Tag: Books

The Panenka’s Paradox

A slightly different version of this article was first published by Olongo Africa.

At the Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium during the 2026 AFCON final, Morocco’s Brahim Díaz attempted something almost unheard of in the 68-year history of the Africa Cup of Nations: a Panenka penalty. Rather than diving early as the technique’s logic dictates, Senegal’s Edouard Mendy chose to stay put, unmoved by the vociferous roar of the home crowd. As the ball arced gently towards him, Mendy arrested the deception, catching the ball, much to the delight and euphoric cheers of the Senegalese contingent in the stadium. Except for Zinedane Zidane’s cheeky chip in the 2006 World Cup final, a Panenka is rare in any high-stakes final; at AFCON, it is virtually nonexistent, a fact that makes this particular gamble in an already controversy-laden match all the more remarkable. With disputed refereeing decisions and a chaotic 17-minute walk-off protest by Senegal on its heels, Diaz’s Panenka was a performative act that felt iconic in the history of the beautiful game. Whether intended to bring calm to chaos or crown his stellar tournament in refulgent style, the Real Madrid forward reminded fans that beauty and tragedy are inseparable when we gamble on grace over certainty.

Photo by Omar Ramadan on Pexels.com

Historically, the Panenka comes to us from the exploits of Czech footballer Antonín Panenka, after whom it was named. He attempted it for Czechoslovakia in the 1976 European Championship final against West Germany. The idea is to prioritize the gentle chip of elegance over the familiar force of the spot kick, gently dinking the ball into the center of the goal as the goalkeeper thinks you’re aiming hard for one of the corners of the goalmouth. 

The word ‘panenka’ in Czech literally means “little doll” or “puppet,” contains a suffix (-anka) that transforms the base word panna (young girl/maiden) into an affectionate, smaller form. The word panenka is itself a diminutive, giving the move its characteristic sense of softness and delicacy, which linguistically mirrors the physical execution of the penalty as a soft and gentle chip rather than a forceful strike. Antonín Panenka’s clever execution was so elegant that France Football called him “a footballing poet,”  a sentiment echoed by Pelé, who remarked that anyone “who takes a penalty like that must be either a genius or a madman.”  But there are certain elements of a perfect Panenka, as Antonin Panenka himself would later describe it in an interview with Ben Lyttleton:

The main ingredient is to do with your own behaviour – your body language and your eyes – to ensure the goalkeeper doesn’t think that you want to kick the penalty in a different way. My run-up was always longer to gain a bit of extra time; and faster so the goalkeeper doesn’t have a chance to change direction.

The shot should not be too fast, you have to chip the ball so it glides. Also you have to send the ball directly to the centre because even if it is one metre from the centre on the right or left, the penalty loses its beauty. When the ball is crossing the line, it should be already dropping. Even better if the ball reaches its peak height before the goal-line and then goes down.

In defiance of its technical brilliance, the Panenka sculpts its own narrative by going against the grain of penalty conventions; it reconfigures nonchalance and its slow, cheeky casualness into a delicate yet creative force that delights the senses.  Framing the Panenka in these artistic terms means we can appreciate it as a sublime gesture of bodily skill on the soccer pitch, effecting an aesthetic spectacle whose greatness crystallizes in the instant the goalkeeper dives the wrong way, and the ball crosses the line. Our sensory encounters with such a beauty, or our perception of it as an artwork in the immediacy of the penalty moment, produce an emotional intensity, an affect that rings across the supporters’ stands and echoes in the language of the most electrifying commentary.  

In the sense described by the Romantic poet John Keats, Díaz’s Panenka penalty might be said to have generated a negative capability for fans who, during that AFCON finale, watched the Panenka moment while suspended between hope and dread, unable to resolve the unfolding tension until the ball dropped in the safe arms of Mendy. From the letters of Keats, negative capability describes “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Logic and reason may fail any attempt to account for the nervy seconds leading to the penalty or why the safety of the power-shot offered no seductions, but the audacity of Díaz’s penalty, mirroring that of legends like Lionel Messi, Zinédine Zidane, Francesco Totti and Andrea Pirlo, suggests that, with the penalty taker – much like Keats’ great poet, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” For the spectator, the mystery of it all is confounding and the uncertainties of a fleeting footballing magic are rather satisfying. We don’t doubt what we have just beheld, but the fact of its risk befuddles us. 

