Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Ombga had bought some of the stars of the 1990 World Cup side, including Stephen Tataw, the Lions’ captain in Italy, and Bertin Ebwelle, and was thought to be paying them as much as $1,000 a month. This was unique: though some league matches draw crowds of 50,000, the receipts disappear before reaching the players, and all teams in Cameroon are semiprofessional. One problem is that as soon as a team does badly their backers pull out. “African entrepreneurs never invest on the long term,” explained Nkwi.

  Yet “OM” was still in the second division. If they could win the Cup, it would be the first prize in their history. They had lost the pre-match skirmishes: a couple of days before the final, four armed men had dragged Tataw from his car and beaten him up.

  The Omnisports always sells out for the Cup final, and the atmosphere is renowned. “Get there early,” various people had advised me, so there I was, nearly three hours before the match, in a virtually empty stadium. It was like finding Wembley deserted on Cup final day. I was not in the pressbox: since it is part of the presidential stand, everyone in it had to be vetted to make sure that they would not be shooting at Biya, and there was not time to check on me.

  I had a personal interest in the first event of the afternoon, the parade of the national champions of other sports. I had met the volleyball champions of Cameroon, Amacam, since they were lodging at the Mission Presbyterienne. After they had crammed into the Mission’s one guest room, I had to move to the proprietress’s shack, where twice I woke up in the night to find her nephew urinating against my bedroom door. But the players were the most courteous people I had ever met, and never passed me without enquiring at length about my health. One evening, when they were brushing their teeth at the wash basin, they asked me how I was and I said I was well. Then I asked how they were. “very good,” they replied. “We won our tournament today.” “What tournament?” “The West African Championship.” I murmured my congratulation. I had known from the first that they must be good, because they all had the same uniform. At the Omnisports, I waved as they passed.

  The stadium was still almost empty, and Biya was due to arrive at 15:20 P.M.—the newspapers and radio news had given an elaborate protocol. But then, with only an hour to go before kickoff, tens of thousands of people materialized within a couple of minutes, as if they had fallen from the skies onto the concrete slabs. Why had they appeared so suddenly?

  Waiting for Biya, I was as excited as anyone else. I did not suppose he was one of the great statesmen of our century, but when you see a man’s poster everywhere for a week you are curious to see him in real life, particularly if he is a recluse. As his time approached, those on the front slabs fatuously stood to get a better view, and were berated by those behind. Then Biya was there, standing and waving in an open-topped limousine on the athletics track, followed by limos crammed with soldiers. But though I had seen his pictures hundreds of times, I did not at first recognize him. The person in the car was shorter and rounder than the Courage Man, Lion Man, and had a bald spot. Was he an imposter? The crowd was delighted and clapped and cheered as if he had been popularly elected. There were still large gaps in the stands, though, which was unheard of for a Cup final.

  The teams warmed up with some breathtaking tricks. The Sports Minister at the women’s Cup final had lost his job in the cabinet reshuffle, and this week his successor kicked off by whacking the ball 30 yards into touch.

  I have never seen as neutral a crowd as the one at the Omnisports that day. Except for a few youths in Olympique Mvolye T-shirts, no one wore club colors, and all acts of skill were applauded impartially. An Olympique appeal for a penalty prompted scholarly debate.

  The kickoff was the highlight of the first half. Directly after halftime Olympique’s captain Tataw raced into the Diamant box, fell over, and won a penalty, which Ebwelle converted. Behind the Diamant goal, a train of boys and girls in identical Olympique shirts formed and danced the conga across the stand, while my two neighbors argued the penalty across me for ten minutes. It proved the only goal of the match, and Ombga had his first trophy. After the final whistle, acting on a hunch, I asked a fan in an Olympique shirt where I could buy one. He told me the street where they were being handed out for free. I understood: Ombga had created not only a team, but fans to go with it. Doubtless, the teenagers behind the goal were paid for their dance. It was all part of the Olympique Marseille fantasy.

  The road past the Omnisports was cleared for dozens of military vehicles to rush past. While waiting for a taxi, I copied out the text of the T-shirt on the giant waiting beside me: And World Cup 1990 will start in Italian soon! . . .

