Cameroon’s Roger Milla eluded the Colombian goalkeeper, René Higuita, to score in the 1990 World Cup, where Cameroon became the first African team to reach the quarterfinals. Agence France -- Presse CAPE TOWN — As the 2010 World Cup arrives at last in Africa, it might come as a surprise that soccer is not merely plowing new ground but also — in some manner — returning to its roots.
The first documented soccer games played on the African continent were staged in the future World Cup cities of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in 1862. That was one year before the rules of association football were codified in England in an attempt to facilitate competition by bringing uniformity to the emerging sport.
“You can make an argument that the history of the game in Africa is as old as the game itself,” said Peter Alegi, a professor of African history at Michigan State University and author of “African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World’s Game.”
There is even the possibility that the history of the game is much older than the game itself. Paintings from ancient Egypt show people throwing and catching balls. Who can be certain they weren’t already using their feet, too?
There is no doubt, however, that the Europeans — both visitors and settlers — provided the initial spark for the early development of the modern game in Africa. Those games in 1862, which took place in what was then known as the Cape Colony, involved military men and other white civil servants for the British colonial government. So it went in other coastal African cities in the years that followed.
But the white monopoly on the club game would not last out the century. In 1896, Mahatma Gandhi, then a young lawyer in South Africa, was among a group of Indian men who helped found the Transvaal Indian Football Association. Alegi considers it “most likely the first organized football group on the continent that was not run by whites."
Gandhi would not be the last future leader to use soccer as a training ground. And the black communities and other indigenous people in Africa would gradually take control of the ball and the phenomenon, embracing the imported game, even sometimes — as in Algeria and South Africa — using it as a tool against their oppressors. Along the way, soccer would grow into a pan-African obsession, perhaps the closest thing to a common currency that this vast and vastly diverse continent possesses.
“If anything can be salvaged from the harsh and unequal encounter between Western and African cultures, then the list must include the arrival of football,” David Goldblatt wrote in “The Ball Is Round,” his global history of soccer. “Western medical care, though dismissive of local healing traditions, is a universal demand in Africa. Christianity’s legacy is more complex, its relationship with indigenous practice more hybrid, but it has become the faith of just under half the continent.”
“Football’s contribution is more unambiguous,” he continued. “It is without competitor Africa’s game.”
This has often not been a blessing, considering the despots, like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire or General Sani Abacha of Nigeria, who tried to use soccer as a political tool, or the toll in too many disasters, like the one last year that left 19 people crushed to death and scores more injured in a stadium in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Even if soccer is “Africa’s game,” that does not mean that Africans are unambiguously focused on African soccer. In the age of the satellite dish and globalization, they are increasingly likely to be watching Manchester United or F.C. Barcelona on television or in a makeshift video shack than to be cheering on their local clubs in domestic league play.
But if the writer Ian Hawkey’s estimate that close to 2,000 African players are now playing or training professionally for European clubs is true, there is a much better chance that there will be some Africans in the mix during those Champions League or Premier League broadcasts. They include Ivory Coast’s Didier Drogba, who plays for Chelsea, and Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o, who plays for Inter Milan.
The exodus — dubbed “the brawn drain” in some circles — represents a major shift, considering that in 1990 there were fewer than 100 Africans playing at the elite professional level in Europe. But that was the same year that Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions and their 38-year-old striker Roger Milla grabbed the World Cup by the tail and gave it an extended shake by defeating Argentina, the defending champion, in their opening game and then becoming the first African team to reach the quarterfinals.
Africa had arrived in earnest as a soccer power, but the game was already playing a powerful role in Cameroon. A nation of close to 200 ethnic groups, Cameroon is rife with linguistic and religious divides but has found a shared passion in the national soccer team. That has been a benefit to its president, Paul Biya, who has been in power since 1982 and who pushed to include Milla in the 1990 World Cup team.
In Nigeria, Cameroon’s neighbor to the north, the national team, the Super Eagles, also plays a federative role (when it is not frustrating its supporters by underachieving).
“Africa is a huge continent, and soccer is one of the few areas of popular culture that really binds people together, but it is a very short-term thing,” Alegi said. “You talk to any Nigerian, and it’s hard to see what they all have in common, but for the 90 minutes that the Super Eagles are playing, there is a Nigeria.”
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