Time to harness sports unifying power for national cohesion
Covid-19 has been with us for one year this month. It has taken away some people very dear to me, including my children’s teacher.
The pain of personal loss, the widespread economic destruction it has brought about and the benumbing uncertainty about what the future holds is what is now euphemistically being called “the new normal.”
It is not just Covid-19 that is real; depression too. Was there a period known to any living Kenyan when the issue of mental health was as present in our families as it is now?
But just as armies march on their stomachs – Napoleon said it, not me – Kenya runs on politics. Covid-19 has temporarily applied the brakes on political rallies, which many Kenyans watched aghast, helpless and mightily annoyed as they went on with reckless abandon, spreading the virus as if it didn’t matter.
Sports gatherings have been managed with a lot more caution, leading some people to wonder why one standard, the correct and responsible one, was being applied to them and practically none to political ones. Even with the Olympic season beckoning, care has been the by-word. Which is all well and good.
Unfortunately, all this has been rendered nugatory by the countrywide political activity and now we are back to where we were last year – all-time high infection rates.
In 1998, while living through another incarnation away from the field of sports, I participated in workshop on democratization. As soon as it ended, a fellow participant made conversation with me.
“I hate elections,” he told me. Why, I asked him as I wondered what he had been doing with us all this time. “They are very costly,” he answered, “they get people killed. They get people displaced. They divide families. They make communities hate each other. They ruin the economy by causing uncertainty. They make lawlessness excusable. They are also extremely costly in money itself. Can’t there be another way?”
Why didn’t you say all those things during plenary, I asked him after he had gone on a bit more. He said he had been “meaning to” but changed his mind on “realising” that he wouldn’t make any difference because his views were antithetical to the objective of the workshop. “Plus,” he added, “I was just going to annoy the donor representative after eating the food and collecting my per diem.”
He was the first person to sow doubt in my mind about the necessity of elections as a method of governance, especially granted that from an objective point of view, the things he was saying were true. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist participating in removing Kanu from power in 2002. I was in Team Unbwogable.
And then 2007/8 happened. From then onwards, my focus changed to glorifying the work of people who mitigate the corrosive effects of bad politics: sportspeople.
I have used acres of print space promoting them and will continue to do so for as long as my fingers can type.
Even with elections more than one year into the future, even with Covid-19 still ravaging the country with no respite in sight, even with many family economies having ground to a halt, politics and elections still dominate our lives. There is no telling how it will all end but this much I know: if ever the healing and unifying power of sport was needed, that time is now.
Pokot women in a jig during the Tegla Loroupe Kapenguria Peace Race in Makutano Township on November 13, 2010.
As we get deeper into another high-voltage political season, we must think of ways, through sport, to counter the narrative of fear, uncertainty and violence that comes with political competition. Messages of unity among political gladiators don’t work because, as the Igbo proverb goes, pepper cannot be one of the ingredients of a soothing balm.
As an agent of peace, sport works. Remember what King Pele said about it? At the height of his career one year before he became the only footballer in history to win the Fifa World Cup three times, Pele and his Santos team made an African tour. This is how he recalled it:
“We first flew into Brazzaville, in Congo, and I remember there were tanks and guns in the street. While we were there, I remember the possibility of a quick hop to play a match in Nigeria. Yet there was a worrying issue: Nigeria was involved in a civil war with Biafra, an area in the south-east of the country.
‘Don’t worry,’ said our business manager. ‘They’ll stop the war. It won’t be a problem.’ I told him he was crazy! We went to Nigeria, played a game which we drew 2-2, and then flew out again. It is said that there really was a 48-hour ceasefire in the war, made just for us, and my teammates remember seeing white flags and posters saying there would be peace just to see Pele play.”
Stopping politically-instigated conflict goes back almost 3,000 years when combatants held the peace just to watch or participate in the ancient Olympic Games. And we Kenyans have an abundance of heroes and fans we can mobilize to do what humankind has done since antiquity if 2007/8 is never to happen again.
Some of our distinguished countrymen and women have heroically walked down this road.
Look, for example, at the work of Tegla Loroupe. Look what she has done for the people of her native West Pokot. Her marathons have probably been more effective than any exhortations to peace from local administrators which for so long went unheeded until she got the warring factions to run together.
Tegla Loroupe (in blue dress) with, from left, Dorcas Asegun (Turkana), Agnetta Jeptoo ( Marakwet) and Kaku Patricia of West Pokot during an athletics and beauty competition at Turkwel sponsored by the former marathoner.