  P’ong design for World Cup

  When Speak to World Cup I’m sure you must be know?

  That it is soccer game which excite

  Every 4 years

  They will find only one team to champion

  And World Cup 1990 will start in Italian soon! . . .

  And . . . I hope you must be exciting!

  I’m sure . . .

  When the giant spotted me writing, he kindly held out his shirt towards me.

  Back at the Mission, I heard the radio news concede that the match had been “low-keyed.” The prestigious Guinness Man of the Match Award had gone to Jang Sunday, the Anglophone captain of Diamant. “I was a bit surprised,” Sunday admitted, and so, to be honest, was everyone else.

  In the USSR, you could read the truth in Pravda, as long as you knew how to read between the lines. In Cameroon, the truth is not in newspapers, radio or TV, but is passed on from person to person, and gets distorted on the way. The trick is to have informed friends who stand at the beginning of the chain. I had questions to ask about the final.

  On the day after the game, I first visited Fon Echekiye in the office he shares with Francophone colleagues at Cameroonian TV. (Apparently in 1990 they had renamed their studios after Milla.) We chatted vaguely for a while, and then he walked me to the elevator where no one could hear us, and told me that an hour before the final, with the stands still empty, soldiers had gone onto the streets and asked people in for free. It would not have done for the president to wave at empty seats. Why had people stayed away? First of all, Fon Echekiye explained, the finalists were mediocre teams, and the arms dealer had made himself unpopular by buying players from Canon and Tonnerre, Yaoundé’s two big clubs. Then, people had no money. Thirdly, the opposition—and most of Yaoundé had voted against Biya—was boycotting the final. Jang Sunday, Fon Echekiye added, had been made Man of the Match purely to pacify the Anglophones. Certainly Azeh’s paper that day was vocal in Sunday’s favor, which suggested that something fishy had gone on.

  There was other news: Diamant had not intended to play the final at all. Angry at FECAFOOT’s decision to relegate them, the players had decided to shake hands with Biya and then return to the changing rooms. At the last minute they had changed their minds, or had had them changed.

  I left the TV building and took a taxi to Bar Liberty, which has a collection box for PWD Bamenda on its counter. “Where is the office of the Cameroon Post?” I asked a customer. “Who are you?” he asked. I said I was an English journalist, and he walked me into the backyard of a private house. In the lounge were a dozen or so men sitting at typewriters or drinking beer, while women cooked in the kitchen. This was the Cameroon Post, a national newspaper, and the house was the home of its publisher. The staff had moved here after getting death threats and visits from the police at their offices. The Post is Anglophone—hence the PWD box at the Bar Liberty—and was by then the only opposition newspaper that had not been banned. The Post’s editor feared worse than a ban. “When these guys come to collect you, they are not gentle,” he told me. Why had his paper survived so long? He cited the poor English of the state censors. In that week’s edition, they had struck out a list of names of the detainees in Northwestern Province but had passed a two-page center spread detailing acts of violence. The editor found this very funny.

  I was at the house to speak to Julius
Wamey, Post writer, CNN correspondent, and, like every Cameroonian, expert on the politics of soccer. The low turnout at the final, he said, was “the first proof of Biya’s unpopularity since the elections.” But, he sighed, “Biya is the kind of person who sees empty stands and thinks they’re full. He’s like a fat ugly person looking in the mirror in the morning and seeing a slim young man.” And Wamey confirmed Fon Echekiye’s view of Sunday’s prize. We went on to the relegation issue. I said that I could see that FECAFOOT would like PWD to go down, but I still did not understand why they felt it was worth the trouble to arrange this, knowing what a fuss it would cause in the Northwest. In short, why did they bother? “Because they think in the end they can get away with it,” Wamey answered. “Because they always have.”

  I took a final Toyota to Professor Nkwi, at Yaoundé University. He agreed that the stayaway at the final was probably due to a word-of-mouth boycott by the opposition. In the same way, he said, a boycott of French products was going on (France was still backing Biya) though no one had announced it. But when I mentioned Sunday’s award he shook his head. He knew the rumor already. If an Anglophone had to win the prize, he asked, then why not Tataw, captain of the winning team, who played well? “People are trying to read meaning into everything now,” he complained.

