African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World's Game

Chapter Four: Nationhood, Pan-Africanism, and Football after Independence

54 C h A p t e r f o U r nationhood, Pan-Africanism, and Football after independence t h e f o r M A t i o n in 1957 of the Confédération africaine de football (CAF) opened a new era in African soccer. The new Republic of Ghana won its independence that same year and together with CAF stimulated an optimistic pan-African vision and bolstered Ghanaian nationalism. With more than thirty African countries in FIFA by the mid-1960s, European domination of world football was challenged by African claims to equal citizenship. African nations democratized the game, at least the male version, and transformed it into a more fully global cultural form by campaigning against apartheid and mobilizing to increase the number of African participants in the World Cup finals. By 1960, football was certainly deeply rooted in urban African popular culture, and as such, it provided a rare form of “national culture” in postcolonial Africa. The new nations staged matches as part of their independence celebrations and asserted their full membership in the international community by joining FIFA. In 1957, Stanley Matthews, one of England’s all-time greats, visited Ghana, the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence , and played a series of matches in Accra and Kumasi. The Ghanaians honored Matthews in a “traditional” ceremony that conferred upon him the title of Soccerhene (from the Asante monarch’s title of asantehene).1 The following year Ghana became a member of FIFA. Togo’s independence festivities in 1960 featured a game between its national team and Nigeria at a packed Municipal Stadium in Lomé.The crowd reportedly 55 Nationhood, Pan-Africanism, and Football after Independence chanted Ablode, ablode (Freedom) throughout the match, which ended in a 1–1 draw.2 A few months later, having already joined FIFA, Nigeria marked its independence by hosting the Nkrumah Gold Cup at the new thirtythousand -seat National Stadium in the Surulere neighborhood of Lagos. Ghana spoiled the party by defeating Nigeria 3–0 in the final. Similar football festivals contests were held throughout decolonizing Africa, including Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia. The game exposed newly enfranchised Africans to the gravitational pull of the idea of nation. As historian Eric Hobsbawm remarks,“The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people. The individual, even one who cheers, becomes a symbol of his nation himself .”3 For overwhelmingly male African political elites, football projected a vigorously masculine understanding of the nation. The game also carried a relatively small price tag for “territorializing identity” and providing ballast to the idea of the nation-state as a legitimate institution with a monopoly on power.4 As part of this political project, many African governments built new football stadiums in their capitals. In a departure from the few colonialera stadiums, smaller facilities usually with one grandstand and an overall capacity of less than twenty thousand spectators, independent Africa’s stadiums were large modern cathedrals of sport: symbols of modernity and national pride. These stadiums quickly became almost sacred ground for the creation and performance of national identities. The ritualized experience of spectatorship, together with “the transcendent characteristics of large gatherings and the emotive capacity of sport,”5 engendered a commonality among fans, practitioners, officials, and the media that extended beyond the stadiums to include radio listeners and, in later years, television viewers as well. African stadiums became extremely valuable public spaces where, as geographer Chris Gaffney put it, “potentially disaggregated social actors [found] a common symbol, language, history, and purpose.”6 Government ownership of stadiums directly linked them to nation-building projects, as evidenced by their names. A partial list includes Independence Stadium in Accra and Lusaka; 5 July Stadium in Algiers and 28 September Stadium in Conakry (dates of independence); Stadium of the Revolution in Brazzaville; and simply National Stadium in Lagos, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. In Abidjan and Addis Ababa, the national stadiums were named after sitting heads of state, Félix Houphouët-Boigny and Haile Selassie, respectively . Stadiums also advanced the conceptualization and production of C h A p t e r f o U r 56 nations through the menacing presence of police officers and soldiers. “The smooth functioning of stadiums,” Gaffney points out, “requires a militarized control of space and the uninterrupted functioning of state power.”7 So armed forces at football grounds in Africa...