Keats might have written about the observer’s tolerance for ambiguity in his letters, rather than the mindset of those in an athletic event; yet there is something about the poetry of the moment he might find familiar, particularly as logic surrenders to the sensational triumph of feeling and imagination as the Panenka demands.  Indeed, Keats wasn’t alone in this approach to poetic beauty. Edmund Burke, for his part, contrasted beauty with the sublime, arguing that the passion caused by something truly great is astonishment, “that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” This moment of performing the Panenka, when time stands still, and awe and wonder seize the observing spectator, is similarly one of horror, presenting a free play of beauty and horror enacted at once. Seen through Burke’s analyses, Diaz’s miss isn’t just a dagger to the heart of a nation; it manifests the darker edges of the sublime.

Photo by Hassan Omar Wamwayi on Pexels.com

Beyond Burke’s sublime, the Panenka also transcends the thresholds of extreme confidence and signifies the human propensity to impose order on the chaos of existence, to find splendor in the intensities of competitive life. Its significations go beyond football, then, as it represents our need to choose the poetic arc over the pragmatic force. The Panenka comes to symbolize our quest for agency in an uncertain universe that doesn’t always follow our scripts. The poetry of the Panenka, like the verses of the Romantic age, shapes football at a deeply sublime level, but this inclination for beauty often courts tearful horrors like a fan’s agonizing reaction to the brilliance of a missed chance that eliminates their team.

Those seconds leading up to the Panenka are indeed bound up with thoughts colored by the likelihood of failure and the possibility of spectacular success. What a player does at that point is not only a function of their mental fortitude but also of our need for control. As both a curse and a blessing, a duality Díaz discovered firsthand in Morocco, the Panenka manifests our natural inclinations to enact the struggles of everyday life from a place of optimism. And the fact that this hope can either kill a nation’s eternal wait for another AFCON trophy, as in this case, or produce the kind of climactic brilliance he ventured is what makes the Panenka distinctive as football’s quintessential gamble.

There are probably other meanings to Díaz’s Panenka. It may have been intended to humiliate Senegal and inflict a psychological wound, but its horrible failure both left the striker distraught and exposed the perils of a delicious skill. And I am not suggesting here that the Panenka is inherently disrespectful; rather, in its manifested ambiguity, we see ourselves in the beautiful risks that repulse the opponent, and the risky beauty that none of us can resist. What was supposed to be an assured statement of psychological dominance in a fraught and thrilling encounter became an account of how the desire for control can often be messy. Only a select number of players have dared the Panenka in major finals. The fact that Díaz chose a crucial moment of Africa’s most prestigious tournament, with Morocco’s 50-year trophy drought on the line, and in front of a home crowd, only amplifies the risks that come with Panenka’s gamble.

Perhaps its failure even had unintended benefits. Nigerian journalist Ayomide Oguntimehin, present in the stadium, suggested that the miss may have diffused the fury and tensions in a volatile atmosphere, sparing African football from disaster. Whether or not this is true, the moment’s complexity, simultaneously tragic for the host nation and relieving for Senegal, who went on to lift the trophy after a 1–0 scoreline, only reinforces the Panenka’s essential ambiguity as a delectable skill that offers both salvation and, in Díaz’s case, suffering. Indeed, an AFCON Panenka is an exceptional occurrence – in fact, very few, if any, are documented – and that is not because African players lack any technical ambition compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Yet its now-famous failure at the 2026 final signals more than the artistry of a special technique. It reminded the world that a Panenka’s vulnerability is at the same time football’s most human moment, defined by beauty inextricable from risk. 

When Senegal’s Mendy caught that ball that night, he didn’t just save a penalty in the most stoic display of composure, he preserved the Panenka’s fundamental paradox, denying the victory of its poetic graces. By staying still, Mendy essentially became the critic who refuses to be seduced by the poet’s aesthetic maneuvers, rewriting the grammar of a heated moment for pragmatism. Had it succeeded, handing Morocco its first AFCON trophy since 1976 (the year we first learned of Panenka, both the man and his skill), we would remember only Díaz’s audacity – more so because the same technique which birthed what many might call Morocco’s greatest footballing joy when Achraf Hakimi pulled off a Panenka to eliminate Spain at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar became the source of its greatest heartbreak in 2026.  

