I found the video via Chimurenga Magazine’s Pilgrimages Project. 13 writers in 12 African cities, as well as 1 Brazilian writer, blogged about their experiences watching the World Cup. The end product would be an edited book. There are a few of the authors who stand out already: the Nigerian Fumni Iyanda and the South African Nicole Turner.

It turns out this is the short version of an argument Adichie had made earlier in an opinion piece for the (UK) Guardian about how, for her at least, Africa becomes a country during the World Cup.

There, she wrote, “ . . .  Sometimes the boundary of this identity widens, as it did during the 2006 World Cup when Nigeria did not qualify. And so, for one intense day while Ghana played the United States, I became Ghanaian. I watched with my Nigerian best friend Uju, hugging each other and dancing when Ghana finally won. ‘Some of our boys started playing this game without shoes,’ Uju said proudly. ‘Our boys’ were, of course, the Ghanaians.”

Later, in the same article, she gets all giddy: “ . . .  Our football nationalism, then, symbolizes a cathartic, even if fleeting, addressing of historical and political grievances. It is a platform on which to stand and say that we may not be part of the G8 who decide the fate of the world, we may always rank on the bottom of health and government and economic indexes, we may have crumbling institutions and infrastructure, but hey, we won by sheer talent and grit.”

Adichie got some stick in some quarters for inadvertently (?) excluding Algeria, the fifth African nation to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, from her definition of “an African football nation” (basically, she repeated the old separation between the parts of Africa divided by the Sahara desert) in her Guardian piece, but very few Africans, including her critics, faulted her for her overall thesis.