Kenyatta Cup once enthralled Kenya’s football-loving crowd

Re-Union’s Patrick Kisanya (left) vies with Patrick Masinde of AFC Leopards in a Moi Golden Cup final at City Stadium. PHOTO | FILE |

What you need to know:

  • Provincial tourney featured the best local talent available and whole country got glued to radio following the action.
  • In the early years Nakuru, the Rift Valley capital, was the bedrock of Kenya football and players like Joe Kadenge who thought they had a future in the game migrated from their ancestral homes in Western Province to try their fortunes there.

Forty years ago today, the name that would be all the rage in Kenya would be Kenyatta. And it would have nothing to do with politics. The people would be discussing the winners of the Kenyatta Cup, the country’s most prestigious football tournament of the time.

The final used to be played on Kenyatta Day, now rechristened Mashujaa Day.

On Friday, on the Day itself, the whole country would have been glued to Voice of Kenya radio, listening to some of the commentators I wrote about last week. And today, readers would be scanning the pages of Nation Sport with a fine tooth comb, analysing every sentence of the match report.

And schoolboys would be waiting for the discarded newspapers so that they could cut out and plaster their walls with the most dramatic photographs of the action.

The newspapers dispatched their best photojournalists for Kenyatta Cup finals and names such as Azhar Chaudhry, Jared Oyombera, Yahya Mohammed and SA Azim became part of our folklore.

How times have changed!

Those who remember must be wondering how they got here; it is now the country’s fate itself that is hanging in the balance and not the slender lead of their favourite teams as referee Williams Ngaah keeps glancing at his watch.

To some of these people, Kenya was a beautiful dream from which they have been startled awake. To others it was a reality they have always wanted to change. Their clashing points of view may very well have come to a breaking point.

The Kenyatta Cup was an inter-provincial tournament. Before the enactment of the Kenya Constitution 2010, the country’s administrative regions were called provinces.

They were eight in number: Nairobi, Coast, Rift Valley, Eastern, North Eastern, Nyanza, Central and Western. (To all ethnic nationalists, this list is not in any particular order; I’ve just written the provinces as I remembered them.)

RESOURCEFUL COACHES

If the tournament were replicated today, it would feature teams from 47 counties. That sounds a wee bit unwieldy but then again, how do Caf and Fifa zone up their members and afford everybody a chance? The Kenyatta Cup featured the best players from each province’s strongest clubs.

Buy some resourceful coaches dug below the top cream. Coast and Rift Valley excelled on this score.

Nairobi had the most number of clubs but instructively, throughout the decade or so that the Kenyatta Cup featured, it was dominated by Coast Province.

It seemed as if the Coast players gelled better when playing for their provincial Select side than even when turning out for the national team.

The clubs that provided Nairobi’s players were Gor Mahia, Abaluhya, Black Mamba, Nairobi Spurs, Maragoli and Young Rovers. Sports journalists had coined a description for Black Mamba which became a cliché. They always called this team “the never-say-die Black Mamba.” It came from somewhere: even trailing 0-3 with zero minutes on the clock, Black Mamba played as if the mission was still possible. This is a nice story for another day.

The star-studded Coast Select was assembled mainly from Mwenge, Feisal, Western Stars, Champion and Ramogi although it also drew players from as far afield as Lamu. A future Harambee Stars coach, Marshall Mulwa, was among them. He believed he was good enough to make the cut for the national team but his name betrayed him, as the phrase that needs no elaboration in Kenya goes.

He got back at the selectors with a sterling performance as coach of the Stars years later.

In the early years of independence Nakuru, the Rift Valley capital, was the bedrock of Kenya football and players like Joe Kadenge who thought they had a future in the game migrated from their ancestral homes in Western Province to try their fortunes there.

MAIDEN WINNERS

Rift Valley’s main teams were Nakuru All Stars, the first winners of the Kenya Premier League in 1963, Abeingo, Nyanam and KFA.

Nyanza Province’s players were almost exclusively provided by Kisumu Hot Stars, the breeding ground of national giants Gor Mahia. Household names like Allan Thigo and John Bobby Ogolla started their careers there.

