The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Some of strangest things I have seen and heard in my short life are to do with football and the entire regime of what we now know as soccer.
At Barbourfields Stadium and the sports bars of Esselin Street in Pretoria’s Sunnyside town I have seen elders behave like toddlers and dignified personalities throw all decorum to the wind all because of soccer.
I have never, in my adult life, participated in the manly thing of being a soccer fan or to dispense passion that is identified with a specific team.
I last was a religious soccer fan when Highlanders was still called Amahlolanyama after that army of beautiful black and white birds that appeared when hunters were to bring lots of meat home in the village. When those birds were seen the village knew that hunters had good fortune.
I was a hunter of sorts in the forests of Siganda in the Nkosikazi communal area. Rabbits, guinea-fowls, bushbucks and other animals knew me by name as I set all sorts of clever traps for them and feasted on their meat. I used to whistle when the Amahlolanyama army of birds appeared in the village heralding my success in hunting.
When Bosso was eventually called Umantengwane, a name after that noisy ugly black bird, I supported the team only for spiritual reasons because High-langa is a deeply ancestral and spiritual outfit.
Otherwise I find soccer and its football a lot of fuss about nothing fundamentally. I write this article because there is collective depression and mourning in Pretoria concerning how African teams have been, humiliatingly, booted out of the World Cup.
Such notions as the backwardness of Africa and the unfitness of Africans are in currency as African soccer fans position themselves to support this and that European team after the loss of Africa.
For me as a decolonial scholar what is happening to Africa and Africans in soccer is just a simple reflection of what is happening to the peoples of the Global South in the global academy, media, politics and economy. In politics, academicism, media representation and economics we peoples of the Global South are poor players in games we never designed and that we will never win, unless we capture the power to change the terms and conditions of the games.
I am not saying Africans should abandon soccer and football altogether, but I am insisting that they should domesticate the game and play with the whole world in the African way, and win.
As long as we play soccer as a foreign game that we have not stamped on our sensibility on we will always be losers even before we enter the field of play. There is and there should always be something called African football. In that game we will be winners.
The Genealogy of Football
Most soccer fans do not care that the first football game was played, not with the leather ball that we know, but a human head.
The people of an eastern province of England played football with the head of a Danish Prince that had been defeated and killed in battle.
Football began as “folk ball” played by an angry and uncontrollable mob as war game.
The history goes that students of Oxford University formed an association for the game which they abbreviated as the “soc” and in that way the term soccer for the football game and its organisation and administration was born. British Monarchs from King Edward II in 1314 to Queen Elizabeth I tried and failed to ban football as a vulgar, unruly and barbaric noisy sport.
Football players, organisers, team owners and those who participated in football batting were killed and jailed in punishment. Rugby broke out of football when certain players preferred a mixture of kicking and handling the ball to run with it to the gates that used to be more than a kilometre wide.
Cricket later broke out of both football and rugby as the only game of “gentlemen” that did not relish in manhandling and kicking each other.
Like the English language that they invented and then lost control of it, and they now have to be taught by Africans how to write and speak the language, the English have lost ownership and control of football and soccer.
They only won the soccer World Cup in 1966 and they now remain as some of those that come and go in the famous tournament.
Football and soccer at large have been improved as an industry and a profession, the earnings for players, administrators and owners are spectacularly good but I doubt the game has lost its war spirit and violent DNA.
Fundamentally, for Africans, football is other people’s game whose barbaric origins and spiritual DNA are alien.
The reference to soccer as “a beautiful game” tends to conceal the ugly origins of the game that was initially played with human heads and later inflated bladders of pigs. It is no accident that it had to be Abedi Pele, a black man who sought to civilise and beautify the game by naming it as such. Otherwise as it is football and its soccer regime of administration are a militaristic and capitalist game and not a beautiful art.
There was another Football
At Siganda Primary School football got localised and domesticated into a local form of art and entertainment. It was not this automated Olympics of time, speed and goals that we see. Football was a kind of dance and players were performers in a stage that was the football field. There was a beautiful thing called “ukureyitsha.” It was a combination of dunking and dribbling by the talented player in possession of the ball, a slippery dance of escape.
And the spectators whistled and broke into song in praise of the hero and mockery of the losers. And then there was another heroic type of player. This one did not as much dance and dunk with the ball. He simply kicked it high into the skies with a big and loud boom.
