West African traditional wrestlers change with times but still fancy a fight

Then Covid-19 came. Wrestling games arranged for 2020, such as the annual championship involving seven countries were cancelled.

Sering Modou Faye, president of the Gambia Wrestling Association, told Nation.Africa that there has been huge demand in the region to defy Covid-19 restrictions and host a championship in Senegal this November. And from the look of things, Faye said, the games will go on because everyone wins in these contests.

“Wrestling used to be a traditional sport, but now it’s a commercial sport,” Faye says.

“It’s a way of earning and a way of living. We envisage that in the near future, it will be the number one sport in this country.”

Top in wrestling

The Gambia, a sliver of land sandwiched by Senegal on the Gambian River, is ranked among the top wrestling countries in the region. When Covid-19 hit, the lockdowns that followed forced the country to postpone most of the bouts planned for 2020. Promoters had invested their money but wrote off their losses.

Faye says his association lost money too. Wrestlers also had to overwork when restrictions were reduced earlier in the year, fighting in more matches than planned.

The Gambia is not the only country enthusiastic about having the muscled men back fighting on sandy beaches as crowds cheer. This year, the regional associations have agreed to return to the games with a bang.

And as part of preparations for the November bouts, a major fight pitting a local wrestler in the Gambia against the reigning Senegalese champion, Modou Lo, has been arranged. That match is expected to kick-start the beginning of the season, which runs from October to July.

The Gambian association in June laid the foundation for construction of eight wrestling venues, as part of a more than $500,000 investment designed to promote the sport in the country.

The goal, says Faye, is for Gambia to host international competitions.

Wrestling matches usually trend days or even weeks before matches in Senegal and the Gambia.

Face-to-face night

Ahead of the match, athletes usually meet up for one last taunt before the ring. It is called the ‘face-to-face’ night. One such recent fight pitted two of Gambia’s biggest names in West African Traditional Wrestling against one another. The fighters, Bombardier and Balla Gaye II, were scheduled to face off on July 31.

As it is ahead of every bout, the months, weeks and days leading to the showdown are characterised by a war of words, fought on the pages of newspapers, on the airwaves of radio and TV stations, and during ‘face-to-face’, a day when the contenders meet, talk and brag about what’s in store for the opponent.

Traditional wrestling or Lutte Traditionelle in French, is a style of wrestling popular in West Africa, particularly Senegal, where it is known to have originated, rooted in the culture and community of rural villages.

Laamb, as wrestling is called in Wolof, the Senegalese lingua franca, has been growing in popularity from country to country.

Like all other wrestling styles, Laamb is characterised by working out, weight cutting and mental warfare. But its cultural and supernatural elements make it unique.

Lambskin loincloths

Wrestlers wear lambskin loincloths, and all sorts of charms tied to the rest of their body. Top fighters have a coach, a griot who sings their praises and also a shaman who prepares the charms and liquid concoctions poured over their body for good luck.

Laamb is done solely in the sand, especially along beaches, where bouts take place within a circle of about 20 metres in diameter. The first contender to fall or even touch a knee to the ground, loses. Shame!

A match can be as brief as one minute. It can last longer, but if there is no winner after a stipulated time, both fighters can be declared losers in a tournament. In a two-man contest or during final rounds of tournaments, fighting continues until there is a winner.

There are rules though: no punching, biting or grabbing the loincloth of the opponent is allowed. In other words, fighters can’t target each other’s nether regions. The idea is to ensure no man suffers an injury so bad that it prevents him from bringing forth future fighters.

According to historians, traditional wrestling began as tribal preparations for war. Later, it was transformed into a village ritual and, over the last 50 years or so, it has become a major source of entertainment.

At one point in West Africa’s history, wrestling was an important feature at village festivals celebrating the harvest season.

Today, seven countries - Senegal, Gambia, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire - dominate traditional wrestling tournaments.

