By Kabs Kanu
The World Cup is going on and we are enjoying the matches, but Sierra Leone is not there. By now, Sierra Leone should have beeen participating in the World Cup. No ?
When we were growing up in Sierra Leone in the 1960s, we thought our country was the best in a lot of things like education, football, athletics and what-have you. This was because we had journalists in those days who were fantastic with written and spoken English, who knew how to use the superlatives in such a grandiloquent manner in their reports or radio commentaries to stir up our emotions and nationalist feelings .
When you had a man like Willie Pratt running live radio commentaries when Sierra Leone was playing , you knew you were going to be so captivated by his brilliant voice and animations that it was not all that stirred you up. Even the players he described were titans in your mind’s eyes. We therefore thought that our King Kama Dumbuya, Christian Cole.Prince Chico Cole, Abdulai Garrincha Sesay, Samuel Opombor Kamara, Conton Sesay, Kawuta Dumbuya, Foday Bangsu Bangura, Saidu Mansaray ( Lady Left ) , Weah Sawyer, Boye Johnson , Bai Kabia ( English Footballer ) , Amadu Kargbo etc. were the best footballers. We adored them in our hearts . We rushed to buy the Sierra Leone Daily Mail because Zac Humphrey and Khalil Kamara knew how to write sports and how to thrill us about these players. We do not see this today because Sportswriting has become a dead genre in Sierra Leone Journalism . The sports journalists contributed in no small way to make us think we were the best. However, our delusions of grandeur were never backed by victory on the soccer pitch.
Few victories we hailed to the high heavens soon turned out to be a ruse . I remember the noise we made in 1969 when Old EDWARDIANS beat a team from Switzerland that came on a Swiss ship, FC Kuesnact, 4-1. After all the hoopla that our boys had badly beaten a white team , we came to learn later that the club was not a league team or an organized club after all. They were just the cooks, stewards and technicians onboard the ship. Even the Guinea national team we beat in Conakry, we later learnt, was just a reserved team put together and that the real Guinea national team was abroad, training. When they returned from their training, the real Syli Nationale came to Freetown, and beat us in own backyard.
Nothing can best describe how much some of us grew up being disappointed later in our country.
The rude awakening came for us, as kids, when despite all the way our players were being glorified , they could not beat other African teams. Save for a few times when we beat Liberia and Gambia, we almost always lost our matches, especially against Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Mali, Senegal etc. My rudest awakening arrived in 1966 when Liberia came and taught us how to play in the first leg of the West African Gold Cup Competition . We saw players that were far better than our boys and this was a Liberia we had always underrated. Mass Sarr was dribbling from defence to our goal. Monkey Browne, Garrison Sackor , Borbor Gaye, Tarpeh Roberts, Wannibo Toe, etc.outplayed our boys in all respects and just unlucky to concede a stoppage time penalty that Kabineh Kabba scored for a 1-1 draw. The Liberian soccer stars became household names in Sierra Leone , especially Monkey Brown, Mass Sarr and Wannibo Toe.
As time went on and Sierra Leone lost other matches, we came to know that our players were just over hyped by our media and that we had been deceived all along thinking that we were the best. And when Guinea came in 1970 and also taught us soccer, like the Liberians, it became clear that we had been living in a fool’s paradise. It was that match , which we lost 2-1, that introduced to Sierra Leone big Guinean names like Petit Sourie, Osman Tolo, Camara Maxime, Kandja, Cheriffe Sulaymane, Papa Camara, Njo Lea , Jansky, etc . Where have these footballers been ? We thought our players were the best on the univetse. In fact, Sierra Leoneans we’re so marvelled by these players that professional tailors and taxi drivers called Osman began calling themselves Osman Tolo. SORIE Kamaras and Sorie Sesays began calling themselves Petit Sourie.
The crux of this article is that we have underachieved as a nation in many fields , even football. We took football to countries like Cameroon ( As one of their newspapers famously confessed years back ), Ghana and Nigeria, not to mention the Gambia. Football was first introduced in Sierra Leone ahead of these countries in an era when Sierra Leone scored many firsts in history. But we have nothing to show today for being the first British colonial country where developments and new technologies were introduced before they spread to other British colonial holdings in West Africa.
When we were kids, we lived in a deceptive world that we were the best. We looked down on other African countries and this superiority complex in Sierra Leoneans exist in many of our citizens even today. I learnt that even when they went to Guinea as poor, famished refugees in the 1990s, Sierra Leoneans still behaved with more superiority airs on their kind hosts, Guineans, though to their greatest surprise and disbelief, Guinea had developed architecturally, materially and even more socio- economically than Sierra Leone in the years ater the death of President Sekou Toure , who was more engaged in fighting neocolonialism and capitalism than utilizing Guinea’s abundant natural resources to develop the country.
I am not saying here that we have not produced players or teams that can stand their own among African nations. Leone Stars and the players I named above had at various times demonstrated their mettle in international football and should have achieved magnificent laurels we should have been celebrating today. I can bet my best Sunday suit that players like Kama Dumbuya, Manneh Peters, Brima Mazzolla Kamara, Junior Tumbu, John Dumbuya, Christian Cole, Abu Syrian, Ishmael Dyfan , Kolleh Dumbuya, Mohamed Kallon , Paul Kpaka, etc. etc are among the best ever produced on this continent.
But what has kept us mired in underachievement since time immemorial? Why have our players failed repeatedly on the big stage ? Why don’t we qualify for the World Cup ? Why have we never won the Africa Nations Cup, despite all our talents ? Or is it true that we are a country that is just over-hyped and in reality, we are good for nothing ? What is stopping us from achieving our real potentials ? Why are we not at the World Cup ?
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
