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Ilunga’s Game

Posted on May 1, 2018

Written by Christian Hazes, Staff Writer

Unintentionally, Zaire defender Mwepu Ilunga achieved football immortality during one of the group-stage matches of the 1974 FIFA World Cup in Germany.

Having lost against Scotland and Yugoslavia, Zaire had already been eliminated from the tournament. On the other hand, Brazil had already reached the second stage of the tournament after picking up two convincing wins. In other words, the final game between the two countries would be a mere technicality. While in the concluding minutes of that last game of group B, tournament first-timers Zaire were down two to nothing against reigning champions Brazil.

In these final minutes, Mwepu Ilunga succeeds in doing the impossible: leaving the divine team Seleçao flabbergasted. The Brazilians are preparing to take a free-kick, while Zaire forms a wall to attempt to block the shot. Shortly after the whistle by the referee that signals Brazil is good to go, defender Mwepu Ilunga breaks free from the wall, sprints towards the ball and before the Brazilians can blink, kicks the ball away as far as possible. Brazilian football gods Roberto Rivelino and Jairzinho looking on with their jaws dropped remains a unique scene. One of the strangest moments in football history just took place.

The fact is the reason for Ilunga’s action had nothing to do with ignorance concerning the rules of the game. No, Zaire’s players, nicknamed the Leopards, are perfectly aware of the rules. Instead, the daunting fear of going home is what drove Ilunga’s action. The clearance was simply a tactic to buy some invaluable time as well as an act of protest.

Zaire was a Belgian colony up until the year 1960, officially known then as Congo. As is the case for the vast majority of the exploited colonies on the African continent, the legacy left behind by former European rulers is far from convenient. Five years after gaining independence, Mobutu Sese Seko cunningly turned the precarious and inchoate Sub-Saharan state into a dictatorial regime. Mobutu’s Popular Movement of the Revolution dominated the one-party state that Zaire had become for over three decades, leaving the country devastated. Under the aegis of “the Father of the Nation”, the people of Zaire had been trapped in a totalitarian system dripping with Mobutism.

Mobutu’s influence also reached Zaire’s football culture by virtue of recalling players that had moved to Belgium, prohibiting playing abroad, and pumping huge sums of money in the game’s development. It must be admitted, though, that Mobutu’s intervention was highly fruitful, in addition to snatching the only African ticket for the contest after a grueling group-stage, the Leopards also became victors of the 1974 African Cup of Nations. As a sign of gratitude, the benign Mobutu awarded every team member with a house and a green Volkswagen car.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Zaire arrived at the World Cup ‘74 on a high. Some bookmakers even deemed the Africans potential outsiders.

The start of the tournament proved to be promising. Under the supervision of a vast Zairean delegate, including important ministers, high-ranking army officials and a battalion of witchdoctors, the team held up remarkably well against a strong Scottish equipe. Nevertheless, Zaire’s world cup debut culminated in a 2-0 loss.

Unfortunately, the close loss against the Scots turned out to be the apex of Zaire’s participation during that World Cup. Ahead of their next game, financial problems surfaced that proved to be the last drop to make pot boil over. The Zairean players did not receive their match payments.

In stark contrast with the present-day conditions, several decades ago football players often lived in financially uncertain circumstances. The fact that corruption was common in Mobutu-led Zaire made the players suspicious of the Zairean entourage. Mwepu Ilunga and consorts could assume the delegate had seized the match payments.

Photo by Jannik Skorna

The players of Zaire decided to strike back. Not merely because of the unreceived match bonuses, but also to address the larger problems of their home country. The World Cup would be the perfect stage to raise awareness concerning the fact that they were living in a full-blown dictatorial regime.

According to some sources, as a last resort to avoid a tarnished image of the tournament, the FIFA promised to pay 3000 Deutsche Marks per player as a means of compensation. All-out mutiny by Zaire was circumvented, but the tension didn’t fully dissipate.

