Title: How Football Explains Africa
Author: Steve Bloomfield
Publisher: Canongate
Genre: Non-fiction
Few books have left me as conflicted as Africa United: How Football Explains Africa.
Technically it is a fantastic book. It explores the complexities of Africa and the political and social issues that beset this continent of a billion-plus people.
Steve Bloomfield has done a great job weaving the stories of football into the fabrics of the various nations. The book is certainly an excellent introduction to politics and social relations in Africa. If you are interested in Africa and its issues, this book will leave you satisfied. If you happen to be a follower of the beautiful game, you will be hard-pressed to find a book as well-written and as effortless to read as this.
My problem with Bloomfield is that he portrays Africa as unique in the kinds of machinations that football and sport in general end up representing. The book then falls into the usual trap of westerners treating Africa as a continent populated by freaks and charlatans.
Telling personal stories of travels in thirteen countries, Bloomfield brings an outsider’s awe of Africa while perpetuating the story of ours being a continent riven with strife, tribalism, political big men and disorganised football associations. In the typical European and North American style of parachuting into a country, Bloomfield tries hard to make South African defender Matthew Booth something extraordinary because he is a white player in a sport dominated by black people.
Although he tries to nuance the argument with references to the long history of white players who have played at the highest levels, Booth still gets a special mention because he has a black wife who happens to have shared a “two-roomed house with sixteen cousins in Soweto”.
Through Booth and his wife Sonia’s story, Bloomfield completes the book with a Prince Charming finding his hapless Cinderella. In keeping with the subtext of a narrative so loved in western Europe, our knight in shining armour is white and the poor girl who will be queen is black.
Booth’s request to the author that he be taken as just another player or a guy who fell in love and married a girl, falls on deaf ears.
Having said this, the quality of the research and anecdotal notes suggests that Bloomfield has put his heart and soul into the project. For this alone the shortcomings of this book are thus forgivable.
Football is not unique in explaining its society. Football in Africa is similarly not unique in explaining its society. Real Madrid are, for example, well-renowned for their football, but the team’s association with Spain’s right wing governments and the fascist rule of General Franco, in particular, has added needle to their rivalry between them and Catalonia’s Barcelona, the footballing representatives of the Basque course.
In Scotland, the Old Firm derby between Glasgow teams Rangers and Celtic is a proxy for the Irish republicanism and loyalists and, by extension, the tensions between Catholicism and Anglicanism.
This scenario is, of course, not limited to football. The 1936 Berlin Olympics is remembered more for its political intentions as it is for the brilliance of American sprinter Jesse Owens, whose exploits debunked the race supremacy myth that Adolf Hitler had sought to use the games to prove.
In fairness to Bloomfield, there is no suggestion that he intentionally treats football as unique. But, as it happens in football itself, intention or lack thereof, does not change the fact of a foul once committed.
To use a footballism, this is a book that can go either way depending on how strongly you feel about how the story of African soccer is told, if you can stomach hearing it told from an angle of a continent in crisis. Nonetheless, it’s worth checking out.
REVIEWER BIO: Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya is editor of South Africa’s oldest newspaper The Witness and a former sports editor of the Mail & Guardian. He is also a committed fan and follower of the global game of football.
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