The journalist Xavier Aldekoa, author of a good handful of books about the continent (Ocean Africa, Children of the Nile, Indestructible, The stories of Africa either Don Quixote in the Congo), has published Round Africa. A trip around the continent through sport (Peninsula Publishing). In two long decades of reporting, the author shows the African reality through the prism offered by a simple ball.
The (recommended) French miniseries The fever uses football as an excuse to talk about other things. The headbutt that a striker gives his coach is the trigger that opens the plot. The Gordian knot, or, rather, the Gordian knots, will come later: identity, racism, the rise of the extreme right in Europe…
Football as an excuse. Football as a hanger. Football as a gateway to other topics.
Xavier Aldekoa has used this same sport to talk about an entire continent, even if it is in parts. In Round Africa. A trip around the continent through sport It compiles articles, chronicles and reports published over more than two decades of reporting on the other side of the Strait.
In a continent in which kids wear the jerseys of the most successful teams in the world, in which a very famous striker from the 90s (George Weah) has become president of his country (Liberia) and in which the material a ball is made of does not stop the intensity of a game, the reporter hangs the continent from the football hanger, taking advantage of the pull of the sport to explain what is happening in Africa. Football as an excuse to talk about the land of oblivion.
In conversation with the author via video call, Aldekoa explains that football “helps me bring Africa closer, because Africa can be explained in different ways and football has the power to attract the attention of people who may not be too interested in what you are explaining to them.” And it has been useful, for example, to tell about an epidemic. To do this, he relied on the story of a five-year-old boy who won the battle against Ebola that devastated Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea years ago. The little boy, discharged while his family fought the virus in the hospital, was wearing a Neymar shirt. “That reality – the reporter deepens – allows you to create a point of connection with what is happening.”
In addition to serving as a link between the journalist and the readers, football has also become the master key to sneak topics into content meetings. The Vanguard, where Aldekoa works, who uses very clarifying terminology when referring to this: «Football allows you to build a kind of journalistic Trojan horse. In International I use sport more as a resource, not as an entire theme. “I am not selling a report about football in Western Sahara or Angola, but I am using it as a resource to tell the story, which ends up having nothing to do with sport.”
Although incidental, this use of football as an excuse has allowed the author of round africa watching a lot of football in numerous countries on the continent and, inevitably, comparing it with what we find here. And, of course, there are differences: «In African fans there is a purity that I miss a little here. That feeling that I belong to a team regardless of whether it wins or not, that I like it for how it plays, for how it attacks, for the proposal it makes. I think that’s nice,” he says. And he talks about a boy from Chad who accompanied him for several days on one of his last trips. «He was from Madrid to die. He had never seen a game of theirs, but they had told him that the team was very good, they had talked to him about Mbappé, Ronaldo… And he was from Madrid. (…) We don’t have that here.
A renowned supporter of the Barcelona Football Club, we did not miss the opportunity to ask Aldekoa if there are more Real Madrid fans or the club he loves in Africa. «I have the feeling that in all of sub-Saharan Africa there are more Barça shirts than Madrid. The Maghreb, on the other hand, is mostly Madrid fans. Although without forgetting that along with the white and blaugrana shirts you also see red and white, red, light blue shirts… As in everything, a continent that is very uneven and round, as the title of the book says.