The second match of Zaire with Yugoslavia as the adversary was amongst the worst in the whole history of the tournament. Exhaustion after days of arguing amalgamated with feelings of anger and resentment left the Leopards extremely demotivated. The result? Zaire experienced complete annihilation: 9-0.

This is when the situation really got out of hand. Mobutu was furious, Zaire had experienced humiliation on the international stage because of the players. Presidential guards were dispatched to threaten the team with a clear message: lose with 4 or more goals to Brazil and you better not come home.

The message surely resonated with the team. Knowing that their lives were at stake, the Zairean footballers gave it all they got against those Gods in yellow. In order for himself and his teammates to survive, Mwepu Ilunga was even willing to make a joke out of himself in front of the whole world.

The sacrifice made for survival is large. Abruptly breaking free from the wall of men in green, with a feral gaze that radiates determination, and hoofing up the ball across the pitch resulted in being universally ridiculed. But, when being able to see your family and home again are at stake, the “by any means necessary” mindset prevails.

When the final whistle had been blown, a score of 3-0 in favor of the Brazilians stood on the scoreboard. Mission accomplished.

Despite being allowed to go home, many of the ‘74 Leopards did not go home for the simple reason that they did not wish to live under a dictatorial regime which considered them pariahs.

After becoming aware of the true underlying motivations for Ilunga’s clearance, it might seem inappropriate to laugh about the incident. I do not fully agree. Obviously, the state of 1974 Zaire is not funny at all. Nor did Ilunga’s sudden action do much to increase the chances of not conceding a goal. But, the free kick farce is one of the best examples of political protest through sports. The metaphorical middle finger towards Mobutu is not only unique; at the end of the day, it is mostly very heroic.

And that is worth a smile.

Portolaos

Posted on May 1, 2018

Written by Laura Alexander

Translation of the title of a book seen in the Benaki Museum:

“Portolaos, Namely book containing the seaports, the Distances between one place and another, and Other useful information for this Enterprise”

I was finally sitting down again to write after all the delicious laziness, in the dry heat where I fled the sun and moved like a sleepwalker, with things spread out so fine I only really did one thing a day, if anything. Hot hours drinking cold cappuccinos, sweet and strong with cold milk the texture of uncooked meringue, and later beer, on street corners, and then crashing to sleep naked in the heat. Crashing back into city life after a month of roughing it across the great scroll of Europe, a kind of self-hood had come back to me. Not a real self-hood of responsibilities and worries, still in the no-time of holiday, but my hitchhiker’s ghost feeling was melted away. I tried to look good, in clean clothes and the backless top I hadn’t worn all across Europe because it felt dangerous to be sexy while hitchhiking. I met people, and said goodbye to them expecting to see them again. I went to the café, and the bookshop, and the corner shop next to the cinema where the owner recognized me and spoke to me in Dutch because he’d once lived a year in Utrecht. Life was leafy and calm, easy to walk in, the streets patch-worked with graffiti and the cafes full of scruffy punks and gorgeous girls who sit with all the time in the world. At night, the open-air cinemas cast snatches of tinny dialogue in Greek or English over the walls onto the street like a football they expected to have tossed back.

Selves are formed by cities. Having discarded myself to travel through all that land between here and home I found a new self here, waiting to be slipped into like the red shoes I found waiting for me on a street corner in Paris once at two in the morning, neat and unexpected and precisely my size. In the same way, here in Athens I find a plausible version of myself, to be tried on and discarded, or to fuse so completely with all the selves I have been up till now that if I looked back in a few years it won’t be possible to make out the join, like with Paris, like with Amsterdam. Just like when you arrive in a new place, especially a city, how it feels like cognitive dissonance to remember that it was always there, that these streets were stretched out against the earth’s surface exactly as you see them now while you were still living for years before blissfully unconcerned with them, like Stephen Dedulus says, “there all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end” – anyway just like that you have to face the fact that the person you could be here is already within you, lurking like a seed, and ever more shockingly, a seed already shaped and formed by all that’s gone before. So if I’d come here a year ago I’d have been calculating how to find a job in a bar here, how to scrape by and wait for adventure, wondering how many places would let you get along with not speaking Greek at first. Now after months of slightly fancier work I was looking at the local British Council, and cultural institutions here and whether I could possibly persuade them to hire me. So the potential self I can taste around me comes from me alone.

