HOW on earth does a nation qualify for a World Cup when it has just emerged from 27 years of civil war? How do you do it when football in most of the country has been closed down? Or put it another way: when children are being sent to war, when the under-5 mortality rate is the second highest in the world, where do the footballers come from?
It reached the stage in parts of the country where playing football could be considered dangerous because young men engaged in athletic activity could be carted off to fight. And if it is too dangerous to travel, how do the talented few who still manage to play ever get together?
The answer is entirely Angolan, a stirring and improbable tale of a nation that lived decades in conflict and suddenly found a football team who can be a focus for a shared national identity. And for it, we must go back to October 8 in Kigali, where Fabrice Akwa, the striker, captain and talisman, rose to head home the winner against Rwanda to secure Angola’s place in the World Cup finals for the first time.
At football matches in the capital, Luanda, fans used not to wear their club colours but instead T-shirts announcing their support of one of the nation’s two leading political parties, the MPLA and Unita, the very factions that kept the nation so long at war.
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After October 8, however, the national team shirt became the garb of honour and it was not long before it was being reported that supplies of Akwa shirts had run dry.
This is not to propose football as a simple solution to 27 years of conflict. Liberia similarly emerged from a devastating civil war (150,000 dead) to be dragged, largely by George Weah, Africa’s only World Footballer of the Year, to the brink of qualification for the 2002 World Cup finals. Weah was hailed in his homeland as “The King”, he became an idol, a symbol of Liberian success and even helped to bankroll the national team, but when they failed at the last qualifying hurdle, the most important match in the country’s history, losing 2-1 at home to Ghana, the crowds turned on him, riots ensued and so angry was the mob camped outside his house that an armed police guard was required to protect him.
“I believe sporting success can precipitate unparalleled national joy. There is nothing like it,” Gary Armstrong, an academic, writer and Editor of the sociological study, Football in Africa: Conflict, Conciliation and Community, said. “But when the game ends, life hasn’t changed. In Liberia’s case, the game ended and you still had no job, no running water and a life expectancy that is wretchedly low.”
Likewise in Angola, although, for the moment, the game has not ended. Despite oil and diamond resources that are the envy of Africa, war has reduced the country to its knees. Thus, among the millionaires on parade in Germany in the summer, there will be Angola players whose homes do not have electricity or running water.
It was one of these, José Zé Kalanga, the midfield player, who supplied the cross for Akwa’s famous winner in Kigali and since then, the national television station has been inviting him to appear on their Monday evening football talk show to wax lyrical about it.
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A good professional player in Angola earns roughly the same as a schoolteacher or doctor and in the three years since the war ended, most have now acquired cars. But Zé Kalanga lives in a suburb out of Luanda and, with no street lights, the chances of mugging or carjacking are far too great for him to consider the journey.
Zé Kalanga’s is not considered a hard-luck story, though, not next to Pedro Mantorras, the striker who plays for Benfica. One in three Angolans were displaced — uprooted and shifted across the country — during the war and Mantorras is among their number, a refugee born in Huambo, a Unita stronghold, then brought up in the seaside slums of the capital. Juan Ricardo, the goalkeeper — wealthier and more fortunate — was taken by his family to live in Portugal.
These are two who have survived as players despite the war, but the achievement is more outstanding when you consider that football at a high level was brought to a halt long ago in the majority of the country. Of the 18 Angolan provinces, 12 stopped playing during the war and only one is scheduled to make a return when the season starts next month.
As Luis Oliveira Gonçalves, the Angola coach, said: “Yes, a lot of great footballers have been lost to our war. We cannot guess at how many or how good some former Angolan teams may have been.”
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WE MET at the Marbella Paradise of Football, in Spain, a training camp where the Angolans — the Palancas Negras, or Black Antelopes — have been preparing for the forthcoming African Cup of Nations. As Gonçalves said, they would never have been anywhere like this during the war. “Money that was previously wasted on the purposes of war is now being channelled in other directions — towards football and sport in general,” he said. “We now have salaries, good food and accommodation — these are the fruits of peace.”
But Gonçalves has not simply put this team together in three postwar years. It is a decade of his own work. He worked with many of these players through the youth levels, the first indication of their potential coming in 2001 when the under-20 team he coached won the African Youth Championship, then reached the last 16 at the World Youth Championship in Argentina.
That was when war was raging, when the only (comparatively) safe way to travel was by air. Thus would his small unit of players meet and begin to forge the spirit that unites them today.
Gonçalves has also been keen to instil in them a sense of the unique social responsibilities and influence that they, as footballers, have over their ravaged nation. He has sent his children to school in London and when they return, he said, the expectations are on them “to contribute to Angolan development”. Likewise his footballers. “Many of my team play abroad; when they return to Angola, they will bring financial resources and experience to the country and contribute to forming football schools,” he said. “This is an idea that I like to promote, but it is something that the players are interested in, too.”
Indeed. Four are planning such an academy for when they retire after the World Cup finals. Or, as Ricardo said: “I am sure that football will make a major contribution to the rebuilding of our society.”
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Football as a source of social harmony — nothing astonishingly new in that. In Liberia, it recently took Weah to within a disputed vote of becoming president. But the Black Antelopes are a football team who are doing their own small bit to help to rebuild a society from scratch — and in the summer they will be doing it in front of the whole world.