Football and me: Conclusion

I signed off last week by citing the cohesive and divisive power of football. A couple more memories come to mind on this score (forgive the pun), from Cameroun and, first of all, from Libya. The only football match I’ve ever attended (hundreds of my readers vow at this point never to look at my column again) was an Africa Cup qualifier between Libya and Tunisia. The match was played in a handsome stadium in Benghazi, where I was then working (at the local university, not at the stadium), so Libya were the home side. Even then to my untutored eye I could tell they were pretty hopeless. The huge crowd were practically one hundred per cent Libyans and extremely despondent, in a very quiet way. I did recognise two Tunisian workers from the university cafeteria as we all filed into the stadium; they waved to me and put their fingers to their lips, not to give away their nationality. I was, I’m sure, the only Westerner present, and rooting for Libya, not that there was very much to root for. At the end of the match—the score was something like Tunisia 6, Libya 0—the crowd waited until all the players and officials had disappeared and then threw exploding fireworks on to the pitch. “You must think,” commented the Libyan student I was with, “that we are very rude.” “A mob of unkempt barbarians,” I replied, and then: “not at all. If this was London, the crowd would have thrown the fireworks at the players.” Now I turn to Cameroun, where I spent a few happy months as a freelance writer before I was banned from the country on account of my writing against the Biya dictatorship (a habit I still diligently pursue). I may have told this story a year or two ago, when I wrote a column titled “Navigating Cameroun”, but here goes anyway. I was staying with a British Council friend in Bamenda, in her house on a hill way above the town. We were sitting on the veranda one afternoon, sort of working, when there was a sudden, enormous noise from the town below. Something like a tsunami or a tidal wave breaking, though Bamenda is way inland. Janet (not her real name) and I gazed at each other in consternation and then she laughed and said “oh, it’s the Africa Cup this afternoon. Cameroun must have scored and the town’s gone wild.” Across the road from Janet’s house was a large area of forest; a path led through this to a bush-bar. A few words of explanation before I go on. “Bush-bar” is the term used in Anglophone Cameroun and in Nigeria for a small drinking-place, often on the borderline of legality in terms of its licencing. In southern Africa these are called shebeens and some day I shall get down to researching the history of the regional usage of that word. It’s Gaelic and I believe was introduced to southern Africa by Irish immigrants, but I’d love to know when and where its usage was first recorded. Back to the Camerounian forest. I would traipse to the bush-bar now and then, as I’d made friends there. A few days after the “tsunami” incident recounted above I made my way there and found on television a later-stage Africa Cup game under way, Cameroun versus Nigeria. I settled down with a lager—the only drink the place sold—greeting my friends, who all knew I’d spent years in Nigeria and loved the place. So they were rooting for the Lions (Cameroun) and I for the Green Eagles (Nigeria). The match ended with a decisive victory for Cameroun and I immediately found myself with several fresh bottles of lager on my table. “For you, Prof,” said my friends. “Sorry your team lost.” Some nights later Janet and I were in Douala—not the capital of Cameroun (which is Yaounde) but the largest city—basically a big industrial and harbour city, and one of several cases in Africa in which the biggest city is not the capital (an ideal quiz puzzler here). We were there basically to say goodbye to a friend of Janet’s, a Kenyan, who had been spending a year in Cameroun—I forget in what capacity—and was now due to fly back to his country. Come the night of his flight and the three of us had a light meal at the hotel we were using and then a late evening swim in the pool (Douala is in equatorial Cameroun and it was fiercely hot and humid). When we set off for the airport I saw that Janet had acquired the use of a large British Council vehicle with Union Jacks painted on the doors and CD (diplomatic corps) number plates. She explained. Cameroun had won the Africa Cup, which was played in Morocco that year and the team were due to fly into Douala airport that night. For security reasons the road to the airport had been blocked off to all normal traffic, but an official diplomatic corps vehicle would be let through. We were going to masquerade as a British delegation congratulating the team. I made my way to a street-stall just outside the hotel and bought a couple of supporter flags: long sticks with an elongated version of the Camerounian flag at the end and the slogan “Allez les Lions!” (“Go, Lions!”). We set off. The sides of the road to the airport were packed with thousands of fans who cheered as our vehicle roared past and Janet’s Kenyan friend and I waved the flags out of the windows. We got to the airport and the Kenyan guy checked in and headed to his gate. Janet and I were ushered into a reserved area where we could get an unobstructed view of the Camerounian team as they came through. I couldn’t believe that anywhere in the world could be so hot and humid at that time of night. But then the team arrived and raced for the (heavily guarded) exits, while Janet and I waved our “Allez les Lions!” flags like lunatics. Then we, too, made for the exits. The car parks were packed with fans, shoulder to shoulder. As we squeezed through the crowd, my pocket was picked—just a couple of small banknotes and a wad of notes for a piece I was preparing for West Africa magazine. So I didn’t feel too distressed and could sort of reconstruct my notes from memory the next day (the resulting write-up was somewhat vague when it came to detail). I said at the beginning of this column that I dislike the brouhaha that goes with the beautiful game (as they call football in South America). But that bit of Camerounian brouhaha was rather fun. Just one more thing. Watching a match on television the other day I noticed that one of the players (East European, I guess) bore the splendid name of Kikoff. I bet his team-mates give him hell in the changing-room.