We played the game.
It entailed any number of men or women running about kicking any
roundish object. We had no special name for the game. Then the man from
overseas came. He brought balls and boots and talked of football and
soccer. Like most white men Coach Clemence came to Africa with a
mission—to discover the beautiful game of football.
Coach Clemence came
with many rules and regulations. And we all got hoarse complaining that
he was complicating a simple game with his many rules. The bounce of
the ball was beyond the ken of most of us. Kicking with boots put us in
all kinds of trouble: the ball flew everywhere but the goalposts. It
was all so cumbersome, like teaching a man to use the left hand in
grand old age.
“Keep the ball on
the ground!” Coach Clemence hollered, daring the noonday sun as he ran
from one goal to the other correcting us. “The birds in the sky do not
play football.”
We suffered at the
hands of this man. He made us run endlessly round the field building up
what he called stamina. After the marathon running, kicking football
was well-nigh impossible. Even so Coach Clemence insisted that we must
play football. There was nothing like impossibility in the man’s
dictionary. You cannot play the man’s game unless you have sapped all
your energy running like a madman chasing after dry leaves.
“Who ever heard of
the footballer with neither skill nor stamina?” Coach Clemence asked
rhetorically while pushing us ahead to more suffering. “You lot deserve
special places in the Football Hall of Shame!”
To give him his
due, Coach Clemence led by example. He ran all the rounds with us and
played ball like a maestro. He could keep the ball up in the air for an
entire day, juggling masterfully as though the ball were tied to his
boots. And he could whack a shot at goal. The goalkeeper once flew into
the net together with his thunderously wheezing shot. And the man cried
like a baby, ending his football career just as abruptly.
The first
competitive match we played was against a team of some tourist friends
of Coach Clemence. It was a massacre. We somewhat stood fixed watching
the soccer wizards from London do all the scoring. They ran like the
wind and danced past our ears like mosquitoes. They were more slippery
than catfish in water. Neither skill nor stamina was on our side, a
total mismatch. Coach Clemence had to stop the match after thirty or so
torrid minutes to save us from further punishment. Even he had lost
count of the number of goals scored against us.
“I quit,” my elder brother said to me moments after the game.
He was gasping for
breath, dying for oxygen. It had been his job to mark the fleet-footed
left-winger of the tourists. My big brother, big and proud fellow that
he is, was dusted on the corners of the field by the flying little
wizard on the left wing. The wee ball player drew circles round my
brother, dribbling, taunting and scoring. After the humiliation my
brother picked up his climbing-rope and returned fulltime to his trade
of tapping palm wine. All the entreaties from Coach Clemence could not
get my brother back on the field.
“I can’t afford to
spend all my life chasing the wind,” Brother Okoro said. “My younger
one is still there and he may yet catch the wind.”
“You can’t afford
to throw in the towel so early in your career,” Coach Clemence pleaded,
staring fixedly with imploring eyes on my brother Okoro. “You can still
make the grade and earn tons of money as a football professional.”
“It is a man who is alive that can earn money,” Okoro replied, unmoved. “Do you know how many times I died in that field?”
“The beginning of
every act is always difficult,” Coach Clemence said, patting Okoro on
the shoulder. “Once you have mastered the art, all the suffering you
took would look glorious in hindsight.”
“White man, I have
played my last match.” The finality in Okoro’s tone could not be missed
by Coach Clemence. “There is even no sense at all in fully grown adults
running all over the place chasing an inflated balloon!”
The exit of Brother
Okoro was an open wound felt by all our teammates. He was a natural wag
who softened our suffering with his many jokes. In his absence
everybody looked upon me to take up the mantle of team clown. I was a
profound failure on all counts. One statement assailed my ears
everyday: “If only your brother Okoro had been here …”
We played some
other matches. We lost all the matches. The score on each occasion was
scandalous. Coach Clemence had the same words for us after every
defeat: “You learn from losing.”
After one
particularly humiliating defeat, a game in which half of our players
scored own goals, one rugged man walked into our fold. Some said he had
been a coup-seasoned soldier while others said he was an expired
politician. Nobody was sure of anything about the man. A pudgy and
crafty old stager, he was gap-toothed and his goggles were darker than
midnight. He spoke quaint English that edged Coach Clemence’s for
incomprehension. He at first introduced himself as our Team Manager. In
the next practice session he appointed himself Defence Minister,
explaining that he had all the answers for all our defensive frailties.
Next he called himself Sole Administrator. Coach Clemence could not
hide his amusement as the strange fellow by and by took the titles of
Head of State, C-in-C, Life President etc. The title Presido fitted him
like a cap.
“They are my people,” the man said to Coach Clemence, pointing at us as we sat head bowed. “I know their psychology.”
