Political meaning of Kiprotich’s gold

I was watching the sports news report on CCTV, the Chinese television network that broadcasts to West Africa from Nairobi, Kenya, and expecting to see and celebrate the great victory by the Ugandan winner of the London Olympic Marathon race. I had missed the live broadcast of the event and that unique moment of the medal-award ceremony, but caught it when Nigeria’s Television Authority did a re-broadcast of the event later that Sunday.

My claims on CCTV was disappointed as the sports newscaster ignored to mention both the great achievements of speed-star Usain Bolt and the historic Ugandan marathoner, Stephen Kiprotich. It made me suspect that a Chinese company may have lost out on hagglings for rights to dig out oil deposits in Uganda’s section of Lake Albert.

My missing witnessing the live version of the marathon race reminded me of a similar mishap in 1972. In that year, the Olympics held in West Germany (the Cold War name of the now reunited country, Germany). I recalled a much exhilarated Professor Idris Makward, a Senegalese pan-Africanist who was the head of the Department of African Languages and Literature at the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin, in the middle-west of the United States of America.
Idris was ecstatic that Uganda’s John Akii-Bua had won the 400 metres huddles race at the Munich Olympics. He, however, put a special twist to the victory.

Akii-Bua, he said, had by that triumph put to rest the prevalent racist view that Kipchoge Keino and other African runners win only races run like a wild animal. Such races did not involve sustained intelligent combinations of brawn and strategic thinking and doing so under enormous stress and speed.

He was a bit disappointed that I did not seem to comprehend the importance of the historic burden that Akii-Bua had carried through his victory. As a product of French colonial racism, Prof. Makward, had grown to sniff out with high sensibility, profiles of racist relations in daily life. I recall his peculiar view that Wole Soyinka, who would later win a Nobel Prize for Literature, threw cold water on the concept of Negritude because he envied its propagator’s combination of being a much celebrated poet as well as being a president of Senegal, a feat he had not achieved in his own native Nigeria.

My own turn of mind over Akii-Bua’s victory was about two other issues. Akii-Bua had beaten a field of world record holders who were American, European and white in the same country and grounds where Jesse Owen, a black American, had shattered Adolf Hitler’s racist white supremacist views. When later a tragic event occurred in which Palestinian militants had brutally murdered athletes from Israel a new gory paradox emerged. The Palestinians had, however, not targeted Jews competing under other country flags.

I recalled that Palestinians were already emerging as allies of Idi Amin Dada whose military regime in Uganda had been launched with a systematic slaughter of military officers of Acholi ethnic identity and those officers suspected to be loyal to Milton Obote’s government. Israeli intelligence and military officers were openly acknowledged to have assisted Amin in his take-over.

The horrendous game of shedding blood for political goals swirled with sinister paradox around Akii-Bua’s great athletic victory at Munich. Makers of the movie around the later drama at Entebbe Airport that brought together Idi Amin, Palestinian gun-wielders, helpless Israeli airline passengers and heroic Israeli military redeemers, would have done well to include Akii-Bua’s hurdles race.

The sight of Uganda’s flag and National Anthem being honoured by all athletes, officials, volunteers, the media and television viewers around the globe at the London Olympic 2012, also brought back for me its baggage of memories and paradoxes.

The marathon race is honoured as the ‘Mother of all Olympic events’. A running exercise that covers a distance of 26 miles, it is one of the greatest endurance test for the human body, will, ambition, aspiration and desire to reassure humanity that it can rise to overcome monumental challenges.

Rare poignancy
For a man whose reedy body reminded the viewer of tropical elephant grass, Kiprotich’s achievement in London held a rare poignancy. This was particularly so as the lines of Uganda’s anthem sprung out of my mouth: ”Oh Uganda, the land of freedom, our love and labour we give. United free, for liberty ….” I recalled images of the British High Commissioner and the Ambassador of Israel competing shamelessly in 1971 for who would stand next to Idi Amin’s huge frame of a body.

These two diplomats had taken part in engineering a military coup whose governance, in less than a decade, would slaughter over 500,000 Ugandans. Uganda would remain a killing field in which open physical and silent slaughter occurred in and outside camps and fields of war apparently till kingdom come. I wondered if British and Israeli and American officials who had aided Amin choked a little as they saw that flag go up and heard echoes of the anthem.

The television cameras went from Kiprotich in the lead as he raced away from other competitors, to an athlete who had collapsed by the roadside and lay motionless on his back. I saw in the fallen athlete the lesson that history, like nature, celebrates only those that run to frontiers and horizons of glory.

Those that fall, bleed or gasp to death along the way are mourned as fodder in the search for freedoms of the spirit. It occurred to me that was also a raw metaphor for the recent times of Eastern Africa.

Don’t let this Kiprotich moment die

A black convertible carrying Stephen Kiprotich, followed by a procession of cars and motorcycles from Entebbe on Wednesday, is such an enduring image. It was replayed by media houses across the world as Uganda’s wait for Olympic Gold ended after 40 years.

The celebrations for winning the marathon are bound to last much longer than the one kilometer file on Entebbe Road. Uganda Sports Press Associations (Uspa) will not need any arm twisting. Kiprotich is now favourite for the coveted sports personality for the month of August and even 2012. The only thing that could perhaps trump his feat on the streets of London on Sunday is Uganda Cranes ending a 35-year absence from the Africa Cup of Nations.

In order not to look too far ahead, let’s say Kiprotich will be the Uspa sports personality of the year. If that were to happen, the athlete will be celebrating his success well into the first quarter of 2013 when Uspa hold their annual dinner.

The moment from that started in London, came to Entebbe Airport and made a stop at State House and Serena Hotel, diverted to several corporate companies and parliament is growing, for now. His home district of Kapchorwa in Eastern Uganda will definitely be the last place to bare the brunt of happiness.

The downside to all this that while Kiprotich won the country’s first Gold since John Akii-Bua’s 400m hurdles victory in the 1972, he is not the first to be honoured this way. Over the past decade, athletics has been the benchmark for sporting success on the international stage.

The trio of Boniface Kiprop, Dorcus Inzikuru and Moses Kipsiro has been a core part of that success and state dinners. None was honoured in the way Kiprotich has. Their success at the Commonwealth Games and World Athletics Championships is definitely not in the class of the Olympics. However, the moment has always been let to die so quickly just the clamour for Uganda Cranes last October. That died as soon as Cranes failed to qualify. Kiprotich, like Kipsiro before him, insists the ultimate celebration is to construct a training track to keep this moment alive.

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