Explaining her mission, Loroupe told a journalist: “Kenya continues to suffer many conflicts among different communities. The main causes of these conflicts are economic and cultural. Through sport, we can address them. Everything starts with perceptions and sports is appealing to everybody regardless of their ethnic, religious or social background.
“Sport is a universal language that can be understood by all. Its intrinsic values such as teamwork, fairness, discipline, respect for the opponent and the rules of the game are understood all over the world and thus can be harnessed in advancement of solidarity, social cohesion and peaceful coexistence. These values are core in resolving any conflicts.”
Loroupe is one of the most admirable Kenyans. The first woman to become world marathon champion belongs to a select group of African sportsmen and women who, aware of their humble beginnings, use their sports celebrity status as a counter narrative to the ideology of violence.
These are the true healers, people with a big social conscience. In this league are to be found stars like Nigeria’s Nwankwo Kanu, Senegal’s Sadio Mane and Ivory Coast’s Didier Drogba.
Loroupe’s passion for education, which she could very well have missed as a sibling among 24 others, led her to establish an academy through which not less than 800 pupils have passed through.
A Daily Nation Special Report of 2019 dramatized the lawlessness of Loroupe’s northern Kenya birthplace thus: “Politics, clandestine interests, livestock business, both legal and illegal, and a mixture of traditional feuds run concurrently, triggering a deadly mix of violence in a land where the gun is the arbiter.
“We found that cattle rustlers, who run the multi-million-shilling cattle theft empire, are buying bullets for Russian-made AK-47 guns and the German Heckler & Koch G3s for as little as Sh100 each.
“Guns are also being traded or exchanged for two to five cows, sometimes in the full glare of police. Outnumbered by armed civilians, police here opt to look the other way.”
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach (left) presents an invitation to the Olympic Games to chef de mission of the Tokyo 2020 refugee Olympic team, Tegla Loroupe, during a ceremony marking one year before the start of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo on July 24, 2019.
Yet today, no mention of the dire security status of that region can be made without reference to the work of the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation and the marathons it has organized in Kapenguria amongst other activities. Loroupe was not born great but through hard work, perseverance and focus, she brought greatness upon herself.
The centrality of sport in national identity and life cannot be gainsaid. Through sport or related narratives we can create and recreate identities. Sport, and narratives related to it, can create a new sense of identity, belonging and togetherness in Kenya.
We can shift the narrative away from its current dominant negative, divisive and confrontational political form to one that embraces a common history with both heady success and abject failure coming to the fore as the glue that holds us all together.
By utilizing sport, the narrative would also significantly nurture and nourish positive values that are closely associated with it: fairness, justice, reward-for-hard-work, teamwork, passion, non-violence, respect, humility, stoicism, vision and strategy.
Tectonic shift
Sport comes embedded with other positive attributes: the power of healing and the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation.
It also provides a tectonic shift from our current architecture by suggesting that it is not only negative politics that should shape our identities as a nation. The rewards of sport towards salubrious health individually and collectively – physical, mental and spiritual, cannot be underrated.
Here is this week’s parting story: Before Caf disqualified Sierra Leone from the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers handing Kenya a ticket to the finals, I found myself in a dilemma.
In 2000, I had been to Sierra Leone and seen little children playing football on crutches after their legs had been hacked off by goons of a mad person named Foday Sankoh, the head of a terrorist organization called Revolutionary United Front. His patron was Liberia’s then warlord, President Charles Taylor. Even today, when I see their pictures, my stomach churns.
The trip to Sierra Leone left me completely shattered. I was unprepared for what I saw notwithstanding the pre-trip briefings. In my worst nightmares, I couldn’t imagine an adult man hacking off a child’s leg as a matter of political expression. That is what Sankoh’s deranged terrorists did.
To see so many children trying to go on with their childhood chasing a football by hobbling on crutches was heartbreaking. I knew that I would never forget Sierra Leone and I never have.
Thus, when Harambee Stars were slated to face the slowly rebuilding country, I couldn’t make up my mind which country to support. Both represented a strong emotional pull. The game never took place as a result of Caf’s action. I shrugged, and later told a fellow fan that if the two countries met and were needing of a referee, I could provide the most neutral one.
Stay safe from Covid-19. BY DAILY NATION
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