FIFA World Cup '10: Black Star Tragedy

Black Star Tragedy
by Laurent Dubois

Football, we learned last night during the Ghana-Uruguay game, is the most effective tool for mass torture every devised by the human race. A vast majority of the over eighty thousands fans in the stadium, and millions of viewers throughout the world, were left speechless and unwound by what we saw unfold. For me, it was a little bit like reliving the final of the World Cup in 2006, with an early euphoria followed by an equalizer, then a game dragging on and on into penalties, with Gyan’s missed shot at the last minute playing the role of Zidane’s head-butt as the dramatic and decisive instant of the night. The sorrow, the indignity, the sense of unfairness of it all was too much to even contemplate. For many people throughout the world, the Cup essentially ended yesterday with the elimination of Brazil and Ghana. For all those who hoped, for a brief time, that this would be the year for an African team to go further than any had before, the remaining games seem somehow sapped of meaning.

The night began very differently. The atmosphere in the city was electric yesterday, with everyone in South Africa seemingly behind Ghana, and the flags and emblems of the country everywhere. The symbolism of it all was, of course, great. Fifty years ago Ghana’s independence began the wave of decolonization on the continent. In 1966 Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, led a boycott of the World Cup by African nations unhappy with the fact that only one of he sixteen berths in the competition was reserved for either an African team or an Asian team. The boycott was successful, and set in motion a long process through which African countries have gained more power within FIFA. The South African World Cup was in some sense the culmination of that long process. To see Ghana advance to the semi-finals, which no African country ever has in the World Cup, would have been a fitting and inspiring confirmation that things have changed, and that they can change, in the world of football.

Of course, there was reason to be cautious. Though Ghana was the last of the African teams in the tournament, it is a young team and weakened substantially in its striking power by the absence of Michael Essien. They had played well against the U.S., but had seemed less convincing in the group phase and only advanced thanks to the loss by Serbia to Australia. They might pull it off, we all knew, but it was going to be tough.

For the game, however, most had thrown caution to the wind. You could find a few small Uruguay flags to buy on the way in to Soccer City, but mostly it was every kind of merchandise in the colors of Ghana. Fans from all over the world decked themselves out in Ghana scarves (I picked up a rather handsome one!), Ghana hats, Ghana gloves, Ghana face paint, and waved small and large Ghana flags. There were of course groups of the famous stalwart Black Star fans as well. Everyone knew what the right outcome was, it seemed. And as the game began, it seemed like Ghana was in a position to win. They played beautifully. They were exciting to watch. The charged the goal, seeking openings in the tough Uruguayan defense, and seemed technically superior in many of the encounters. And then came Muntari’s goal.

The rest of the story is I can not quite bear to run through. But that it so happened that a Uruguay defender, pushing the ball out with his hands, prevented a Ghanaian goal, and that what football can offer in response is a penalty kick. And that it fell to Gyan, a young player who on a team with Essien had come to bear the burden of Ghana’s attack, to take that penalty, and who under the pressure hit the bar. And that the burden of the loss falls on him rather than on the Uruguayan who cheated. And that this, it seemed, simply devastated the team, which was not able to rally effectively during the penalty kicks. And that all of the urging on, the beautiful cacophony and integrated vuvuzelas of the crowd, the millions of prayers, among them mine, repeatedly spoken during the match, that all of that led to what it did is unbearable. To watch Gyan, sobbing uncontrollable, consoled by his teammates on the pitch, was – like the entire match – purely gut-wrenching.

Read the Full Essay @ Soccer Politics

New Book! In Search of Brightest Africa

from University of Georgia Press

In Search of Brightest Africa

Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936

Jeannette Eileen Jones

A critical look at the American intellectual tradition of enthusiasm for Africa

Reviews

“Written in a lively and convincing style, In Search of Brightest Africa offers significant new insights derived from a close reading of primary materials. It will unquestionably be a major contribution to the study of African identity in America.”

—Graham Hodges, author of Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863

“With elegant prose, analytic precision, and archival depth, In Search of Brightest Africa forcefully pushes us beyond the enduring image of the Dark Continent. Jones persuasively demonstrates how little-known images and ideas about a ‘Brightest Africa’ were central to the American imagination as the country was making itself over as modern. The stories here of naturalists and environmentalists, Pan-Africanists and anti-imperialists, also tell us why Africa stays on our mind not just as a record of imperial pasts but also as a haunting yet hopeful recognition of possible global futures.”

—Davarian L. Baldwin, author of Chicago’s New Negroes

Description

In the decades between the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa and the opening of the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, Americans in several fields and from many backgrounds argued that Africa had something to teach them. Jeannette Eileen Jones traces the history of the idea of Africa with an eye to recovering the emergence of a belief in “Brightest Africa”—a tradition that runs through American cultural and intellectual history with equal force to its “Dark Continent” counterpart.

Jones skillfully weaves disparate strands of turn-of-the-century society and culture to expose a vivid trend of cultural engagement that involved both critique and activism. Filmmakers spoke out against the depiction of “savage” Africa in the mass media while also initiating a countertradition of ethnographic documentaries. Early environmentalists celebrated Africa as a pristine continent while lamenting that its unsullied landscape was “vanishing.” New Negro political thinkers also wanted to “save” Africa but saw its fragility in terms of imperiled human promise. Jones illuminates both the optimism about Africa underlying these concerns and the racist and colonial interests these agents often nevertheless served. The book contributes to a growing literature on the ongoing role of global exchange in shaping the African American experience as well as debates about the cultural place of Africa in American thought.

***

Jeannette Eileen Jones is an associate professor of history and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

At the Center of This Discourse: Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

At the Center of This Discourse
Independent Lens: Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor

Early in his career, Herskovits probably thought that if only people knew more about Africa and more about black people, they would be less ignorant and that racism would wither away. But by the end of his career, he understood that racism was a much more intractable problem than that.
—Vincent Brown

The story of Melville J. Herskovits is at once familiar and peculiar. “I think of him as kind of like the Elvis of black American studies,” says Harvard historian Vincent Brown. Like Presley, he appropriates from an existing culture, in his study and support of black Americans at a time of overt racism and oppression, the 1930s–‘50s. But even as he “mainstreams some of these ideas about the relationship between Africa and African American culture,” Herskovits also misunderstands, exploits, and evaluates his object of study. And so his relationship to that object remains vexed.

The anthropologist himself becomes an object in Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, premiering this week in PBS’ Independent Lens series. Llew Smith’s 58-minute film traces Herskovits’ career, from his early interests in “others” as a child (his daughter Jean Herskovits Corry shows a 1911 photo of her then 15-year-old father alongside Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries, suggesting that he “must have been in the thick of battle”) to his to work with Franz Boaz at Columbia to his founding of the first major American program in African studies at Northwestern, in 1948. When, in 1961, John Kennedy considered (but did not select) Herskovits to head a new bureau of African Affairs, the film indicates that his support of decolonization in Africa—not to mention his membership in some 17 groups judged “communist front organizations” by HUAC—thwarted his appointment.

Herskovits helped to develop the concept of cultural relativism, as he tried to see his objects—primarily African and American “Negro” communities—without the bias of his own background. His book The Myth of the Negro Past made the controversial case that black Americans maintained African traditions, and further that race was a cultural and sociological construction, rather than biological.

Read the Full Review @ Popmatters