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Running Like Blacks to Live Like Whites

Football: the Perfect Metaphor of Our Time

Text Juan Cruz Journalist

© Alex Livesey / Getty Images

© Pere Virgili

Anyone who looks at the history of the footballers who have landed in Europe will want to see heroes. But it is a story full of poverty, in the origins of the players and in the relationship they themselves have had with the hope of becoming the greatest in the world.

When the Cameroonian Samuel Eto’o celebrated like a madman the goal he scored against Real Madrid in May 2003 playing for Mallorca he was, in fact, brandishing a phrase that is his and forms part of the more than understandable way of looking upon the competition, which for him is life: ‘I run like a black man to be able to live like a white man.’ 

       Eto’o is an emblem of Africa’s dispossessed, the legions of boys who think the promised land is a European grass field which they can reach thanks to the world of football, today an equivalent of a patera, a frail boat often used by would-be immigrants to attempt the crossing from Africa to Spain. There you can see them playing on quagmires, looking for rags to make balls, humble and proud, scoring goals or saving them, as though life were a competition they had already won. They are heroes, but they are still children. They think they are the winners of the universe they do not yet know, in which light predominates over darkness. And from out of the darkness they search for it. 

       But football is pitiless, and it attracts you or destroys you, whether you are black or white, depending on the interests of the teams, which sometimes coincide with the interests of the fans; they applaud you when you win, they insult you when you lose. Football is life, and it is terrible to stare into the abyss of defeat from the pinnacle of glory, because looking back the other way produces a feeling of dread, not just a sensation of emptiness. They love you or they hate you. They accept you or destroy you; and football is extremely cruel when it destroys someone. It takes rough diamonds and, perhaps because that is the way the genetics of football behaves, turns them into ordinary stones or glorious stones. But as time passes, not even gold holds its own. They sideline you, they find in your history the reason for their disdain, and they make you a substitute, or maybe not, you’re no use, you gave what you had to give, and although you are still a kid, you’re ready for the scrap heap. It’s the fastest race in the universe, in which Marx’s (the comedian’s) dictum is fulfilled: ‘I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty’. It is not always like that, but there are plenty of examples that bear it out. 

       One day I was watching a Madrid-Barça game with some friends in the Santiago Bernabeu stadium. The ground roared with white passion and there, dwarfed, was this Barça supporter, who every now and then showed his enthusiasm because at that time Luis Enrique was playing, and it was glorious to see how this Asturian, who had once been an outstanding member of their team, irritated the Madrid fans. The insult directed at the Barça players then is remembered to this day, because it sounded good and expressed something terrible. They jeered as though insults were part of football’s genetic makeup and those gentlemen, who the day after no doubt went to work in their offices in jacket and tie, did not hold back on the essence of what they were shouting, which at that time was against a host of people, against the relatives of both those being insulted. They said, ‘Luis Enrique, your father is Amunike!!’ 

       Amunike was a highly promising African player; Barça put him in their team, sidelined him, he came back, he was injured, and he experienced the humility of defeat as someone forgotten by football, one of those who made use of that patera until the club’s management annihilated him in ostracism. 

       At that moment, in the Bernabeu stadium, he served to insult someone with a rhyming couplet: ‘Luis Enrique, your father is Amunike!!’ 

       I tapped one of those who was screaming the insult on the shoulder and the man stared at me, now looking more like an office worker. I said to him, ‘Look here, Luis Enrique is a relative of mine…’ 

       Then the man had second thoughts about what he had said, and at a football ground that is as though a clap of thunder had occurred. Until the revelation led him in another direction and he hurled his insults at Rivaldo or any of the others. And of course I couldn’t go on coming up with relatives. 

       Amunike had been born in 1970 in Nigeria. He played in his own country, for Sporting de Lisboa, for Barcelona. He belongs to one of the best generations of African footballers, but we remember him because of that insult and because he advertised a special van for agricultural work. 

       In 2004 he was voted the best African player and he retired; he won gold medals, cups, silver medals, leagues, everything that came within his grasp was turned into success until defeat came to visit him and dragged him down into football’s abyss. One day, when he was injured, Barça sidelined him from the squad, put him among its leftovers and turned him into part of the mythology of football’s dispossessed, those who would have been great, but became human scrap. He had seen the light when he left Africa, but that light proved to be blinding, an illusion that lasted a few years, like the light described by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland: ‘[...] she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out.’ Amunike found out, very soon. 

       Would the same thing have occurred if he hadn’t been African? If he had been white, would the same thing have happened? Maybe. Racism functions more in the spectators than in the club, although Real Madrid is supposed to have sold off one of its most successful midfielders, Makelele, because he didn’t fit in with the team’s aesthetics. That is probably an urban legend, but in football almost everything legendary is true. 

