May Morocco, Africa’s prodigal son bring the beef home

It is long since I last enjoyed a Fifa Senior Men’s World Cup. Qatar 2022 has done it. Besides the great football and upsets there have been several interesting controversies.

First, the kerfuffle. I did not think it right for any nation to go preaching with religious purity, about good governance and human rights, to Qatar.  We should bear in mind that all countries on the globe fall very short.

Well, seven European countries insisted on their captains wearing the ‘One Love armband.’ It has the colours of the flags of the LGBTQ+ community. So they intended to use this to highlight the issue of ‘human rights abuses’ in Qatar where homosexuality is banned.

They dropped the idea when Fifa in true draconian fashion warned that they would be sanctions.

Someone cryptically put it that is was nice that  Germany, Wales, Belgium, Denmark could ‘only manage one round.’ By the end of the quarter finals the rest of the crew; Switzerland, Netherlands and England were also out.

England a country with a violent exploitative colonial history littered with slavery, murder, racism, exploitation and war mongering, hosted and won the World Cup in 1966. Yet in 1966 homosexuality was also illegal there.  England was one of the most vocal against Qatar 2022. They went out in spectacular fashion. Their captain Harry Kane shot a penalty so sky high in the dying minutes of the game against eventual winners France, that they needed a replacement ball to continue with proceedings. 

The memes and jokes have been flowing thick and fast on social media. One of the best was one of an astronaut in space with a ball at his feet claiming Kane’s ball has landed safely. Another is a video showing the ball flying all the way from the penalty spot in Doha and hitting a pensioner seated on a park bench in London.

But perhaps the most exciting record coming from Qatar 2022 is about Morocco It is the first time since 1930 that a country from the African continent has made it to the semi finals. They have done so in a magnificent manner. Led their group that had ‘favorites’ Belgium; another of those ‘one love’ European countries with a dirty murderous colonial history in Africa. Morocco conceded only one goal that saw them putting out three penalty kicks when they downed Spain. They sent a Cristiano Ronald-led Portugal home, in the process.

Now a ‘controversy’ has cropped up. That though geographically located on the great African continent, Morocco is ‘not exactly’ an African country but an Arab country. Some western media (as usual) is relishing in this narrative.

Morocco has been no stranger to controversy in its relationship with Africa. In 1984 Morocco left the Organisation of African Unity (OAU,) huffing and puffing. OAU had reorganised the Western Sahara or Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) as an independent country.

It started in 1975 when former colonial power, Spain (the one Morocco knocked out on penalties in Qatar,) left the Western Sahara, prompting Moroccan troops to move in. The Polisario movement fought for Western Sahara’s independence and the OAU sided with it by granting them a seat in the organisation. In 2017 after a hiatus of 33 tense years,  Morocco was readmitted to the African Union (AU), the successor of the OAU.  They came back home like the biblical prodigal son.

Now we have this useless ‘debate’ that is trying to divide and derail us Africans from the phenomenal exploits of our team Morocco. This is on the eve of a monumental gargantuan semi final clash against two-time winner France - another of those European countries with a despicable, blood socked colonial history in Africa.

Many on social media are incensed that some Moroccans do not identify themselves as Africans so they do not need to be supported.

That leads us into another debate that comes right out of our colonial past. Not many of us ‘in practice,’ identify ourselves as Africans in the first place because the very essence of colonialism is the creation of an identity crisis leading to confusion. (The latest trick is about gender and sexual identity.) Subjects of the colonial project should stop being who they are and become what they are not. In fact they should apologise and feel ashamed of who they are and fall over themselves spending all their lives trying  to take on the identity they know little about.

The starting point is with belief systems. We have taken on Christianity with its White God -and Islam with its Arabic leanings as the true religions. Traditional African belief systems and practices are equated to evil, animism, paganism and witchcraft.  So we now identified by all these European names as Christian names and Arabic -many of which have no meaning to us.

This moves hand-in-hand with education of the mind. We have to accept what the colonialist perceives and has told us is justice, human rights, love, democracy, discipline, right and wrong. Our own concepts and understanding is irrelevant or must fit into their narrative. In this light colonialism was at best a blessing and at worst a necessary evil.

Then you move to language. Many of us cannot read or write in our mother tongues so we miss a lot of the knowledge and history that is the basis of language. Yet we are quick to look clever by laughing, correcting and casting aspersion at those who make slight errors in English or French. We then deliver asinine claims that those errors are a sigh of lack of seriousness and attention to detail, which is a characteristic of cerebral underdevelopment.

We then round it off with attempting an aesthetic make over - to look, talk, eat, dress, walk and live like those who colonised us. The houses of the owners of African hair salons and beauty parlours have been built on the heads of those who misguidedly seek to fit in with the definition of Western beauty. Hair extensions from dead bodies and animals. All the dangerous skin lightening creams, all the nail extensions and clothing not fit for the tropical heat fall in that category. It is a futile attempt to run away from the African identity to the ‘correct,’ one designed by the onset of colonialism.

So if some Moroccans are confused and lost in trying to establish their identity, which makes them believe they are not Africans, it is not something new and alien to them.

It is something much, much deeper, which unfortunately afflicts and affects most of us. It should not be something that divides us but instead should unite us in an attempt to understand and overcome it.

Here it is Morocco all the way. 

Twitter: @nsengoba