Africa Is a Country

Simple Football

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

Simple Football

By
Sonja Sugira

Belgian photographer captures grassroots football in 30 villages across 10 countries in west and southern Africa.

All images by Jessica Hilltout.

Africa’s World Cup is over, but many of us know that on the continent, the games will continue. Such is the all-consuming passion for football in Africa, a fact that Antwerp-based photographer Jessica Hilltout aimed to capture in her just-released book on grassroots football, Amen. The project was first brought to our attention by the team at Aid Watch, and Hilltout’s book has since been profiled in the New York Times’ Lens Blog, as well as in a recent piece by the New York Times’ Johannesburg correspondent, Celia Dugger. It’s nice to see these stunning photos make the rounds because they really highlight the passion, ingenuity and creativity of the players Hilltout met, from some 30 villages across 10 countries in west and southern Africa—players that don’t necessarily have access to expensive equipment.

And yet.

In her introduction to the book, Hilltout writes:

Africa is a world like no other.  The people have simple needs and huge hearts. They accept their lot in life with a supreme calmness. […] Africa is a land where the superfluous and superficial seem stripped away, a place where the fundamentals shine through.  What makes it so special is that this vast continent accepts its fate with elegance and grace, head held high.  Here, I was constantly amazed at the strength of humankind. Here, nothing is a problem, despite money always being one. Yes, Africans may be poor, but poverty does not bring misery. A state of mind alone can bring happiness.

Oh, those simple Africans. Forever destined for lives of misery and poverty. And yet so happy.

I suppose this is what happens when the objects of your photos (Dugger writes that Hilltout “photographed [the players’] balls resting on cracked earth or cupped in hands with nail-bitten fingers”) become more important than the subjects who made them. In  fact, looking through all the photos (which you can see here), the book and the accompanying videos, you’re hard pressed to hear the voices of the players themselves come through. In the end, it is only Hilltout who gets to speak.

I would have preferred that she let the photos speak for themselves.

H/T: Siddhartha Mitter

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.