  Two days later I was back at Douala airport, had met my porter of a fortnight ago, and had shaken him off. Then I was told that as I had not confirmed my seat I would not be on that day’s flight. The next Aeroflot plane left in a fortnight. A friendly fixer advised me that other hopefuls were bidding for seats on my flight, and that to get on I would have to pay a bigger bribe than my competitors. I gave this man $100 and fretted for five hours in a lobby without air conditioning until he told me I had a seat. I ran onto the plane—there were more passengers than seats, and I did not want to strap hang to Moscow—and just 18 hours later, I was home.

  Postscript: I had a twinge of nostalgia for Cameroon when I read months later how the Lions qualified for the World Cup. The deciding game was at home to Zimbabwe, on October 10, 1993. The opposition, still trying to unseat Biya, had called a general strike for the 11th. Biya responded by saying that if the Lions qualified on the 10th, the 11th would be a public holiday. Meanwhile the players, led by Bell, were threatening to throw the game unless they were paid their overdue bonuses. On the night before the match, the prime minister and my friend the FECAFOOT president brought them the money in cash. Cameroon won, and when the final whistle went the fans left the Omnisports immediately. They were furious with the players for missing the political point.

  CHAPTER 14

  MANDELA AT HELDERFONTEIN

  HELDERFONTEIN. IT WAS THE journalist’s event of the year, and I rang Mark Gleeson to ask if I should wear a jacket and tie. “Are you kidding?” he answered. “This is South Africa.”

  Whatever you read on African soccer, the chances are that Mark wrote it. He travels the continent and writes up its soccer for the Johannesburg Star, the BBC, World Soccer, France Football, the Daily Telegraph and La Stampa, to name but a few. If, say, an African Cupwinners’ Cup semifinal is being played in Burundi, Mark flies in, hangs around for a week, and sells a dozen articles. He says his average is four pieces a day. He drove me to Swaziland once, knees to the steering wheel of his tiny car (Mark is 6’ 8”), because there was an off chance that the Cameroon team might be landing at the airport. (They did not.) He knows the best prawn restaurant in Mozambique, and has been Roger Milla’s tennis partner. In the players’ tunnel at Botswana vs. Niger, the more senior Niger players went up to greet Mark, while their younger teammates looked on in awe. Being 6’ 8” helps, he says, and so does being white. No one in Africa forgets Mark.

  So he and I drove out of Johannesburg in shorts and T-shirts, through the bush to the Helderfontein country estate, where Nelson Mandela was to meet the South African national soccer team. The “Bafana Bafana” (Zulu for “The Boys”) were due to play Nigeria two days later, in a game they had to win to have a chance of making South Africa’s first ever World Cup. Mandela’s visit had more to do with the nation’s first ever multiracial elections, to be held a year later. Even by the standards of the rest of the world, black South Africans are soccer mad. “We need to be seen to be there,” an ANC official told me, and of course the press was invited.

  In 1992, to judge whether South Africa was ready to return to international soccer, Joâo Havelange and Sepp Blatter of FIFA visited Johannesburg. Solomon “Stix” Morewa, secretary-general of the South African FA, drove them in his Mercedes around the city’s seven marvellous stadiums. Then he took them to a filling station in Soweto. It was his, and he wanted them to see it. Also, he had phone calls to make. So he told them to wait in his car, brought them soft drinks from the drinks machine and gave them a chance to ponder South African soccer’s naïveté.

  I visited the SAFA offices to arrange an interview with Morewa. In his office I found a woman, whom I asked, “Are you Mr Morewa’s secretary?” She replied: “I don’t know. I’ve only been here one day, so I don’t know what his name is.” I pointed out that her appointments book had Morewa’s name on it, and I booked an interview. I turned up on the appointed day, and met Morewa, who showed me the appointments book. My name was not in it. He agreed to speak to me the next day. Mark drove me in, and as he had predicted Morewa was nowhere to be seen. “I think you’re the fourth foreign journalist I’ve taken to meet Morewa and he’s still not shown up yet,” Mark consoled me.