Sport more organised

These are where the sport is more organised, with national tournaments, federations and arenas.

In Senegal, where it is most popular, wrestling is considered the national sport, surprisingly ahead of football, in spite of producing some of the biggest footballers on the continent.

Bouts involving top wrestlers can attract between 20,000 and 30,000 spectators. And thousands more follow the action over the radio or TV.

Senegalese people prefer traditional wrestling to more professional sport. So popular is the sport that there is now even a women’s championship and it’s growing in popularity. For a conservative Muslim country, that is really something.

There are an estimated 8,000 professional fighters in the country. Some accounts put the number of young people involved in the sport at over 50,000 in Dakar alone.

Giant billboards advertising fights are a common sight in the streets of the capital city.

But wrestling is fast growing beyond Senegal.

In neighbouring Gambia, where it is called ‘Boreh’, wrestling is the second-largest sport after football.

Championships

In 1994, the Francophone African Games included wrestling on its list of sports. There has also been the African Traditional Wrestling Championship since 1995.

The regional bloc Ecowas in 1986 adopted wrestling as the official sport of the community, through which it hopes to attain its vision of moving from a community of states to a community of people.

An Ecowas traditional wrestling championship has been staged since 2008. It’s the single largest international competition dedicated exclusively to the sport.

About a dozen competitions were held up to 2018.

When it was first staged, 11 countries participated. Since then participation has gradually grown to a maximum of 14 out of the 15 countries that constitute the bloc, with the exception of Cape Verde.

The three-day event involves over 60 wrestlers competing in five weight categories and featuring over 100 fights in both team and individual events.

Hosts

Senegal has dominated the championship. The only country close to it is Niger. Little wonder that throughout the competition’s 14-year history, it has been hosted by only the two countries. Faye says this is because they are the only ones willing to foot the cost involved in hosting it.

So important is hosting the championship for Senegal and Niger that sometimes the competition has been staged twice in one year, as in the last edition in 2018.

But over three decades since Ecowas adopted the game, some member countries are still struggling to fit it into their priority sporting lists. While some are struggling with infrastructure, others don’t even have a reliable base of wrestlers.

The secret, Faye says, is perseverance and investment.

About eight years ago, he says, Gambian wrestlers were paid a mere $5. Today, they receive up to $10,000 per bout.

In contrast, in Senegal a winner earns as much as $80,000 per match. In Niger, they get $4,000 in prize money.

According to reports, in Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire, there are year-round competitions with even bigger prize money, which attract fighters from other countries.

Endorsement deals

Being a wrestling star in countries where the sport is doing well also comes with opportunities for lucrative endorsement deals.

But with the increase in the stakes come more problems for the sport, especially cheating.

Some fighters eliminated in tournaments allegedly receive bribes to lose to undefeated rivals.

Wrestling is also becoming synonymous with violence, especially in Senegal and Gambia, where both fans and fighters have been called out. Two of the most recent bouts in Senegal ended in violence, with properties in and around the arenas destroyed.

In June, about a dozen wrestlers and clubs in Gambia were fined for various offences, including violence. Two fighters were suspended for attacking people after a match. Another one was fined for pouring charms on his opponent.

Performance-enhancing drugs

There have also been concerns around illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

All these were the subjects of a summit in 2019, which replaced the usual sporting events. It entailed trainings and conferences designed to revisit the rules of the game.

A number of innovations have since been introduced into the sport as part of this effort, including a doping awareness campaign and testing, and mainstreaming intellectual contributions and refresher courses for referees to ensure that best practices are kept at all times.

Judges now have the opportunity to watch videos of fights to determine whether a fighter has cheated.

Traditional wrestling also faces a challenge to becoming a true global sport from another quarter - Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), which has been growing in popularity across the continent.

In Senegal itself, many wrestling champions are reported to have switched to the American-dominated sport. In 2019, an undefeated Senegalese heavyweight champion, Oumar Kane, made his debut fight in MMA.