Senegal beat Egypt on penalties to win the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) in Cameroon on Sunday for its first championship glory in the tournament. Held against a background of a still deadly Covid-19 pandemic, it was always bound to be a different Afcon. And there was more.
As The Atlantic’s Clint Smith put it, “There are moments when the success of a sports team can transfix a nation. Such moments provide respite from difficult circumstances and can offer a sense of hope that permeates people’s everyday lives. Senegal winning its first-ever Africa Cup of Nations...in Cameroon is such a moment.
“The final of this year’s competition—postponed six months because of the pandemic—featured the two best African players in the world, Sadio Mané of Senegal and Mohamed Salah of Egypt. What made the match-up even more intriguing is that the two of them are teammates for Liverpool Football Club, in England’s Premier League. But Mané and Salah are not simply the two best African footballers in the world; they are two of the best players in the world, period.
“Attempting to describe what it is like to see Salah and Mané play on the same team is like trying to describe the northern lights to someone who hasn’t seen them before. You can describe the colours, or the shapes of the bending arcs of kaleidoscopic light, or the way it looks like the sky is breaking open in the most beautiful way—but until someone sees it for themselves, they won’t really understand.”
Yes, there was more than football at issue at the Afcon final but even the magazine only captured the historical significance of the moment.
Nations and continents often witness events that are harbingers, signalling the approach of another. Sometimes they are the canary in the coalmine, warning of danger to come.
Afcon 2021 was a harbinger. And one of a recent series of sporting events that signalled majors. One of them was the 2014 African Championships in Athletics held in Marrakech, Morocco, in August of that year. There was a strange mix of apprehension and optimism hanging over the game. The Spring revolutions of 2011 had roiled the Arab world but had largely been crushed in many places.
Weeks later, in April 2015, Al-Shabaab carried out its historic attack on Garissa University College, a massacre in which 148 people died.
In Egypt, Field-Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had seized power earlier mid-year. Nigeria was being brought to its knees by Boko Haram militants. President Goodluck Jonathan was hanging on by the tips of his fingers.
A few months later, he was out of a job, defeated by current President Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari, too, become the first opposition candidate to defeat and succeed an incumbent in Nigeria. Later in the year, the people of Burkina Faso took to the streets and ran long-ruling strongman Blaise Compaore out of power.
US President Barack Obama came visiting in Nairobi as the pall over the International Criminal Court (ICC) cases against President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto was beginning to lift. The forces of progress and promise, and stagnation and reversal, were poised in the middle of the ring like giant sumo wrestlers feeling each other out.
Last year, when Africa still looked in peril and was hearing about Covid vaccines only as rumours, the continent stood exhausted on the ropes. In Rwanda’s capital Kigali, Basketball League Africa’s inaugural tournament was held. It was the first continental or international event held in a Covid bubble. If they could pull it off, then Africa could begin to believe that we would come out of the pandemic, wounded and limping, yes, but with enough left to fight for the future. And so it was.
In an earlier period, when women’s rights and conferences were still a novelty, in 1985, the UN World Conference on Women was held in Nairobi, it was a turning moment. Women’s rights put a foot out of the door on the continent.
Afcon tournaments tend to be messy, marred with embarrassing spectacle. Beyond the stadium stampede, in which at least eight people died and 38 were injured in Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé, all went swimmingly well. A surprise, given that the despotic President Paul Biya, in power for nearly four decades, is not famous for running an efficient state.
But this is also another inflexion point for Africa. In a significant reversal, many more Africans are migrating within Africa than to Asia, Europe or North America.
In Salah’s homeland, the Grand Egyptian Museum, set to be the largest archaeological museum, will formally open this year. In Mane’s Senegal, the Museum of Black Civilisations, opened in 2018 after 52 years.
In the confrontation between Senegal and Egypt, as the rapper Kendrick Lamar would sing, there was a sense that amidst the gloom and uncertainty, an African butterfly is coming out of its cocoon. We will soon know its colours.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3