The paradox of this tragic symmetry couldn’t be more textured. In the crushing failure, we’re reminded that Panenka’s beauty lies not in any fantasies of certainty, but in its necessary risk. Every Panenka contains the possibility of this, with a ball either caught by the keeper or sailing home, and a daring player either shattered or ecstatic. Ultimately, we are confronted with a technique that can be both sublime and fragile, more like the human ambitions it so quietly represents. To contemplate the Panenka, therefore, is to behold beauty and embrace its inherent messiness and contradictions.

2025 AFCON: Football as Signifier

You may read my reflections on the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations here. The first essay, “The Intimate Moments of Football Solidarity”, captures the intimacies we encounter on the pitch. My argument is that, beyond the politics and nationalism football often stages, the African Cup of Nations’ most powerful moments show the bonds between those on the field. Find the article on Sean Jacobs’ Substack, Eleven Named People:

I am not suggesting that intimate spaces are absolutely devoid of the political nor that football is all pleasure and genial encounters. While the personal can indeed be political, sometimes, intimate moments want to signify something other than politics. To the second point, forever standing in the shadow of this spirit of solidarity is, of course, its subliminal opposite, namely a propensity for violence among sporting actors and fans. While both arguably come from and are produced by the same ardor, the game truly mesmerizes us when its communal bonds prevail. At the same time, these intimate moments are not always centered on the tragic and awful. There are many instances during a game when players from opposing teams share laughter on the turf, or simply banter and humanity, despite the playful seriousness of their momentary adversarial contest. In these instances, the antagonistic drums of rivalry sound less forcefully than the sonic affections of human connections.

The second essay, “AFCON, Literature, and Distant Kilns,” brings Nigerian literature into conversation with its football, examining both as parallel cultural productions that enact the tensions between home and diaspora. My main focus is to ask what gets lost when “home” becomes invisible and a Nigerian football identity, like its literary establishment, is consecrated abroad. It is on OlongoAfrica.

The country’s broader sociopolitical decline suggests we are not just exporting our best people; we have outsourced the very parameters for determining what it means to be a Nigerian. I don’t endorse any needless binarism between home-based talents and their diasporic colleagues that often erupts on online football forums, but I am also asking about how footballers lay claims to places they inhabit from afar, and how local football administrators who have relinquished the development of local players ask of legitimate outsiders to sing the songs of a foreign nation.  Yet, the tragic irony is that we mustn’t misrecognize the agency of the diasporic subject who left home or was born abroad but still chooses to sculpt the narratives of their being and subjectivity through a Nigerian homeland that sometimes suffocates. For those in the former group, exile is effected by the realities of collapsed dreams and infrastructure and leaving home is not a question of desire, but of practical necessity and common sense. The best of Nigerian writers and players do not leave Nigeria because they want to, but because home becomes the place dreams are buried in a nightmare of perpetual stasis and untold confusion. They did not leave because home became the mouth of a shark, but because they abhorred the future fantasized for them by the jaws of rotten mouths.

Diaspora and My Unpackable Library

The loss of books is often one of the many effects of the mobility of African scholars, especially when they travel permanently for education in the West. I reflect on this, thinking with Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library”

What does it mean to travel and leave your books behind with only the faintest hope of any reunion? I did not leave only Lagos behind in 2013 when I travelled to Canada for doctoral education; like many people, I left my books too, a forced decision that still haunts today. But isn’t one of the often-overlooked conditions of migrancy the loss of books and personal libraries? Or to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, don’t the diasporic trajectories of the African scholar sometimes involve the loss of piles of volumes that may never see daylight again after years of darkness because of the collector’s willful displacement?

It does not have to be the case, but most of the times, certain economic anxieties impose choices on the African scholar who seeks knowledge outside the continent. His book collection in his new location is almost never complete; his library constantly vulnerable to absence. We don’t want to carry too much luggage when we travel, or we promise ourselves to retrieve them later, even if we never do. As genuine collectors and book lovers, when we pack our bags for the west to study, we want to take along the best of a collection that contains our memories and that catalogues our scribbles and communion with texts, but the uncertainties ahead often mean we must prioritize other symbols of survival, of arrival.

Markus Clemens, Unsplash.

