spades, who trudged on. He threw me a nasty glance, but left me where I was. White skin may make you a thief’s target in Cameroon, but it saves you from the worst bureaucratic bullies. Even so, I retreated to the stand, pointed at the bully and asked one of the evicted fans, “That’s not Milla, is it?” “Yes it is,” he replied sullenly.

  Roger Milla is the son of a railway worker. His father probably took his name from a German named Muller. The boy turned out to be blessed with the balance of an American football running back and was voted African Soccer player of the Year in 1976. A year later he went to play in France, and for the next 12 years he moved from one mediocre French club to another. He was 38 in 1990, playing Indian Ocean soccer in Réunion and bound for oblivion, when Biya picked him for the World Cup squad.

  It was an arbitrary presidential act that paid off. The born extrovert (he shaved his head before the England match, just in case anyone was forgetting him) won the title of Most Entertaining Player of the World Cup (a choice that must have given FIFA three seconds’ thought) and became the idol of middle-aged men everywhere. He scored four goals. When he strolled into press conferences after games, Cameroonian journalists would wave their yellow and green caps and cheer, “Bravo, Roger, bravo!” “No one,” says Milla, “has forgotten the moments when I was on the pitch.”

  For a year after the World Cup he travelled the world, playing exhibition matches and negotiating with clubs. Every now and then it would be reported that he had signed for a team in Mexico, or in Germany, or in South Africa, or somewhere on the far side of the globe from all these places, but each time the deal would collapse on his demands. At Cape Town Hellenic, he demanded 65 times the pay of any other player. In this phase of his life he charged for interviews, and refused to play for Cameroon against England at Wembley, in February 1991, when the English FA would not pay him a special appearance fee. A Nigerian chief awarded him a trophy, which was meant to be an annual prize, but when the time came for Milla to return it he held tight. The chief had to have a new trophy made. Finally, accepting that no club in the world could afford him, Milla retired to Yaoundé. He claims he scored over 1,000 goals in his career, but no one really knows.

  The day after he chased away the fans, I met him again. This time he was wearing soccer uniform (a team shirt with Arabic letters) and was descending the steps of the Omnisports on his way to train with the Lions. “You see,” he said, pointing to his outfit, “I’m keeping fit for 1994!” I was not about to bet against it, but he laughed uproariously. He had become general director of the Lions, a post Biya had invented for him.

  The general director agreed to an interview (for free) and the next day I found him in his office. It is basic and battered and located in the basement of the Omnisports Stadium, just a few doors down from the room where he kept 120 pygmies from the Cameroonian rainforests locked up last summer. Milla had invited the pygmies to play a few games at the Omnisports, to raise money for their health and education, but he imprisoned them there, issued them with guards (one of whom wore a Saddam Hussein T-shirt) and seldom fed them. A tournament spokesman explained to Reuters: “They play better if they don’t eat too much.” As for the imprisonment: “You don’t know the pygmies. They are extremely difficult to keep in control.” The Omnisports cook concurred: “These pygmies can eat at any time of the day and night and never have enough.” The little hunters themselves were too frightened to comment.

  Their tournament was a disaster. Team names included Bee-sting of Lomie and the aptly named Ants of Salapoumbe, but only 50 fans bought tickets, and most of these came strictly to shout abuse at the pygmies. On the last night of the tournament, Milla staged a charity concert for the pygmies, at which he sang himself. (When France Football asked him, “Can you sing?,” he replied, “Let’s say, if they rectify my voice in the studio, then yes, I can sing.”) Thousands attended the concert. A month later, with the pygmies safely back in their rainforests, Milla proposed a charity game between them and the Bushmen of South Africa. The pygmy reply is not recorded.

  I did not dare discuss pygmies with Milla. With his enormous, cropped head, his military moustache, the photograph of Biya above his desk and the sense he emitted of pent-up force, he resembled the leader of a Fascist party. In fact, the Biya photograph is customary in Cameroonian offices, and though Milla growls rather than speaks, he is friendly. Dressed in shirt and tie, he was also the smartest thing in his office. Hammering went on constantly above us.

  I began with the World Cup. Was Cameroon’s success Africa’s success too? “Not just the success of Africa, but of the whole Third World, because the Third World supported Cameroon.” This was no idle boast. When England knocked out the Lions, a Bangladeshi man died of a heart attack and a Bangladeshi woman hung herself. “The elimination of Cameroon also means the end of my life,” said her suicide note. What Milla did for Cameroonian migrants in southern French provincial towns surpasses imagining.

  Had Milla’s own success in Italy surprised him? “Maybe, because it was after all a World Cup. But I was a star in the French league, I was a star in Africa.” Already he was rewriting history: Milla was a respected player in French soccer, but no star. Until the World Cup he could have ridden the Paris metro in peace, and even Cameroonians were amazed by his play in Italy. Why, I asked carefully, are some African greats nonentities at their European clubs? “Because when Africans arrive in Europe they are taken for monkeys. The clubs must give the players confidence.” He claimed that his spell at Monaco “brought me not to play in big clubs in France because I told them the truth: that they must accept players as they are.” He was saying, in other words, that he played for minor clubs by choice. How much racism had he found in French soccer? “Let’s say that maybe now this racism has disappeared, but when we arrived in the 1970s we suffered racism. I have been told to go and look for bananas in the forest.”

  He said sorry about the Wembley match, and blamed his absence on “machinations” by the president of the Cameroonian FA of the time. But this was the new Milla speaking, Milla the diplomat. Milla at the end of the World Cup found himself a great player who had made no money out of his career, and he was bitter. He says he never made more than £3,000 a month. This, he claims, is because he is African. “I have been deceived by France,” he told France Football. He admitted to me that he had still not received all the money he was owed for the 1990 World Cup: Cameroon took 80 people to Italy, the largest delegation from any nation, and £400,000 went missing. Joseph Bell, the team’s first-choice goalkeeper, was dropped on the eve of the opening match for complaining about the missing money, which is why Thomas Nkono enjoyed his second World Cup. (For his rebellion, Bell earned himself the nickname “Nelson Mandela.”) Yet some say that Cameroonian soccer is the best organized in Africa.

  Why had Milla quit his global quest for money? “Friends advised me to stop at my peak,” he s
aid, and the president had given him this job. I pointed to the photograph of Biya. In 1990, when Milla was voted African Player of the Year, he had dedicated the prize to him. You are an admirer of the president, I said. “Yes: he’s our president,” said Milla. “When he goes there will be another president whom I will admire.”

  Now that he was a general director of the national team, what did he do? “I administer the team, I call the national team together for training camps, I prepare water, balls, uniforms, and so on for their practices, I prepare the fees for the training camps.” And was that fun? “Everyone must be happy where he is and we must not refuse without judging first in the field,” he replied piously. “I like the job because it keeps me in contact with my old comrades in the national team.”

  Ah yes, his old comrades. Before the World Cup, they objected to the retiree being added to the squad. After the World Cup, many of them complained that Milla had taken the credit for Cameroon’s success. “We played, but Milla won,” sulked François Omam-Biyik. Milla was reticent to me, but two years before he had told France Football: “Omam-Biyik has understood nothing. It was not the manager or the minister who chose me to play in the World Cup, it was the people. I accepted the verdict of public opinion, relayed to me by the head of state, President Biya, who ordered the minister to send me to Italy. I did it all for them, for the young lads. If I had done it for me, I would have descended upon the Champs-Elysées in an open-top car and I’d have said, ‘I am the greatest!’ ” And indeed, he never did descend upon the Champs-Elysées in an open-topped car and say, “I am the greatest!”