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Ghana's Black Stars: A Fifty-Year Journey to the World Cup Quarterfinals
- University of Michigan Press
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99 ghana’s black Stars A Fifty-Year Journey to the World Cup Quarterfinals CRAIg WAITe IT’S The 120Th mINuTe—the last gasp of extra time—of the World Cup quarterfinal between Ghana and Uruguay at Soccer City. The game is tied 1–1 as Asamoah Gyan steps up to take the most important shot in African soccer history. I could not believe that Ghana’s Black Stars were about to become the first African team to reach the World Cup semifinals. After surprising Serbia 1–0 in their opening match and deservedly beating the United States 2–1 in the round of sixteen, a victory over Uruguay in the quarterfinals would cement Ghana’s place as sentimental favorites. I was sitting in my living room in Bloomington, Indiana, half a world away from the events on the screen. Having spent several years researching and writing a doctoral dissertation on Ghana’s football history, I wished I were back in Accra’s Independence Square to witness the upcoming victory celebration—dancing, singing, and the euphoric Ghanaian brand of public revelry on an unprecedented scale. In that instant, I thought of how what was about to happen was not simply the culmination of a four-year rebuilding project or a lucky tournament run for the national team. It was much, much more important than that. Gyan’s penalty was a moment embedded in a century-long historical process of Africa’s adoption and adaptation of a European game. A Ghanaian victory held the potential to constitute and represent African equality and achievement on a global stage. But Gyan missed! His 100 • AFRICA’S WoRld CuP penalty struck the top of the crossbar and went over the goal. Oh no! The encroaching ecstasy of victory was replaced by a sickening feeling that a penalty shoot-out defeat was cruelly approaching. For Ghanaians and Africans who had embraced the Black Stars as the flag-bearers for the continent—South Africans had taken to calling the side BaGhana BaGhana—the anticlimactic shoot-out quickly confirmed those fears, leaving us pondering what might have been. I sought solace in the knowledge that Gyan and his teammates owed their brush with history in 2010 to Ghana’s national football teams from fifty years earlier. Just like the 2010 team, the accomplishments of the first Black Star sides had showcased the possibilities of African independence and the game’s capacity to generate national pride in Ghana as well as unity across the entire continent. For Ghana and, to some extent, Africa as well, the larger implications of the 2010 World Cup spectacle had roots in events that took place in the first decade of independence. ghANA, FoRmeRlY kNoWN AS the Gold Coast, achieved independence from Britain in 1957, the first African nation south of the Sahara to do so. Within the next decade, most other African colonies freed themselves from the shackles of European rule. Today, most members of Ghana’s national team play professionally for European clubs, but in the 1950s, none of them played overseas. In fact, none of them played professionally at all. Although British sailors had introduced football to the Gold Coast at the turn of the twentieth century, players and fans did not begin looking for new football opportunities overseas for a long time. Beginning in the 1930s, regular matches with representative teams from Nigeria served as the pinnacle of football competitions for much of the colonial period.1 The Gold Coast touring team to Britain in 1951 marked the beginning of Ghana’s integration into global soccer and perhaps an early expression of a growing nationalism at home.2 In Britain, the Gold Coast squad lost nine of its ten matches. But that encounter with Europe became a turning point in the country’s football history. It illuminated the broad possibilities that this hugely popular pastime could offer to a new nation struggling to create a cohesive national identity and acquire international recognition and to a ruling party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP), eager to acquire greater political legitimacy. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and founder of the CPP, [44.200.196.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:52 GMT) Ghana’s Black Stars • 101 saw the distinct political and social advantages of promoting football .3 In 1957, to improve football in independent Ghana, Nkrumah appointed Ohene Djan as the minister of the central organization of sports. Nkrumah also tasked Djan with enhancing the Ghanaian national team...