Some must wonder if African urban spaces even have leisurely subjects that worry about the many pleasures of books and bookstores, or that walk in the city as a practice of everyday life; whether there exist flâneurs that delight in sauntering around public spaces in which they encounter different objects. In their many instances of subversive loitering, the flaneur, in moments of walking contemplation of cities like Lagos, produces narratives that are often based on the ancient habit of collecting used books from the dusty grounds of street bookstores and highbrow book spaces But what happens when as academics, they have to travel abroad? How should we read the meanings encoded into the collecting of books, a process that is sometimes the pastime of cosmopolitan African subjects? And how must we unpack, or perhaps recover, “a library languishing” in the homeland, in the words of a Nigerian scholar in the US academe? Are there any meanings to the hastily discarded books in our personal collection just before we left home for study elsewhere?

The art of collecting books and building a library are longings of the soul for many a woman of letters but at the moment we decided it was sacrosanct we leave home to study abroad—often permanently—most of us often leave behind books so meticulously packed after many years of sentimental collecting. So, with a stab to the heart, we are forced to forgo the cherished texts collected over the years, together with the memories, histories, and attachments they evoke. And the economic calculus that determines what we must pack remains long after we have settled in our new location and faced again with a dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder, in Benjamin’s memorable phrasing. And he adds, “thus is the existence of the collector.”

In his 1931 short essay, “Unpacking My Library: A Speech on Collecting,” Benjamin explores readers’ relationship to their books, using the occasion of unpacking his many books from their boxes to offer insights on a reader’s possessions and on the art of collecting itself. Being then “at the threshold of forty and without property, position, home or assets,” Benjamin assigns usefulness and agency to his books as they provoke critical reflections through the process of unpacking them. The “chaotic memories” that is the passion of the collector overwhelm the room, with memories of cities and bookstores, of bookshelves at conference venues, of the disorder of used books on the streets of Ibadan or Accra. The ownership of these books, the most intimate entanglements that one can have with objects, invites us to disappear into them. Not that the books possess us, but that we own them sufficiently for the renewal of the self, or our existence each time the moment of packing and unpacking reveals itself.

Of course, like Benjamin I speak here of my own close scrutiny of books and the social facts that organize our relations with, and memory of, them. Although when Benjamin notes that the acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money, I would think there is a class dimension to book buying and the ability to transport hundreds and thousands of books to the West when one has to leave. Our libraries are unpackable because of the forces of capital, something to which the bourgeois class is impervious. My meditation chiefly applies to the mostly, young scholar who leaves home for the first time to study in the West. Unable to pack all of his books or any of them for that matter, he sets out on a journey of knowledge, with gaps and silences in his personal archive screaming from behind; with his best books left behind, so are the memories of his collecting and collection. Benjamin is right, “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner,” in this case, as it loses its owner to another location.

And when books become unpackable because of the pressures of long-distance travel and economic costs, the act of unpacking is infinitely deferred and incomplete. There is no doubt the matter of book collection and leaving them behind press other sociological questions, including why African intellectuals leave their country? One possible answer to this specific problem may be the lack of books themselves, besides other glaring social indices. For instance, until recently, it was constantly said that books written about Africa were sometimes not available in most libraries on the continent. It makes sense then that some of the best African thinkers are pushed away by a culture that misrecognizes the value of books, a culture that is increasingly unfair to books the book fairs that molded an earlier generation of intellectuals. Even the idea of a public library or an institutional archive—supposedly infrastructures of knowledge—are anchored on weak systems. Hence, others are made to question whether bookstores and libraries even exist at all.

Although a country like Nigeria has a national library, one wonders how that space truly governs or contributes to the country’s social and political dynamics. We may buy new books and replace old ones, but the libraries we have left—and which appear to have left us—actually remain as fragments of our past, symbolic objects of our dissociation from the home that, as the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire poetically renders it, is the “mouth of a shark,” the “barrel of a gun”. So it is that every act of packing and unpacking we perform again in our new location necessarily bears traces of a past habit of collecting, having signs of the collection that was unpackable.