In the football
field he spoke to Coach Clemence in English while he talked to us in
the native tongue. Some of his words to us were actually full-throated
insults directed at the white man.
“Don’t mind the white monkey,” the man said, pretending to be serious. “May he dissolve under the hot African sun!”
“What’s that?” Coach Clemence asked quizzically after we had burst out in laughter.
“Oh I was telling
the boys to rise up to the magnitude of the British Empire,” the man
replied in grand English elocution. Then he turned to us and asked in
vernacular: “Can this white nobody give birth to a black somebody?”
We continued to laugh much to the puzzlement of Coach Clemence.
“Don’t mind the
native morons,” the man said, reverting to English. “They are laughing
at my lack of knowledge of the local lingo.”
Coach Clemence was
none the wiser but would not be distracted. He upped the ante by taking
us into the classroom to teach us football. He mentioned many
incomprehensible figures and numbers: 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 4-2-4 etc. He drew
many lines on the blackboard and plotted many graphs. He pointed and
directed through arrows and curves. We got more confused by the minute.
The classroom lessons continued interminably. If there was anything
worse than being defeated woefully on the field it was being made to
sit through the dreary lessons in the classroom.
“My people cannot
get the hang of this teaching of football inside the classroom,” our
self-appointed President challenged Coach Clemence.
“Without a sound theory there can be no good praxis,” Coach Clemence explained.
“How can somebody do on the blackboard what is played out there in the football field?”
“Presido!” We all rose in salute of our President for asking a question that we had all individually wanted to ask.
“Football is a game of the head rather than of the feet …”
We all shouted, interrupting Coach Clemence.
“In that case,” Presido was saying, “the game would have been called headball instead of football.”
Yes! We were all screaming in support of the thesis of our darling Presido, a true man of the people.
Coach Clemence
shook his head and announced the end of the day’s lesson. He then said
that the British Embassy Staff Club had challenged us to a football
match. Presido instantly volunteered to produce FIFA-graded match
officials and a record crowd for the special match.
“This match I take as your command performance,” Coach Clemence said, dismissing us for the day.
The football
stadium was a wild forest of people and spirits on the august day. The
pep talk of Coach Clemence minutes before the match dwelt much on the
anticipated style of our opponents. He talked of the speed and accuracy
of British football and asked us to watch out particularly for the
overlapping runs of the full-backs. He mentioned a certain footballer
of yore called Terry Cooper who by overlapping turned into a menacing
demon for all opponents of England.
“We know what you
mean,” said Presido, interrupting as usual. “Overlapping means that
somebody comes as a missionary and then overlaps as a colonial master!”
“Don’t mix football with politics,” Coach Clemence said.
“Don’t listen to the white man,” Presido said to us in the native tongue. “When we get into the field we shall play our style.”
“Our style is
home-grown freestyle soccer democracy played with military boots,”
shouted our dancing goalkeeper who had for some time been taking some
private lessons at the insistence of Presido.
The match was not
yet a minute old when the British left-back, overlapping, scored. He
would have scored again in the very next minute but for the agility of
our goalkeeper. Now instead of putting the ball into play according to
the rule of the game our goalkeeper ran the full length of the field
and threw the ball into the net of our opponents!
“The overlapping goalkeeper!” roared the crowd.
“Unprecedented! Fit for the Guinness Book of World Records! First in history!” I heard so many exclamations.
The referee looked
at his assistants and at the excited crowd and then pointed to the
centre of the field, thus counting our goalkeeper’s caper of a coup as
a goal. The British Embassy Staff Club players were dumbfounded. I
could not understand what was happening. The referee was asking the
Embassy boys to restart the game, but they refused to. Suddenly our
goalkeeper picked up the ball and ran all the way to score again. The
referee blew a blast on his whistle, jumping up in excitement like
Presido and the crowd. The overlapping goalkeeper scored many more
times, and the spectators could no longer be controlled for joy. They
encroached into the field, passing the ball to us with their hands and
feet. It was a melee. Nobody could leave the field of play. I looked in
the direction of Coach Clemence but his place had been taken by
Presido. And how Presido enjoyed the game! He actually came into the
field to score a handful of goals with his hands and feet and head. How
he gloried in “our style” of total football! He jumped and screamed and
laughed, urging us on with his hands and feet and mouth. And we obeyed
him, playing with all parts of our bodies and scoring with every
section of our anatomy. It was indeed an original never-ending game.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
was born in Nigeria on December 22, 1960. He was the 1989 Distinguished
Visitor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of Western
Ontario. He is the author of the collection God of Poetry. In 2010, his
play Doctor of Football will be produced across Nigeria. He was
nominated for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2008.
