Random Thoughts after the World Cup

Charles Quist-Adade, PhD

The just-ended World Football (Soccer) Fiesta produced many spectacular results and surprises—favourites Germany and Brazil eliminated, unsung Croatian beating all the odds to play France in the final…the list goes on.`

Besides my home team—the Black Stars of Ghana, which didn’t qualify for this year’s Ballon d’Or I usually rooted for the underdogs. That’s why I was sitting on the horns of a dilemma when France met Croatia in the final. In the end, however, I settled for France by sheer force of ethnocentric affinity for the army of African players in the French team. Sometimes blood is thicker than water, isn’t it?

Many have celebrated the victory of the French team in the World Cup as a victory for Africa thanks to the superlative performance of the African-studded French team. The French victory is being touted as a victory for global migration and a defeat for white supremacy, xenophobia, racism, and nativism. The French victory should shame all the xenophobic, white supremacist and malevolent racist deviants in the Euro-American landscape.

And this is a lucid lesson in dialectics. The bitter fruits of the trilogy of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism gushing out the sparkling water of soccer victory by the offsprings of the victims of centuries of Euro-American White supremacist, genocidal acts and policies in Africa and its Diaspora.

And yet, in spite of these gut-wrenching and heartless inequities and "man’ inhumanity to man," Africa rises, apologies to Maya Angelou.

An irony of ironies! The offspring of Africa’s detractors —the self-acclaimed anti-African xenophobes and racists—are today basking in the glory brought to France by the great, grandsons of those I call the unsung heroes and heroines of the anti-colonial, anti-white supremacist global establishment.

Yet Africa benefits from this bitter-sweet fruit of French soccer victory, even if the fruits are tainted and bitter. At least, the moderates among the white supremacists would be compelled to accord the African a modicum of respect.

One last point: No matter where one is born or lives, once you have African blood in you, you are an African.

Peter Tosh put it better: “No matter where you’re from, once you’re a black man, you’re an African.”

And Kwame Nkrumah reminded us that people of African Descent, wherever are, be it in the Americas, Europe or elsewhere “are African and "belong to the African nation.”