  Morewa managed to make it to the FIFA congress in Zurich, in June 1992. There, 16 new members were admitted to FIFA, but of these only South Africa raised an ovation from the hall. The world is happy to have South Africa back. People feel it is the land where gold and diamonds flow, where only human folly prevents greatness. Not only SAFA officials were going around Zurich saying that South Africa was about to win the World Cup, and the nation’s fans joyously began to pick national teams.

  It all went wrong. Even before South Africa played their first match, their manager, Jeff Butler, had to resign, when the news leaked that he had been creative with his c.v. His rather modest claim to have played for Notts County turned out to be false—though as his supporters pointed out, a cousin of his had done so. “We get people who say they’ve played for Liverpool and they haven’t, or they’ve played two matches for Liverpool Reserves, and they’ll have had ten clubs in South Africa without adding anything to the game here,” John Perlman of the Star grumbled to me. Perlman liked to grumble.

  Mark called South Africa’s next manager, Stanley Tshabalala, a “coaching peasant.” Poor Tshabalala was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. He grew up in the sanctions era, when South African teams never met foreign teams, and seldom even saw them on TV: the World Cup of 1990 was the first to be shown in South Africa. South Africa was less far removed from the world than, say, the moon or Pluto, but it was still a few light-years away. White South African soccer players tried to play like the English, but the blacks imitated the Harlem Globetrotters, and Tshabalala learned that soccer was about circus tricks. “Piano and shoeshine,” he proudly called the South African style, and he fondly imagined that Brazil played the same way. After the Bafana Bafana lost 4-1 to Zimbabwe, his players revealed that he had given them no game plan at all. They had had to go out and ad-lib. Also, they complained, he was obsessed with muti. A 4-0 blackwash by Nigeria followed.

  The journalists raged against Tshabalala, and he called them racists. Most South African soccer reporters are whites, and so are most managers. “Black players are scared of white coaches,” Phil Nyamane, a rare black journalist, explained to me over breakfast at the Star one morning. “When the coach is a black man, they relax. Chiefs once brought over an Argentine manager, and when you spoke to him you realized: ‘This guy knows nothing about soccer.’ ” But the funny thing was that Chiefs did well under him, because he impressed the players by being white.” It is not just a matter of whiteness: South Africans tend to feel that an
y holder of a foreign passport is great and wise.

  Eventually, Tshabalala slapped Sy Lerman of the Sunday Times in the face, and was sacked. (Lerman is known to other journalists as “Coach”: they say he picks the team.) Tshabalala was succeeded by a caretaker, and then by Augusto Palacios, a Peruvian and a friend of Lerman’s.

  The Helderfontein receptionist was Miss South Africa 1982, and young men in tracksuits were swarming around her desk. “Any messages for me?” they would ask every two minutes. George Dearnaley, a white striker, found out that Sizwe Motaung, a black midfield player, was getting 50 phone calls from women a day. “Tell Sizwe’s mother and sister not to ring so often,” Dearnaley whooped, “because I know for sure that he hasn’t got a girlfriend.” Motaung didn’t blink. Journalists had told me that white and black players hardly mixed, but four weeks in training camp seemed to be helping.

  Mandela was due, and players were climbing out of the swimming pool and changing into tracksuits. I asked Roger De Sa, a bespectacled keeper, and one of three whites in the squad, whether the players were excited about the visit. “Not me,” he said. “I won’t be voting for him.” While we waited for Mandela, De Sa and I chatted, and Innocent Mncwango, a black player, sat with us but said nothing.

  De Sa is the son of Portuguese colonists and was born in Mozambique. His father played for Sporting Mozambique, a branch of Sporting Lisbon, and had a spell with the mother club until homesickness forced him back to Africa. Eusebio also started his career with Sporting Mozambique, and flew to Portugal to join Sporting Lisbon, but Benfica were quicker. “They caught him at the airport, offered him more money than he’d ever seen before, and he signed,” claimed De Sa. De Sa supports Sporting—these things matter in South Africa. “When I was a boy everyone would come with their radios to the Portuguese Club at the weekend, to cheer on their team.” Mncwango still said nothing.