Africa's World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space

The Road to 2010: A Soccer Journey from Marrakech to Johannesburg

176 The Road to 2010 A Soccer Journey from Marrakech to Johannesburg NIelS PoSThumuS ANd ANNA mAYumI keRbeR The IdeA CAme uP while we were living and working in Johannesburg in 2008: Let’s drive a car all the way from Europe through Africa to the 2010 World Cup. It sounded like a crazy idea, and, in fact, it was. To make the best of our journey, given our limited time and means, we soon decided to focus on the region that produced Roger Milla, Michael Essien, and Emmanuel Adebayor and that, with North Africa, is the most accomplished in the continent’s soccer history: West Africa.1 At the end of 2009, we bought the cheapest sport utility vehicle we could find—a Suzuki Vitara—and packed our bags. We put spare tires in the trunk, waterproofed an old tent, and were ready to leave. Somehow it all felt strangely logical. A Dutch reporter and football fan and a slightly less soccer-obsessed Austrian photojournalist on the road to 2010, driving from Amsterdam southward, through Belgium and France, to a ferry near Spanish Algeciras four days later, and into the African continent to write stories about soccer for the next six months on our way to the first World Cup on African soil. We came to West Africa to study its soccer culture. What explained its importance in the societies of this vast and diverse region? Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon had all qualified for the World Cup 2010 in South Africa. This meant that four of the tournament’s six African participants were located in the West African area along the Gulf of Guinea. Did soccer in this region mean more than just sport? The Road to 2010 • 177 We thought of a poster in Cape Town that stated, “In Africa, soccer is no religion; it is what any religion should be.” Still, we wanted to search for more than stories of African soccer success and the game’s social resonance. We also were keen to learn more about failures and the shadowy aspects of soccer. What explained the rapid decline of a Togolese national team that had been so successful in 2006? And how had Morocco, arguably Africa’s strongest national side for much of the 1970s, turned into a national disgrace? We crossed into Morocco from the rock of Gibraltar in December 2009. We expected to find soccer madness in the country because the African Nations Cup was due to start in two weeks in Angola. We expected everyone to be fully absorbed by the impending competition, but Moroccans seemed not to care. On the day of the opening match, it was dead quiet at the Montreal, a coffeehouse in the Djemaa el Fna, Marrakech’s central square, bustling with street vendors and tourists, surrounded by souks and the town’s tallest minaret. The coffeehouse’s television was switched off. The rundown Hotel Tiza, just behind the square, was doing brisk business because local folks had gathered there to watch a Spanish La Liga game between Barcelona and Tenerife. Local disinterest in the African Nations Cup, explained Youssef Ahenguir as he brought us tea, stemmed from Morocco’s failure to qualify for the tournament. Once among Africa’s most powerful and feared soccer teams, Morocco would not challenge for the continental title for the first time since 1996, when South Africa won the competition on home soil. Moroccan soccer, Youssef told us, was in deep crisis. It had gone sharply downhill after 2004, when the country lost the bid to host the 2010 World Cup. The FIFA executive committee vote had been close. South Africa edged out Morocco 14–10; three more votes for Morocco, and the newly built stadium just outside Marrakech would have been the arena for a World Cup semifinal. “But after losing the 2010 bid, everything went wrong,” according to our interlocutor.2 Morocco failed to qualify for the 2006 World Cup and was eliminated in the first round in both the 2006 and 2008 African Nations Cup tournaments. The Atlas Lions, as the national team of Morocco is known, reached their nadir in 2010, failing to reach the Nations Cup in Angola and the World Cup in South Africa. Morocco’s exclusion from the 2010 World Cup was especially pain- 178 • AFRICA’S WoRld CuP ful. “We were the first African country to top a group at the...