The higher the ball went the louder were the screams, ululations and whistles of the villagers. This shooting of the ball into the skies was called “umboko.” It was more celebrated than a goal. For a long time, players seemed to wait for the poor ball to return from the skies as spectators danced and sang in celebration of the power and beauty of football.
There was one Gadeo from Lukala Primary School that became a legend for such shots. His claim to fame was to shoot the ball into the heavens with a big boom, and the spectators loved it.
As Gadeo jumped up and down in heroic self-celebration other players, especially angry fellows from losing teams would shoot the ball into the bushes just to disrupt the game and frustrate the winners.
That is how one Phamba became a kind of hero. He was a little known fellow who ran to pick up the ball from the bushes to return it to the field but did not do so. He picked up the ball, looked back once and took to his heels, never to return to school again.
For Phamba the ball became too good a prize and a whole schooling career could go to heaven, and he ran for it. Some of the best sprinters in the area just saw dust and gave up the chase. In my mind I think Phamba is still running with that ball now, as I write.
My own uncle, the late Bonani Sibanda, we called him “Gwindi” was a school football hero. He was notorious as a goalkeeper for catching penalty balls.
He did not just catch them but he danced and made other amazing moves as he did so. My cousin Roy Gwayi Moyo was not even a football player but a big mass of muscle and bone that pushed other players to the ground until the ball was in the net.
Not so Dladla, a fellow from Mbayiwa Village that span from Hauke to Lukala.
Dladla dribbled and turned with the ball, doing what we called tap-tap, playing with the ball in one place, avoiding other players with body moves that stupefied them. It was a kind of magic. Dodging and diving with the ball to empty competitors of all energy and spirit.
Football matches, at Siganda, were a carnivalisque festival that brought schools from Siganda, Dulutsha, Mbembeswana, Hauke and Nkosikazi into an annual ritual of celebrating dance, bodily strength and agility of the young and old. Goals were just a bonus, not the capital aim of that beautiful game that one never sees on television now.
On TV one sees a play station-like game where goals, in the true profit and time spirit of capitalism, are everything. Minus the dance and the performance, football becomes a war and not a beautiful game. It is a tense and hectic contest that still carries the emotions and gravity of the times when human heads were the ball.
Technicalities and cold rules take away the beauty and art of the game and renders Africans alien and removed from it. Not that Africans and blacks are essentially out of it; our own brothers have made it big in the West, playing what is essentially other people’s game that has its own sensibility, a game with a poor sense of humour and smells of dried human heads.
I am not a football or soccer fan. But I have found myself watching this not so beautiful game for purposes of earning much needed beer from my gullible friends.
Most of my friends in Sunnyside are Arsenal fans. Whenever Arsenal was playing I would also become tense, lose my temper and keep shouting “Arsene knows!” pointing into the sky and predicting impossible victory. That way the beer normally flows.
I avoid conversations that demand that I name individual players or express any detailed knowledge of the alien game.
A question of Sensibility
My argument is that in football as it is played in the globe now Africans are playing a game that is not theirs and in terms and conditions that are imposed on them. Some of my friends argue that African players have internalised inferiority and lose the game before they even enter the field.
Others hold the view that Africans lack the skill that Europeans have naturalised and perfected over years. Some invoke arguments about our physical inferiority and bodily lacks. Others still claim that we get cheated.
I think in football as it is in politics, economics and the arts we abandon our African sensibility and try to compete with Europeans in their own sensibility and therefore naturally lose. Football rules, regulations, terms and conditions are designed, in my view, to suppress African sensibility and the natural propensity to be artistic and performative as we work and play.
Once they have given us a pace, a way to tackle and kick the ball, how to run and not to run in the field, the order and the form of the game, the time to spend on it, we lose our game and they win theirs. It is in that systemic, structural and regulatory way that we are cheated.
In academia we experience the same underdevelopment where we are told how to hold the intellectual conversation from abstracting our essays and presentations to introducing, structuring and concluding them, in an alien and frozen sensibility.
In politics and in business, Africans are given rules of engagement and contestation that de-Africanise and disable them, we get into the competition not as players only but also students of the game, novices and poor learners. We need to own the game and dictate the terms and conditions; and play the game as us.
Our humbling in football and in soccer is reflective of the same humbling we suffer in politics, economics, academia, culture and otherwise.
We have a job to decolonise world power relations and ownership rights and responsibilities of work and play in order to win.
Not all football is soccer and not all soccer is football. Africans needs to press on African ways of sensing, knowing, playing and owning this game.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founder member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Esselin Street, Sunnyside in Pretoria:[email protected].