In Athens time was thick and golden. From one day to the next I could hardly remember what I’d been doing – the opposite of tourism. One day I dragged together enough energy to get to the Acropolis museum, bright and sleek. Another night we went to a free outdoor screening in the gardens of the French archaeological institute, and while we were watching a minor riot broke out a few blocks away. The film was a French one, with Jean-Paul Belmondo. It was subtitled in Greek so I could only follow about half the plot, which turned out not to matter as the plot was very silly and the visuals were stunning, all long slow shots of Niemeyer’s half-finished Brasilia buildings. The riot was over by the time the film was, and the restaurants were moving tables back out into the street. From the balcony of the apartment all we could see was a huge pillar of black smoke and the reflected orange light on a building about a block away. When I went down to the square to get more beer the fire was burnt out and I stood and looked for a while at the slightly smoking, twisted and blacked remains of two cars. It was the first time I’d seen a burnt out car, though in Paris I’d seen the melted tarmac remains of where two motorbikes had been burned then taken away.

Photo by Matt Artz

Hot night under the glow of colored bulbs, speed and slowness with hours passed in drunkenness and shouting and cicadas loud as sirens fading finally silent. Endless unremembered conversations jokes and absurdities, and above all movement and heat in stillness. The taste of beer and ouzo, the dirt under the feet, the smell of the pine trees in the bar on the hill with the hill looming black and the barely payable bill. Fuck roughly when we get home, beer-drenched four-in-the-morning cunts, and wake to a sunlight so clear and strong, the pinkness of flowers and their sticky-sweet smell on the street.

I finished the last volume of Proust a few days later, sprawled topless on a rock that was digging into my thighs, with my head in a girl’s lap and a picnic of melons and bread spread out. Me and the girl I’d been living with had gone out to an island to camp. We fucked on top of my sleeping bag in the forest of night and then come back down to the stony beach to sleep. In the sunrise by the cool clear water I felt the weirdness of finishing nearly a year with one great mass of book (about a week later back in Athens I came across where Anne Carson has a character say reading Proust is like having a second unconsciousness, a formulation of words which allowed me to give a shape to my sadness). By the end of the book all the tiny hundreds of fragments of story come together, and the outcome is that you can see how over time all those little fragments do become a life.

When we took the boat back to Athens and were sitting on the top deck of the boat, some hippy kids were taking turns throwing little bits of bread up to the gulls. Following along with the speed of the boat they seemed to be stationary above the deck. Every time a gull managed to snatch a scrap out of the air the whole deck would clap and whoop. By this point the clouds had come in, and everything around was soft shades of grey, different everywhere you looked.

That tremendous observation; that there is only one world and that everything you see and read exists inside it at the same time. These are many things, and it’s difficult to put them together in anyway that feels coherent. Like Proust and his fragments of life, all these othernesses, in a way so simple it’s a cliche even to say it, come together and form the fact of all the things that are the case.

HOMEWARD - May 2018 Jurek Wotzel

Moria: When Home is Neither Ahead, Nor Behind

Posted on May 1, 2018

Written by Jurek Wötzel, Head Writer

It’s a regular day on the island of Lesbos, Greece in late March 2018. In the infamous Moria Camp, a young Syrian refugee sets himself on fire after learning that his application for asylum has been rejected for the second time. He would rather die than go home.

Home, that is where the bombs fall, where the sirens scream, where the relentless fire of the machine guns keeps you up at night. It isn’t for no reason that millions of Syrians have abandoned their home since the beginning of the war, five years ago. Many of them ended up in Lesbos, waiting for the authorities to decide their fate.

Since the EU-Turkey deal was put into effect, refugees arriving in Greece are immediately detained in Moria Camp. When the Greek state erected the camp in 2015, it was supposed to temporarily host 2,000 people. Now, that number has increased to 6,000.

