Dayo Olopade: Why Are 53 Countries Rooting for Ghana?
[Dayo Olopade is a reporter for The Daily Beast in Washington, and a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.]
"When you're playing an African team, you're playing the whole continent." So reads one of several different World Cup ads sponsored by South African telecommunications giant MTN. The participatory slogans ("I Believe in Africa"; "United We Score") riff on a theme of continental solidarity--and their ubiquitous placement seems to reinforce the point. The bus-yellow signs greeted me in Lagos, Nigeria, and again when I landed in Cape Town this week....
In the context of history, the cheering makes some sense. Under leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and even Joseph Mobutu, nationalism thrived in the 1960s and 70s. But the African states that have since failed their citizens time and again today inspire a less than robust sense of civic pride. Ethnic, linguistic or religious identification may generally be stronger than the political borders that partition the West African coast, for example--or do not partition the vast, conflict-ridden eastern Congo. And for many of the African nations that did not qualify--Senegal, Kenya, Angola and Egypt, to name a few--the South African World Cup was always going to be a proxy war....
Read entire article at The Atlantic
"When you're playing an African team, you're playing the whole continent." So reads one of several different World Cup ads sponsored by South African telecommunications giant MTN. The participatory slogans ("I Believe in Africa"; "United We Score") riff on a theme of continental solidarity--and their ubiquitous placement seems to reinforce the point. The bus-yellow signs greeted me in Lagos, Nigeria, and again when I landed in Cape Town this week....
In the context of history, the cheering makes some sense. Under leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and even Joseph Mobutu, nationalism thrived in the 1960s and 70s. But the African states that have since failed their citizens time and again today inspire a less than robust sense of civic pride. Ethnic, linguistic or religious identification may generally be stronger than the political borders that partition the West African coast, for example--or do not partition the vast, conflict-ridden eastern Congo. And for many of the African nations that did not qualify--Senegal, Kenya, Angola and Egypt, to name a few--the South African World Cup was always going to be a proxy war....