Way, way back in early 1966, I was a seven-year-old Canadian kid living at a university compound in Ibadan, Nigeria. I was attending Grade One, was deeply homesick, but quite entranced and influenced by the sights, sounds, colours and cultures of West Africa.
Rainy season storms that went from clear blue sky to deluge in under five minutes. Vibrant cloth markets, bathed in a thousand colours in the hot intensity of an overhead noonday sun. The Milky Way and Southern Cross fairly blazing in the utter darkness of the midnight sky.The endless dust and lush jungle greenery of a place unimaginably different from my quiet little side street near Bloor and Spadina in downtown Toronto.
And then the civil war broke out. The whole Biafra thing.
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There was never any shooting where we lived, although the Lagos airport got shot up on a day we would have been there had we waited for my younger brother to get over the mumps before we fled.
But there were lines of armed soldiers on the hillsides. There were burned-out and shot-up buildings in the city. People I had come to know sometimes disappeared. Other people told me they’d been shot. A tank came to our school one afternoon, and soldiers told us not to come to school the following day.
And I did once have a rifle pointed at me at a checkpoint.
None of these things compares, in any way, with the recent attack on Togo’s national soccer team in Angola. People died. People saw friends and colleagues die.
I’ve only ever been on the edge of a war. But the casualness and suddenness of what little I saw left me with dark, obsessive thoughts that still haunt me – in one way or another – forty-four years later.
I don’t know how the Togolese could possibly have been expected to play soccer in the African Nations Cup under those conditions. Certainly no one expected the Sri Lankans to play cricket after their team bus was ambushed by gunfire in Lahore, Pakistan, a year ago.
The president of Togo sent a plane to get them out of there. The team called a three-day mourning period – and even that seems pretty optimistic as a realistic return to competitive form.
But international soccer tournaments have tight timelines, and Togo were supposed to play Ghana on Monday in the opening match of Group B. The game did not go ahead, and Togo have been disqualified.
I don’t really have an argument for what is right and wrong here. People dying in bus ambushes is so far from the experience of just about everybody I know. What I do want to say, though, is that a little terror – when you actually taste it – goes a long, long way.
For all the factual arguments about what should or shouldn’t happen here, for all the inevitable logistics of both tournaments and armed rebellion, only the team know how they really feel this morning. … And all they’re getting is whatever emotions – so far – have been able to filter through the shock.
What happened to me in Africa was hugely minor compared to most people who have ever lived in the shadow of an armed conflict. I saw only aftermath. But even then, I could taste the terrifying uncertainty in the everyday air of the lively, sprawling, vibrant city that was my home throughout my first year of grade school.
No one – even those who were with me, and are with me to this day – knows how it felt to be me back then.
Only the Togolese should decide whether they can – or should – play in this tournament now.
Onward!