Payman Shamsian, a former NGO worker at Moria camp saw many people arrive there. “They are so happy that they have made it to the land of freedom,” he says. “They think their life is becoming better and better from now on. They come to the camp with thousands of hopes and dreams. And wait. And wait. And wait. I witnessed the entire process of collapse and destruction for many asylum seekers, and how the reality hits them on their face over a course of even one week.”

About 2,500 asylum seekers land on the island every month. Most of them will soon be accommodated in sparsely equipped tents, providing just the bare minimum to keep them sheltered. Each year, when winter approaches, new headlines about the humanitarian crisis in the Greek camps appear in media outlets all over Europe. Still, no one really seems to be bothered.

The conditions in what has earned the name ‘Moria Prison’ among refugees are horrendous. Not long ago, Greek migration minister Ioannis Mouzalas warned they are potentially life-threatening. Yet, detainees do their best to deal with homesickness, the fear of deportation, and the daily struggle to survive.

“I have seen or personally been in many situations that people in the camp talk about their traditions, their culture, and language with others”, Payman remembers. “Homesickness has a huge presence in the camp. Expressions of it range from the way people decorate their tents to strong hatred toward their tents because it’s not their home.”

The atmosphere in the camp is a pendulum between hope and frustration. “Refugees and asylum seekers mostly don’t want to accept that they don’t have a home anymore. They either think that one day they go back home or think they can make the new place they are moving to their new home.”

It’s not only the homesickness that causes hatred. Anger about being rejected, intra-group conflict, and simple overall despair spark violence and aggression. In 2016, a large group of refugees set fire to their tents in the french Calais camp, leading to outrage at the dinner tables of European families. In Moria, too, riots erupted several times. In the same year, a riot led to a fire resulting in the evacuation of 4,000 detainees. These incidents exacerbate the misery even more.

“The camp can’t be a humane place to have a dignified life, let alone being a home”, Payman tells me. “Every person has a different coping mechanism to face this reality. Some can’t cope with it, some can. It depends on many things. But one of the main problems is that your social status in the camp is totally different from the outside world. Coping with that aspect is the hardest part for people.”

Photo by Roman Kraft

Hannah Arendt, who lived as a Jew in Nazi Germany, was particularly concerned with the lack of belonging one experiences as a refugee. She saw the struggle of the refugee being no different than the struggle of the stateless person. The loss of legal protection of a sovereign state makes the refugee cease to have any social status at all; their actions become meaningless. They have no political community in which there is good and bad, right and wrong. Being stateless is essentially the loss of political identity.

Payman is less worried about abandoning your community of origin in general. “I personally believe that associating the concept of home to a country, usually your birth country, is very overrated. Home can be anywhere for various reasons and change over time for different people based on their life experiences. Even not having a place to call home is becoming very common among people.”

There is a difference, though, between those who left home voluntarily and those who were forced to leave. As Somali-British poet Warsan Shire writes:

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.

Obviously, this is not the story of voluntary migration. It is a story that should end with the possibility of permanent resettlement or the possibility to return home. Unfortunately, the realities of the Syrian war and European refugee policy continue to prevent both. The increasingly prevalent image of the refugee as the criminal immigrant who is nothing but a parasite to society is not a positive sign for change. It also isn’t making it easier for refugees to feel at home in a new country once they manage to leave camps like Moria or Calais behind.

“The only thing I want from any country hosting refugees and migrants anywhere in the world is to see and perceive refugees and migrants as simple persons living in a society”, Payman replied when I asked him for advice for Europe. “They’re not necessarily angels or hard-working and full of hope all the time. They are not necessarily evil and criminal. Let’s not romanticize them. Let’s not get shocked when one of them becomes successful or hate them because one of them commits a crime. Let’s just see them as what they are, and embrace them in our societies, as any other person in the society.”

