Of Iceland’s football and Africa’s tribes

The international sports calendar features three big events that partially overlap after every four years; the quadrennial football World Cup, the annual Wimbledon tennis tournament and the annual Tour de France bicycle race.
If circumstances permitted me to attend as a spectator, and I had to choose between the three, I would go for Wimbledon, with the Tour de France as second choice. You can deduce how not so hot my passion for football is.
However, I was intrigued by the events at the World Cup in Russia this year.
It was not because the Europeans and the Russians kind of suspended their mutual hostility for a few weeks. The cause was Iceland. And when Iceland got knocked out, I lost interest in the World Cup.
Not the North Africans, not the West Africans, and unfortunately not even France, the eventual winner, which many Africans adopted as ‘their’ team after all the African pretenders had been eliminated. But why Iceland?
With about 103,000 sq Kms of territory, Iceland has less than half of Uganda’s 236,036 sq Kms. In an age which hankers after mega things, Iceland would be a forgettable little country.
Even less auspicious, the population is less than (or around) 400,000. Uganda has almost 40 million.
So, where Uganda averages at 169 people per sq Km, Iceland stands very sparsely at four people on every sq KM.
To make matters worse, the Icelanders spend much of the year in unforgiving sub-zero temperatures and weird (season-dependent) light and darkness cycles. In winter they are lucky if they can see the ball at all during the day.
So, where is the pool of citizens from which Iceland raises a football team (and, more surprising, a cricket team) that the giants are forced to respect?
If you put aside the under-18 and over-35-year-olds, then the women, and those in jobs where finding time for sport is impossible, the pool at the disposal of Iceland’s football officials is almost a joke.
When, anyway, do the weather conditions permit the team to practice?
My interest may be called anthropological. Football is something of a ‘tribal’ war game. A contesting side lines up its finest warriors. The agenda is to penetrate and tear through the enemy’s defence and deliver winning shots.
In the game’s origins, probably among the Aztecs, the ‘ball’ could have been a human skull. There were plenty of human skulls in the (Mexican Indian) Aztec era, both from ritual sacrifices and from some of the most savage battlefield practices invented by man.
Part of what makes the Icelandic team work is a kind of tribal bond that transcends the team’s technical and environmental disadvantages.
When they were defending against a stronger opponent, it seemed the very survival of Iceland depended on the comradeship and absolute resolve of 11 men during 90 minutes.
After a victory, or a draw, or even a respectable defeat, a wave of emotional and spiritual effects seemed to sweep through the whole nation like an electric current racing down the spine of a single organism.
I believe it is possible to tap into some of this tribal energy and direct it into the broader justice and socio-economic enterprise of a people.
Africans, who in many ways are multi-tribal collectives, have had many of their ‘modern’ states fail for too long in the pretence that they are non-tribal. Perhaps it is time for Africa’s less homogenous states to revisit the artificial territorial arrangements imposed by colonialism and exploited by the continent’s post-colonial autocrats.