Africa Is a Country

The World Cup and Pan-Africanism

The World Cup and Pan-Africanism

By
Sean Jacobs

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observes that international soccer allows for “a kind of nationalism that expands as your country loses.”

Kevin Prince Boateng, plays for Ghana. His brother, Jerome, plays for Germany.

The writer Chimamanda Adichie once suggested the World Cup is a perfect vehicle for fostering pan-Africanism. That your nationalism expands as your country loses. In the video below (filmed in Nigeria by anthropologist Jesse Weaver Shipley) the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about she “became Ghanaian in the last World Cup [2006].”  During a World Cup, she usually support Nigeria when they’re playing. Once the team gets eliminated, she switches to the next African country still in the competition. “It is a kind of  nationalism that expands as your country loses.”

Watch.

I found the video on Chimurenga Magazine’s Pilgrimages Project. Thirteen writers in 12 African cities as well as one Brazilian writer blog about their experiences watching the World Cup and at the same time writing a book about it. Standouts already: the Nigerian Fumni Iyanda and South African Nicole Turner.

By the way, this is the short version of an argument Adichie had made earlier in an opinion piece for the (UK) Guardian about how, for her at least, Africa becomes a country during the World Cup.

There, she wrote, “… Sometimes the boundary of this identity widens, as it did during the 2006 World Cup when Nigeria did not qualify. And so, for one intense day while Ghana played the United States, I became Ghanaian. I watched with my Nigerian best friend Uju, hugging each other and dancing when Ghana finally won. ‘Some of our boys started playing this game without shoes,’ Uju said proudly. ‘Our boys’ were, of course, the Ghanaians.”

Later, in the same article, she gets all giddy: “… Our football nationalism, then, symbolizes a cathartic, even if fleeting, addressing of historical and political grievances. It is a platform on which to stand and say that we may not be part of the G8 who decide the fate of the world, we may always rank on the bottom of health and government and economic indexes, we may have crumbling institutions and infrastructure, but hey, we won by sheer talent and grit.”

Adichie got some stick in some quarters for inadvertently (?) excluding Algeria, the fifth African nation to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, from her definition of “an African football nation” in her Guardian piece, but very few disagreed with her overall thesis.

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