Yams, fish, and mad African EPL fans

The English football 2023/24 Premier League season began on August 11, and barely a month in there are already deaths over 10,000 kilometres away in our eastern sides of Africa. In the western Uganda district of Sheema, an Arsenal fan was stabbed to death by a Manchester United devotee shortly after his club thrashed his killer’s 3-1 on Sunday.

In the same Uganda, in the old industrial town of Jinja to the east, in January police arrested several Arsenal fans after they took to the streets in wild disruptive celebrations of their club’s victory over Manchester United victory. After that, the Jinja Arsenal fans and Police held the equivalent of Kenya’s bipartisan talks between the ruling Kenya Kwanza (Kenya First) and opposition Azimio la Umoja (Resolution for Unity), to agree on the modalities for future celebrations.

On Sunday, the Arsenal fans threw the book away and went wild. As in many parts of Africa, Kenya has had its fair share of extreme outcomes following Premier League clashes. Not too long, in Meru, central Kenya, Arsenal supporter David Mwangi put Liverpool’s Anthony Mutethia to the knife. In Nairobi, a dyed-in-the-wool Manchester United fan John Macharia jumped to his death from a building after his team was hammered by Newcastle United. In 2009, an Arsenal fan hanged himself after the team lost to Manchester United.

Despair and anger

The police, nationalists, and other guardians of things African look at all this with despair and anger. The nationalists have denounced the extreme fans as traitors, brain-washed lost Africans consumed by the white man’s league, while not supporting their own domestic game. Pan-Africanists see it as an imperialist plot to bring about the demise of a great continent, a foreign opium of the people.

It is more complicated than that, of course. For starters, football is sweeping most of the world, not just Africa. Secondly, sports in general; from Formula One, basketball, athletics, to football, have become entrenched as platforms of globalisation. Though it happens outside Africans headlines, even golf, the so-called “rich man’s” game has seen phenomenal growth on the continent in the last two decades, thanks partly to Tiger Woods, but also to the expansion of the African middle class, and increased mobility.

African golfers have weekends when they visit each other for games. The Nigerians, in particular, are masters at this. They come in plane loads. An East African golfer told me that about 60 of them travelled to Lagos for a golfing weekend. The Nigerians sent 60 cars, one for each of them, to pick them from the airport, and threw for them a banquet that would have made a Roman emperor envious.

Economic failure

Premier League fans, especially Kenyan and Ugandan ones, throw lavish parties for each other. Premier League fandom is the early 21st Century’s new family, the kinship that defies borders.

We have to look to the crises inside the countries the nationalists cherish, and global uncertainty, to find the reasons for the fanaticism over the Premier League and others. It is partly result of political and economic failure at home. In many ways, football provides for many the escape from the real deadly ethnic and political contests, the grime, or deprivation, they face at home, allowing fans to do warfare over these issues at a distance.

The murder of rival fans is proof that the walls provided by distance via the TV and online aren’t as high as they think. One of the geniuses of the Premier and European leagues, has been providing a global platform for African players like Senegalese superstar Sadio Mane, and Egypt’s Mohamed Salah. That representation on international stage is a thrill for many Africans who don’t get to see their best given pride of place at home, however brilliant they might be.

There is also a related “tribal” element, because the European leagues have elevated to great heights players of the African diaspora like PSG’s Kylian Mbappé, and before him Thierry Henry, from what someone called “plunder nations” like France and the UK. They are so many of them, they have often formed the whole first 11.

Their rise over the last 25 years turned into a potent mix when it met the internet, and more recently social media. It provided a very democratic entrance for many in the conversations, and engagement with the sportsmen and women, and their clubs, directly via their social media pages.

As the good old proverb says, where God boils his yam that is exactly where the devil roasts his fish. Very quickly, the devil jumped into the mix via sports betting. Sports betting is so big in parts of Africa, some have claimed that several times more young people bet than go to church, mosques, or work.

A week ago, Business Daily reported that Kenyans staked a record Sh88.5 billion through online bets in the full year to June 2023; Sh10.1 million hourly. “Were Kenya’s gambling industry a marketplace,” it declared with some flourish, “it would rival the Nairobi Securities Exchange whose equity turnover last year stood at Sh94.2 billion”. Very many Africans are roasting their fish on the Premier League.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3