Afcon is not just about football

The Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) is fully on in Gabon. The journey for many teams has already ended.

I have always been of the view that if you watch events like Afcon only for the sport, you miss the bigger social stories they tell. This year is no exception, and a reminder to us that most folks never just see the revolution, be it political, social, technological, or economic, coming.

This was revealed dramatically the other day. Continuing the excavation of Africa’s delightful past, I came to the story of Sylvanus Olympio, who was prime minister then president of Togo from 1958 until his assassination in 1963.

Olympio was a wonderful man, clever, progressive, and with good taste in clothes and other things of life. Yet on midnight of January 13, 1963, he and his wife were awakened by mutinous soldiers breaking into their bedroom, to put it a little dramatically.

Next morning as the US ambassador in Lome, an early riser, was going to work, he stumbled upon a body three feet from the embassy’s door. It was Olympio. The soldiers had murdered him rather quickly in the night.

It is a testimony to how changed the times are, that coup-making soldiers certainly wouldn’t be able to dump a body that close to an American embassy today.

But one has to wonder. How is it possible that an intelligent, well-clued man like Olympio couldn’t have smelt trouble, and at least slept in the house across the street? But, he wasn’t alone. His was the fate of many leaders in Africa.

MOMENTUOUS THINGS

This failure to catch momentous things is evident in some of the commentary at Afcon.

In the early games, the commentators kept bemoaning the fact that several stars of a couple of the teams, who play in top flight clubs in Europe hadn’t made it to Gabon.

However, at the same time, they also kept remarking that Afcon 2017 had easily the most youthful players ever, and also that it was the best football they had seen.

They were totally oblivious to the contradiction.

If several of the players were young and inexperienced, and the big boys who play in Europe hadn’t made it, how come the level of the game was the best ever seen at Afcon? Mark you, for the tournament favourites; on average 90 per cent of their players who showed up, all play in Europe or Asia.

Clearly, what this told us is that there are very many African players playing outside the continent in elite clubs. So the thing is not how many players playing in Europe didn’t show up. The story is how football has become so globalised, and how Africa is quite a big part of it. So big, teams can still field a whole team of foreign-based players, even if many of them didn’t return home to play for country.

And yes, the football is finer. Noticeably absent is the wild-eyed Afcon football of years gone by.

'VILLAGE FOOTBALL'

The Afcon of old was rather familiar. There was still quite a bit of “village football” – all brawny, no finesse. In the dying minutes, the losing team could actually come close to killing rivals in a desperate rush to get a goal.

This time, it has remained fairly calm, and losing teams still pass, and play intelligently. We have been spared the past scenes of a defender rushing the ball from the back, knocking every living thing in his path down, and trying to single-handedly save the day.

Also, there are strikingly few “natural born” players with all the unbridled flair. Very many players are well practised, and think through the game.

It’s this that struck us most. The middle-class kids in Africa are replacing the rural ones who honed their skills kicking a fibre-made ball in the village square.

As young people, you can sense that they spent a lot of time watching European football on television.

But mostly, one can sense that in Afcon 2017, we had the first generation of players who spent more time as children first playing football games on their parents’ mobile phones, before then taking fully to the real thing.

And those scandalously empty seats during the games settled the issue of whom in Africa is “rising”.

It’s definitely not the African football fans that want to travel and watch live football.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher, Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com.

Twitter: @cobbo3