Imagine you’re a 17 year old middle class Dutch girl. You just cycled home from another boring day at school. Trapped in the conventional humdrum of the day, you are deprived of the stirring type of high school tales that you often watch. Back home, you switch on the TV and stumble upon a rerun […]
By Charles Mafa* It’s death or glory today for defending champions Zambia, who must beat Burkina Faso to make it to the quarter-finals. Anything less will be a major disappointment. Just in case the Chipolopolo boys need a confidence booster ahead of the big match, and so that they remember what this means to the […]
That was a duel between Zambia and Nigeria. Two equally matched opponents facing each other in the Mbombela Stadium. Each team intent on gaining that certain satisfaction. The Super Eagles wanted to cut down the Champions. The Chipolopolos needed to show they were Champions. The game had everything. A woeful penalty miss, an historic penalty […]
Ethiopia’s wily head coach Sewnet Bishaw turned this game with a substitution on 64′, bringing on Addis Hintsa in central midfield. It was Hintsa’s through-ball that opened up the Zambian defence, which four minutes earlier had been reduced to three players when Herve Renard went for more goals and swapped full-back Musonda for striker Jacob […]
Guest Post By Charles Mafa* Zambian fans know what it’s like to participate in the Africa Nations Cup. Their national team take part in 15 tournaments (0ut of a total of 28) so far. The team twice lost in the final: first to Zaire (as the Democratic Republic of Congo was known) in 1974 and […]
Next year we hope Nigerian super-pastor T.B. Joshua will let us know what 2013′s top 10 sporting moments will be well ahead of time (we’ll be starting our dedicated sports page “Football is a Country” in the new year and if Joshua wants to join in he’s more than welcome). While professional TV pundits cautiously […]
Even as a child, I knew Zambia was a media dictatorship. No one dared say too much that criticised the government; and anyway, where did we get our daily news? Two sources — a nationalised newspaper, and a nationalised television station, both of which were (and apparently continue to be) government mouthpieces. The ZNBC news […]
Bleeding, splintering, RGB pixels paint repeated images of handshakes and embraces — filmed off a television screen, or from existing filmed material — until they expand to a short panorama of the China-Africa Summit held in Beijing in 2006. Rapturously applauding, celebratory faces of powerful men, presidents and heads of state are seen, to a […]
Among the most striking portraits in South African photographer and filmmaker Sydelle Willow Smith’s online portfolio are those taken in the Western Cape, reflecting much of what Cape Town and the wider province stand for: the engaging (solidarity and protest marches; parades; a reportage about Blikkiesdorp, no longer just a “temporary” village echoing the crudest […]
1. This high-stakes knockout format might not be so bad after all. Qualifying groups are long, turgid affairs, especially the European ones, international football’s equivalent of the snoozetastic-but-moneyspinning Champions League group stages. Knockout football puts the big names at risk, as they should be. This past weekend was joyous.