       Amunike’s case is the most representative in recent times of what the football dream means today for the multitude of African boys who reach the promised land and soon find themselves faced with the consequences of what the market still does with their anxieties. This likeable Nigerian, whose name was used by the Real Madrid supporters to try to insult Luis Enrique, ended up doing TV commercials for Renault and there his popularity went up again, though through different channels. Amunike had already been written off even as material for entertaining stories. 

       Eto’o is one of the exceptions, like his brother, the Espanyol goalkeeper Kameni, or like Keita. But it took hard work; his role was not the one he played that afternoon in the Bernabeu when he scored against Real Madrid and tried (successfully) to embarrass the club’s directors who had rejected him. It was revenge, a way of saying, ‘I came, I wasn’t liked, here I am again, shame on you’. It is an attitude Eto’o displayed against Madrid, but it is not only that. It was his emblem. He reacted like that, with rancour, when they shouted at him as though he had just left the monkey kingdom; and, as far as I am concerned, he was right when he threatened to leave the field that time when the shouts of the fanatics made him, and many of us, indignant one fateful, racist afternoon in Zaragoza. 

       In the origin of the euphoria and subsequent sensitivity shown by Eto’o (a real irritant in the Barça changing room and, and I imagine in any other dressing room) is in his history with Real Madrid and at Real Madrid. Samuel is a prototype of the player who comes from Africa, whether illegally or not, lands humbly and is taken on to learn, to see whether the promise he shows is not just a figment of the imagination of those who have bought him. The story of this type of footballer is no different, in general, from that of others who come in different colours and from other hemispheres. Now we talk admiringly about what happened to Messi at La Masia, Barça’s youth development centre, but if you go back a bit in time, you can recall a moment when the Barça directors forgot to fill out the registration form for this puny footballer from Rosario, Argentina, who had been discovered by a scout when he was a kid who didn’t grow. The Barça board thought he would never grow, in any sense, and they brought him back only when they saw things were turning sour with him and his family. 

       Eto’o could have earned a fabulous amount, but they made him suffer until he was eventually able to put himself forward as what he really is, one of the most complete footballers ever to have played in Spanish football and a lifeline for Barça. An athlete who played around with his love of being made a fuss of and his ‘scrambled eg-o’ until Pep Guardiola, with sound judgement, decided that there had been enough of making the team revolve around one person’s ego, however decisive he might be. 

       But that’s another story. The fact is that Eto’o arrived as a boy, almost—he was fifteen—from UCB Douala in Cameroon, and in 1996 signed for the Real Madrid reserve team. There he began in fits and starts, until Real Madrid B was unfortunately relegated to the Spanish Second Division B and he went on loan to Leganés. Two years later he was brought back and put into the first team squad, which used him against Espanyol; and it turned out that it was to Espanyol that he went later, bounced once again from the height of indifference by those who still felt nothing for him but curiosity, which he thought was interest disguised as disdain. He ended up in Madrid, in one of the best teams in the world, which, moreover, was often actually the best, and it was a dream come true, which at that age was almost like touching heaven with his hands. Heaven was the pitch, to which he came after playing in the humble territories of the difficult Eden of Africa. 

       For Eto’o and for anyone else, going to Real Madrid was like going to a cathedral, to receive a baptism that marks you for life. It was a golden destination, at which he arrived like many others arrived from South America and Europe, and also Africa. In football’s past, few players came from Africa; one of them, Ben Barek, came from Morocco, further north than Eto’o, and became an emblem of Atlético de Madrid. From Brazil came Didi, for example, who turned into a melancholy artist in the Real Madrid team of the early sixties, and black players came who were a key part of some historic line-ups. But Eto’o’s case put the focus on the misery and misfortunes awaiting footballers when they don’t know that the grass—on the pitch—on the other side is not always greener. 

       His case could have been like Makelele’s, but disappointment rained down on Makelele later, when he was already a star and Real Madrid decided he should leave its firmament. He was a likeable man who was a success in society and on the field of play. He was rather like Iniesta at Barça, or Xavi; he ran about the pitch with enormous wisdom and was a latent threat for the opposing forwards and defenders. Someone who provided tremendous security, an athlete like Eto’o. They called him Anaconda, and that is a name which reveals his qualities as though it were an X-ray. He had been born in Kinshasa, Congo, and had gone to Paris when he was a child, but inside he carried the African energy he then made a gift of, at a good price, in major teams. He played for Olympique, Celta, and in 2000, with the change of millennium, he changed his jersey and went to Real Madrid. He was a winning footballer and nobody understood why, three years later, the Real Madrid board put him in the hands of Chelsea who got an extraordinary return out of him. 