Hence, what Payman and Hannah Arendt would agree on, is the need to include refugees in a new community. A community that allows to them to feel at home, that allows them to have a political identity and that allows them to live a purposeful life.

Moria does not do any of that. Instead, it puts refugees into a political purgatory situated between the hope of a new life and the fear of deportation. A truly humanitarian response of the all-so humanist Europeans would look different.

—-

Payman Shamsian currently works for the migration team of Samuel Hall, an independent think tank providing research and strategic services, expert analysis, tailored counsel and access to local knowledge for a diverse array of actors operating in the world’s most challenging environments. He has obtained two masters degrees before joining Samuel Hall. He obtained a joint basters degree on Global Studies between Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg and Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO Argentina) and he studied at Central European University in International Relations and European Studies program. Prior to working for Samuel Hall, Payman worked for the Danish Refugee Council as a Protection Assistant in Greece.

HOMEWARD - May 2018 Sarah Osei-Bonsu

White Masks

Posted on May 1, 2018

Written by Sarah Osei-Bonsu, Staff Writer

I grew up in the most religious country in the world. Ghana is a melting pot of Christian, Muslim and ‘traditionalist’ African beliefs. However, the dominant religion is Christianity and it is fundamentally at odds with the traditional belief systems. Growing up in the city of Kumasi, the cultural center of the Ashanti, Ghana’s major ethnic group, I witnessed this clash between our African spirituality and Christian colonial legacy first hand.

When I was little, I observed a traditional ceremonial dance at a funeral. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the man in the grass skirt kicking up dirt as he swirled in hypnotic circles, every inch of his body twisting, curling and contracting to each drumbeat. His entourage threw white dust as he turned and he was enveloped in white mist, his skin slowly turning grey. His face was already painted in the dust, like a white mask. This man was an Akomfo, an Ashanti priest, his dance a spiritual performance of the traditional belief system, Akom. There was a strangeness about this mystic man, yet one thing wasn’t all that extraordinary. Many Ghanaians today wear white masks. The only difference is that these masks are invisible. They are not symbols of our traditions, but rather tokens given to us by our colonizers.

The white masks conceal our identity, altering the way we saw ourselves. We first wore these masks because we had no choice, but in the centuries since, we forgot what lay behind them. Colonialism damaged Africa’s cultural integrity. One of the greatest and most damaging colonizing tools on the continent was Christianity. The Christian faith itself is not harmful, often it manifests itself beautifully. However, in Ghana it is rooted in the racism and subjugation of our colonial past. The Christianity we initially encountered was that of slavers and murderers. It was spread on the basis of our assumed inferiority and that of our customs. Because of this there is an implicit self-hatred in our history with Christianity, and this is a self-perpetuating system. Not only are we forgetting our culture, but we are actively demeaning and rejecting it.

Just like our colonial masters before, most Ghanaians view traditional religions, like Akom, with hostility and condemnation. These traditional belief systems in our popular culture have become synonymous with words like Satanism, fetishism, and magic. These all fall under an umbrella term: ‘Juju’, by which Ghanaians refer to anything that is neither Muslim nor Christian and is thus by default evil. This stigma is deeply embedded in Ghanaian culture and it directly descends from the colonial roots of Christianity in Ghana.

Today Christianity is a big business in Ghana. New denominations and ambitious pastors (or entrepreneurs) are making their mark across the country with churches overcrowding the cityscape. This is often an aggressive brand of Christianity. The problem with this kind of Christian gospel is that it condemns any other religious beliefs. Given the massive role of Christianity in Ghana, this perpetuates a cycle of self-hatred. Adoring the deity of our colonizers is in conflict with our local culture and tradition and demands their rejection.

Throughout Ghana’s cities you will encounter preachers, condemning everything satanic. Satanic meaning anything spiritual outside the realm of Christianity, such as Akom. In Akom, the belief is that the spoken word holds power. Every word spoken is an evocation. In Ghana, most of the times, that which is spoken and preached is hateful and demeaning of traditional spirituality. These evocations have clearly been realized in Ghanaian society.

Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde

Ghanaians are very spiritual people. Pre-colonial beliefs, like Akom, assume that there is a spirit in everything: the earth, rivers, thunder, animals, blood. Our custom, music, and dance, passionately built on this conviction. Christianity in Ghana instrumentalized this spirituality and radicalized it. In modern-day Ghana ‘spirituality’ is seen as something harsh and overbearing, sometimes taking the form of ‘exorcisms’ during lunch breaks at school or, violent ‘possessions’ of my colleagues attributed to some vague spirits.

Akom, has been so misconstrued. Now it is merely juju. I used to believe this too, or at least I never questioned it. When Ghanaians are not actively perpetuating this stigma, we relegate ourselves to ignorance. This might be even more damaging. How have we forgotten the complexity and harmony of our traditions? Most of us don’t know that at its core Akom seeks balance between the physical and spiritual worlds. It claims the immortality and infinity of the earth and our ancestors. We have not only turned our backs on traditional worship, but in the process we have lost much of our identity. Beyond the beautiful rituals that are being lost, we are drawing further and further away from nature. Rejecting our culture builds on the assumption that we’re not cultured and we have filled this void, or rather covered it, with a new one.

Christianity, this religion we have tied all our hopes to is not an innocent faith in the African case. These masks we wear, have worn, and will continue to place on our children are harming our society. I want to remind you again, that my issue is not with Christianity itself, but with the denial and self-hate which afflicts our practice of it. Like Frantz Fanon explained:

“The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen.”

Christianity was a central underpinning of imperialism and the slave trade. How can we worship the same tool used to subjugate us? In the slave castle of Cape Coast, above the dungeons in which slaves were held stands a proud church. By the time the colonial era was over, the mask was already firmly in place. Just like Cape Coast, modern, independent Ghana, has built churches above its disturbing history with Christianity. Now Christianity is deeply embedded in the fabric of Ghanaian society. We once worshipped in nature and then we were herded into Churches. The community used to be a family, now we clash because we belong to different denominations. The business of Christianity is unnatural, and it cannot be sustained.

There is a popular symbol in Ashanti culture called Sankofa. It means ‘go back to that which you have forgotten’. I hope that as Ghanaians, and Africans, we can return to our roots. That Christianity in Ghana will no longer sustain itself on the suppression of our traditions and customs but can coexist with them. Religion should not be dependent on conversion and dominance, but should cohabit with spirituality and a pride in our traditions. I think of the Akomfo, his vigorous dance a memory of our traditions and the pride that once was. The white mask a reminder of where we are now. It is time to take off this mask.

HOMEWARD - May 2018 Issues

May 2018 – Homeward

Posted on May 1, 2018

Dear Infected,

All of you know what a home is. It’s the place you hang your hat. It’s where your heart is. It’s the place that you miss when you’re away, or maybe home is even a person. That longing to be back where you belong, or to find such a place, is the inspiration for Pandemic’s May theme: Homeward.

For most, returning home is as simple as buying a plane ticket. For others, home is only a memory or abstract concept. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates 65.6 million people are currently displaced from their home. Every day 28,300 more are forced to flee their home in order to survive, leaving behind the devastation of war, or persecution at the hands of their countrymen.

Violence and death are not the only reasons people find themselves without a home; economics and biased policies play a part as well. Redevelopment plans that aim to “beautify” or “revitalize” the city often push vulnerable members of society to the streets. The UN estimates that over 100 million individuals are homeless, and an additional 1 billion are inadequately housed. At other times national immigration policies can deny people the right to call their home “home” because of their “illegal” status.

For these people, the craving for a home, in whatever sense, still exists – though it may never be fulfilled.

This month we would like you to reflect on what the concept of Homeward means to you. We suspect that the results will be as varied as the four articles we have to start this month. The feeling you get moving towards home may be too difficult to put into words, so we’ll gladly accept your infectious ideas in whatever form they come be it a painting, song, or creatively coded computer program.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The Pandemic Team

Homeward – May 2018

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