There was a team called Luanda Harambee which provided the bulk of players from Western Province. Its mantle was inherited by Kakamega High School, the fabled Green Commandos who fed the town’s Ministry of Works FC and, a lot more importantly, AFC Leopards.

The school’s outstanding contribution to Kenya football is in itself a sub-chapter of the story of our national pastime.

Some provinces didn’t hack it when it came to the Kenyatta Cup. Central, Eastern and North Eastern were all below the radar, year after.

The enactment of a new constitution gave the first batch of Governors a chance to show their colours in engaging the vibrant youthful masses in their counties in the sports field. Alas, that only happened only through token tournaments during their campaigns. It was all quiet thereafter.

Compare this with the attitude of the Kenya Football Federation chief when the Kenyatta Cup was at its height. Explaining his near obsession with sports, Kenneth Matiba, who founded Tusker FC, wrote in his autobiography, “Aiming High: The Story of My Life”.

“I have always created time for sports for myself and I have tried to encourage others to participate in one sporting activity or another.

While sports play an important part in keeping the human body healthy both physically and mentally, some of them, especially those involving teams, teach us to work together. We live in society as a team.

“We are all talented in different ways. A combination of those talents helps to create a happy society. I get captivated by all kinds of sports, even the ones I don’t normally play. Perhaps this helps to explain why I got so involved in football administration in the early 70s.”

I attended the Council of Governors’ Devolution Conference in Meru last year and on matters sport, I took home nothing. I identified no passion for it among the county chiefs.

A largely new lot of them is in place, even as many of them battle petitions. It is going to take a while to see what the new order portends. But clearly, the days of the inter-provincial Kenyatta Cup are lodged in the distant past and there is nothing visible on the horizon from the counties.

As our neighbour to the west, Uganda, revive the fortunes that saw them contest the Africa Nations Cup finals and now try credibly for the World Cup, is Kenya sliding to its death?

Since I started writing this column in 2010, I have never been as distracted as I was this week.

I even feared I might not get through to doing it. When I first visited South Africa in 1994, I was warned so often to watch my back against muggers and other criminals that I got exhausted and cut short my visit by a day.

This week, whomever I spoke to when researching this story couldn’t end their recollections without asking: “What do you think is going to happen?” This question about Kenya’s future has become the next thing one brings up these days for conversation.

It has become something like a millstone around my neck and I experienced an exhaustion similar to the one I once had in Johannesburg, infamously referred to as the crime capital of the world.

I felt a deep sense of misplacement, talking about sunshine, as it were, when everybody was mentally scurrying around for the downpour they feared was coming in a deluge. I was classifying a group players into those who wore three different shirts in a year – for their club, for their province and for their country. These were the best, people like John Nyawanga and Daniel Anyanzwa – Abaluhya, Western Province and Kenya.

PERSONAL DETAILS

Or Ali Kajo, Kadir Farrar and Ahmed Breik – Feisal, Coast Province and Kenya. Or Allan Thigo - Gor Mahia, Nairobi Province and Kenya. On an ordinary week, I would have been delving into the personal details of many players, like the temperamental international midfielder, Hezekiah Ang’ana who jumped off the 10th floor of Development House in Nairobi in a suicide leap to protest the chairman of his club sleeping with his girlfriend. And many others like Daniel Nicodemus whose escapades would run into several columns.

But it was so difficult bringing it all together. How surreal, to be talking about the foibles and excesses of footballers of so long ago when everybody is consumed by IEBC, Nasa and Jubilee.

But since the question never goes away, I have been saying truthfully what I think will happen: It will get worse before getting better but in the end, everything will be alright. The country doesn’t have a limitless supply of self-destructive energy so it will exhaust itself at some point.

The only question is what the cost will be before that point is reached in terms of lives lost, injuries sustained, forced dislocations, ruined businesses and the psychological wounds resulting from hatreds produced by clashing political loyalties.

Even the two gentlemen who will eventually sit down and thrash out these matters don’t have the answer to that question. But all conflict, even a World War, is eventually settled by a discussion. Why don’t you have it sooner because you will have it anyway?