       African or not, French or African, the fact of the matter is that Makelele had the same reaction as Eto’o, with certain differences. Being of a much calmer character (off the pitch), there dwelled in him a desire (perhaps natural) for revenge, and against Real Madrid he played one of his best games. Eto’o was delighted, moreover; fond as he was (perhaps more than of any other team) of Real Madrid, in which he made himself by overcoming many obstacles, Eto’o used the springboard provided by Barça, which gave him stability and made him extremely famous, to attack his former owners. Eto’o never resigned himself to giving up the white shirt; he yearned to go back to the Bernabeu wearing white and he was tremendously disappointed when Mallorca put him on the market and Real Madrid spurned him for the third or fourth time. 

       His railings against Real Madrid are already part of his legend, especially because people don’t say in public what is known in private: that if there is a team on earth for which he feels concern and also admiration, it is Real Madrid. Those who know him well say that the first team whose results he asks about (and he did the same when he was at Barça) is Real Madrid, and he nurtures that love-hate relationship as one of the symbols of his greatest, or only, passion, which is the passion for football. 

       Eto’o is one of the privileged, someone who has successfully climbed up the greasy pole of fame. But it is true that the flow has been extraordinary; football has served to turn Africa into a breeding ground of humble or luxury emigrants, all drawn by football’s sometimes diabolical mechanics. But Eto’o must have come at a bad time. He went into Real Madrid’s reserve team of young players, was tested out, and when he appeared to be ready to burst onto the scene as the footballer he was later to become, Real Madrid released him on loan to Mallorca. There, with the aid of manager Luis Aragonés and his own talent, Eto’o became one of the most battle-hardened and decisive forwards in the Spanish league. That afternoon against Real Madrid, Eto’o was already who he was going to become later on, but Madrid still rejected him. When he scored Mallorca’s third goal against what would have been his team, he paraded his pride like a man possessed, took off his shirt, ran along the touchline and started to gesticulate in front of an embarrassed Madrid directors’ box. 

       It was a gesture of revenge and it wasn’t the only one Real Madrid would get from its failed footballer. When he was playing for Barça and this team won what was to be the first of its league championships with Eto’o, he screamed out his famous exclamation for which he later on had to apologise: ‘Madrid, you bastard, hail the champion!’ 

       Eto’o’s lack of restraint is perhaps a cry that summed up all those the people humbler than he who have been left in the lurch—by Real Madrid, by Barça and by other more modest teams—would have liked to let out. Amunike is one case in point; there have been others. Pablo Iván has written about Dungani Fusini, who leant his name to one of the cruellest metaphors of the trafficking in disposable footballers. ‘Dungani Fusini, a 14-year-old boy born in the Ivory Coast was the person who gave his name to the trafficking of African boys in Italy. Spotted in Abidjan by an Italian agent, the boy entered Italy in July 1999 without completing any immigration formalities and was dumped in one of the lower sides of Arezzo, a Serie C-1 team, that acts as a reserve team of young players for Milan. There, without even receiving an allowance, he did some evening training as his only activity. He didn’t go to school, he didn’t learn the language. The accommodation provided by his agent was far from ideal; he slept in the basement of a friend’s restaurant. One September day, fed up with this prison, Dungani ran away. The boy was found a month later sleeping under a bridge. According to the police officers who found him, they will never forget the despair reflected in Dungani’s eyes.’

       That is his story; others were born for glory; in the middle is life’s despair. There are some, such as Seydou Keita, a star now with Barça, who started off on a better footing than Eto’o, although Eto’o has now left Spain amid the controversies of glory. Keita is a special case, because, possibly being (with Alves) Barça’s most profitable signing under Guardiola, he has spared the club the headaches given them by the great footballers’ whims. He comes from Bamako, in Mali, and is a young lad. Like Eto’o, he is 29 now, but he started off much more mature than his Cameroonian colleague. On the pitch that expression has become thoroughly accepted and today Keita is one of the footballers from Africa (or anywhere else) who has a reputation in the stadiums that commands respect. 

       Kameni, a Cameroonian, whom Eto’o always honoured with his patronage (or with his brotherage; at all events, that of an older brother), is an example of fury and the capacity for self-improvement in the face of the difficulties the Spanish league imposed on him. In the eighties he was already one of the best goalkeepers in Africa and in the world, and the Barcelona team Espanyol set their sights on him. He came for very little money, as though they had bought him on the raft or the patera, but his esteem gradually grew until he became one of Espanyol’s bastions. Unlike Eto’o or Keita, he has not shown his temper, or his fury, on the pitch; Kameni was jeered at like Eto’o, they insulted him because of his colour, using the facile insult common at Spain’s football grounds, where racism is still rife in some areas like a relic of the most atrocious of attitudes. But he has never responded like his fellow countryman; in Espanyol’s history he is a legend and in goalkeeping history his talent has never been bettered in Africa, where he is regarded as the best goalie in its history. 
 

