AfricaIs aCountry

Have another Coke and smile Roger Milla

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Have another Coke and smile Roger Milla

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M3Q54rPjQw&w=480&h=295]

Having stripped the Somalian singer K’Naan’s protest song, “Waving Flag” of any meaning, Coco Cola now sets about to trivialize African football history. As reported by Steve Bloomfield on his blog, Africa United, Coke’s new commercial, “History of Celebration,” reduces the legacy of Cameroon’s historical run in the 1990 tournament in Italy to striker Roger Milla’s hip wiggle at the corner flag rather than the goals he and the rest of the team scored.” (In that tournament, Cameroon went to the quarterfinals–the first for an African team–beating Argentina, Romania and Columbia on the way before 2 dubious penalties awarded to the English knocked them out. Bloomfield correctly captures what Cameroon achieved in 1990:

“Cameroon’s success changed everything for African football. No longer would Africans be seen as also-rans making up the numbers. Fifa, which by 1990 had grudgingly allowed two African teams to compete, increased the allocation to three in 1994, four in 1998 and five in 2002. This year, the first time the tournament will be held in Africa, the continent has six teams. A line can be traced from Cameroon’s performance in Italia ‘90 to Fifa’s decision to award the World Cup to South Africa in 2010. It was the moment that African football could no longer be ignored.”

[Steve Bloomfield]

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.