THE expanse of hard, bare earth, pictured above, is where Kolo Touré learnt his football. The ground is uneven and rutted and, in places, you can find shafts of metal protruding: bottle tops, tin cans. No throw-ins here. They play off the walls, off the side of the school on one side, off the side of the makeshift shack housing on the other. And they have markets in here, too, as well as weddings, public meetings, the odd goat wandering through, and — of course — children endlessly playing rag-tag games of football with their DIY football posts. This is the Stade Harris and, for a boy at the centre of the massive Adjamé slum quarter in Abidjan in Ivory Coast, it is a comparative paradise.
The team back in the early 1990s was known as Les Inconditionnels and playing alongside Touré was Aruna Dindane (now at Lens) and, later, Touré’s younger brother, Yaya (now at Olympiacos). Saturdays at the Stade Harris provided, for each of them, an early taste of competitive football.
Their coach back then, Traoré Siaka, still lives 400 yards from where they played and it is with considerable emotion that he shows off the breeding ground of what has become the heart of the present Ivory Coast national team. “Think of where Kolo came from and where he is now,” Siaka said. “We are so proud of him, to see where he got to in life.”
Yet while this is part miracle, it is also part fact of life in African football. The Touré brothers will by no means be the only ones in the World Cup this summer, or in the African Cup of Nations that starts this week, who learnt the game on bare earth. In Angola, it was only two years ago that they insisted that first-division sides played on grass.
But the story of how the Angolas of world football have raised themselves from their bare-earth beginnings to World Cup qualification is extraordinary. It was completed on October 8, when the traditional power base of African football — Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa and Senegal — had their citadel stormed by four World Cup virgins.
Angola, Ivory Coast, Ghana and the thin sliver of land barely mentioned on international news, Togo, will play in the finals in Germany this summer in their stead. And we should bear in mind that all bar Ghana have recently been assailed by either civil war or massive internal violence.
Professional football is still anathema to most of Angola; in Ivory Coast, every first-division club has moved south because life north of the military checkpoints and no-man’s land that splits the country is unstable.
How these teams qualified for Germany despite their circumstances is a subject that fascinated The Times and will be the subject of an investigation over the next four days. How do you play football during a civil war, for instance?
And how did Togo succeed in qualifying when they cannot even get the telephone number at their football federation to work? How do they even manage to organise a match? No joking here: their website, Fifa and the World Cup organisers in Germany give the same number for the Togo FA and it does not ring.
There is a lot that is very African about this. In tracking down the Angolans, we went to see them in Spain playing a friendly against Málaga (score: 1-1), but on arrival we were told that the kick-off time had been moved forward from 5pm to 11am. Why?
Because later that day they had decided to drive three hours down the coast and play against Real Jaen (Spanish division 2B group IV; Angola lost 1-0). A few days earlier, they had planned a friendly against China, who were also in the area, but they changed tack and played Bayern Leverkusen instead, winning 4-1.
Unsurprisingly, we found a lot that was very backward in these countries’ administrations, too. Angola’s own Wembley saga, for instance: the Cidadella national stadium that began construction in 1977 was supposed to finish in 1985, is still not finished and has completed terraces on one side of the ground that are so ramshackle that they are too dangerous to stand on. Or the Ghana Football Association, which only last month was given independence from a perpetually meddling government — “At last!” Abedi Pelé, one of Africa’s all-time greats, said triumphantly. “We can now plan our own way forward.”
THERE is a great deal that is random, too, in the fluctuations of strength in African football. Zambia, for instance, built a strong team around the copper-belt towns during the boom of the 1980s, but then copper crashed, the industry was privatised and its new owners stopped funding local football. So when a plane then crashed, wiping out the national team in 1993, there was no new generation to replace them.
In Uganda, the leading club, SC Villa, have recently taken up farming — they have signed a contract to supply maize and rice to the World Food Programme to boost club finances. And who knows what will come of that because it was the decision by a single club in Ivory Coast to start a football academy 15 years ago that is almost entirely responsible for the nation’s success.
Yet while generalisations in African football are hard to make, the accusation pointed at the fallen giants of the game on the continent is that they were guilty of complacency at the start of their World Cup qualifying campaigns and all the while there was a unity of spirit building within the camps of their four replacements that can be rare in Africa.
Politics and ethnicity have long interfered with African teams. In Nigeria, the national team’s coach has to pick the right ethnic mix; you hardly ever see a Christian playing for Egypt; likewise, you did not see anyone without Bauba ethnicity playing for the great Zaire team of the 1970s; and the infighting between players of the Luhya and Luo tribes in the Kenya team of the late 1980s was so extreme it got physical.
In the Kenyan language Kiswahili, they have a word, harambee, which means “pulling together”. A statement of Kenyan social unity today is the fact that their national football team are now known as the Harambee Stars. Internal conflict, the likes of which ripped through Angola, Ivory Coast and Togo so recently, could easily carry over and divide Kenya’s football team, but here it appears to have worked the other way and encouraged a spirit of harambee.
In Angola, Luis Oliveira Goncalves, the national team’s coach, should take the plaudits; in Togo, it appears that a united front against a despotic paymaster, who rules the national football federation like a personal banana republic, has done a similar job.
Whether this will be enough to cause the remotest stir in Germany this summer remains doubtful. Sir Walter Winterbottom, the former England manager, has been proved wrong with his long-lost statement that we would see an African team lift the World Cup by the end of the 20th century. Franz Beckenbauer, the head of Germany’s World Cup organising committee, said last month that he believes that Ivory Coast could reach the final this year. But Abedi Pelé is surely closer to the mark in his belief that the “home” World Cup in 2010, in South Africa, will provide Africa with its first real opportunity.
But for now, in the countries of these debutant World Cup nations, there is still a feeling that qualification was enough in itself. When it all happened on October 8, Togo declared a national holiday, the Angolans returned home like heroes and were presented immediately to the President and, in Ivory Coast, the President went a step further by giving each player a villa.
Around the Stade Harris in Abidjan, all this is known, each glorious Touré achievement cherished and tucked away as if in a boy’s scrapbook. Kolo Touré still contacts the coach, Siaka, when he is back home and Siaka still recalls the first time he saw Touré.
“Initially, Kolo wouldn’t play,” he said. “He just wanted to watch his friends. But that first day when eventually those friends persuaded him to play, too — the impression I will always have is of his endurance; he never stopped moving. He was disciplined and respectful, too, so I soon made him captain. And after that there was no stopping him.”
And there was a dream fulfilled, which is the story of African football: the realities of life on this continent and how far outside them a boy can travel with a ball at his feet.