Catching sight of the lights of Brindisi 

Football was always a good patera, or simply a patera. Those who are interested in the history of the footballers who have landed in Europe from anywhere else want to see heroes, but in most cases—those that people don’t know about—, as well as heroism, there is poverty, in the origins of the players, but also in the relationship they have had with that hope, which sometimes remains intact, of becoming the greatest in the world. After years of thinking he was spoiled, I have come to see in Eto’o a symbol of rebellion against the treatment meted out to those who have yet to know glory and will never achieve it. Dungani represents those who wanted to come but never succeeded, and those who came, but remained on the threshold. 

       Juan Cueto tells the story of how, years ago, when Albanians were rushing over to Italy expecting to be received as immigrants, one of those frustrated travellers who was sent packing and had the door slammed shut in his face uttered a beautiful phrase that has now become famous. As he was sailing away from the coast he had wanted to claw, he said into the microphone, ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ve already seen the lights of Brindisi.’ 

       In Cameroon, in Mali, in Nigeria, in the lands of Eto’o, of Keita, of Makelele, there are a lot of boys today training with rag balls, as we did in our childhood in the gulleys and on the paths and in the school playgrounds, dreaming of a future that travels in a patera and lands on the luminous grass of the stadiums they see on television. For the moment, for them they are the lights of Brindisi, the utopia for which they live, not only as a life’s ambition, but, for the most part, as a way of survival. 

       When Barça eventually got rid of Amunike, he found a sudden refuge in car commercials; his time on Earth was linked to football, but the meanness of the grounds and the boards of directors turned him away towards something that had nothing to do with either his ambition or his character. Footballers, young or mature, are sometimes asked to display fortitude in the face of adversity, as though they had come to Earth (or the football pitch) with a rosary in their hands, resigned; and they have come to win. A defeat, that is, a show of disdain, is paid for with ostracism or fury; Amunike gradually faded out as a footballer, and could only lift up his head to advertise the Renault Kangoo. Now I come to think about it again, however, that Eto’o who was unable to shine at Real Madrid and was vying with Ronaldinho to be someone at Barcelona, pampered by some and detested by others, seems to me a symbol of someone who triumphed in spite of everything and then took his revenge. 

       His last season at Barcelona was a clear example of this attitude; as though representing the grudge held by others, he showed off that mast of his pride against Guardiola and against everybody; but, deep down, he didn’t want his vengeance to be on anyone in particular. He was a sort of Capitán Trueno—the comic hero idealist 12th century knight—of blackness, one of those who had arrived in dark circumstances and found the light of Brindisi, but who thought they themselves outshone that light. 

       Two years ago, when his relationship with Barcelona was already troubled, someone who had known Eto’o in Majorca, and knew about his comings and goings, told me that as soon as he came into the house on his son’s birthday, he asked the child, ‘How did Real Madrid do?’ 

       His intimate wish was probably what they told me; he wanted Madrid to win – it is his team. And I’m not surprised. His lights of Brindisi were the lights of the Bernabeu. What happened after that dazzling is in the story of his disillusionments, but in his heart I’m sure there remains what he saw for the first time. And his discomfort at Barcelona, that lack of feeling that Guardiola mentioned at the end of the player’s last season with the blue and claret team, hides that intimate militancy of which he was never able to rid himself. 

       He is a symbol. And a metaphor that concentrated in a fervent phrase that is like a banner announcing what those who represent the football coming from Africa feel: ‘I’ll run like a black man to live like a white man’. 

       Journalist and writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán once said that ‘of all the religions designed in the 20th century, the most powerful is sport, especially football, in Europe, Latin America, part of Africa and Asia’. He wrote this in August 2002. In the seven years that have passed since then there has been a turnaround that has become enshrined in the universal religion of football: there are a host of African footballers; they come by plane, ship or patera, but they rush over, and here, on these coasts of the promised world, are their lights of Brindisi, and all the standard-bearers are there, Eto’o, Kameni, Keita… Football is now of every colour; whoever doesn’t want to see this, doesn’t know anything about religion or football, and this is a religion that is soon learned, as it has only one commandment: win to survive. Eto’o knows this; that is why he gets angry so often and that is why he runs: to take revenge, to say where the flag he brought with him is. The winning flag, which is still synonymous with running like a black man to live like a white man.

 


Spring (April - June 2010)