Unpacking is not just a symbolic ritual of remembrance and performative identification with books, therefore, it is also a site of loss, of rememory and affective belonging. But as we disappear into new collections and memories in the West or elsewhere, the markings of the past yet unfurl themselves to us. In new editions that contain emendations. In new copies that remind us of past annotations. This too is chaos. One wonders if the few among us who truly able to leave home behind do indeed leave their books too. We may say then that unpacking never ends. And we never can truly unpack a library that was once never indeed packable.

What happens when African scholars travel for education in the West? One of the many costs of this mobility is the loss of books, and we need to talk about this more. So, having collected and accumulated more books by now, my colleague whose library is still languishing in Ibadan will probably gift his once-prized possessions to an institutional library. For now he must continue to contemplate how his books must be unpacked.

Reading Shola Adenekan’s African Literature in the Digital Age

Shola Adenekan’s African Literature in the Digital Age characterizes itself as “the first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.” For a fascinating and inventive volume, this description is both apt and reticent, even if a reminder of the tad neglect of an area of African literary studies that still appears to have a tentative and uncertain reputation among scholars of African literature. This is, however, not a denial of the evident strides made in literary digital humanities in Africa in the last several years. For instance, there has been a growing body of publications exploring these topics  in the last 5 years, including a recent special issue at Postcolonial Text co-edited by Shola Adenekan himself, together with some of the other prominent scholars in the field—Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Stephanie Bosch Santana, and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang. A survey of some of the most important volumes of African literary and cultural productions, however, seems to suggest we still encounter the role of digital media hardware and software in African writing as peripheral scholarship to the “serious” work critics are doing in other areas. I can immediately point to three excellent edited volumes that precede Adenekan’s book, all of which either entirely omit or offer a paltry space for a robust engagement with African literary DH.

For instance, the outstanding 2021 volume, A Companion to African Literatures edited by the literary scholar Olakunle George, offers a single chapter which, despite its writer’s characteristically brilliant analyses, appears to be, quite frankly, an afterthought that is supposed to reconstellate the literary forms and meanings in more supposedly ‘serious’ and stable forms like print. Although this gesture is consistent in several other instances, it makes a publication such as Adenekan’s a timely and refreshing work that calibrates and potentially refigures the theoretical canons of African literary criticism.

While studies in the intersections of “new media technologies” and African literary and cultural productions are not uncommon, this lack of sustained engagement with the specific ways computer technology influences and transforms literature is also glaring. In its nuanced attention to the form and aesthetics of the digital, therefore, Adenekan’s book takes seriously the discursive implications of the affordances of digital media for both established African writers and a new generation of young writers using the participatory web and blogging to circulate literary forms. This important book recognizes how the digital age enables new writerly possibilities and an era of openness, while making legible the agency of new literary voices and sensibilities.

One accomplishment of the book is the analytical space it constructs for the enunciation of the digital articulation of literary works that invite us to rethink how a new regime of digital visibility enables novel understandings of quotidian political and cultural processes. For instance, the inaugurating chapter on network thinking, draws on Adenekan’s previous scholarly background in computing and builds on the work of Manuel Castells and Patrick Jagoda to signal the many layers of relationship and literary networks between the analogue terrain of print publication and that of the digital. Although the philosophical notion of the “rhizome,” developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, could have greatly enriched Adenekan’s explications of the assemblage of literary connections and authorial multiplicities in African digital spaces, the author makes up for this by invoking oral poetics, which center on the Anansi trickster spider. Symbolizing how oral networks operated long before print technology, Anansi’s web in Adenekan’s theorizing signifies how networks come into being “through information architecture as well as through the metaphors provided in oral productions and creative writings” (22). In this integration of orality, Adenekan’s volume promotes an understanding of digital media through its connections to the aesthetic strategies of ‘old’ media.

By foregrounding analysis of digital literary networks and their importance to our understanding of literary history in Nigeria and Kenya, African Literature in the Digital Age addresses an important aspect of African literature, expertly explicating the online literary networks that enable an appreciation of global politics, class and literature. Adenekan demonstrates how the digital both rearticulates the metaphors of print and connects to oral tradition through the fluidity of textual forms and the dialogic participation of readers in their production and transmission. As rich and middle-class queer Kenyans and Nigerians create communities and find new online platforms for their work, they not only transcend the conservative politics of traditional publishing but also inspire the author’s argument that African digital spaces are marked by class consciousness and sexual politics. Therefore, we encounter imbricating links between discourses of class, sexuality and the body politic in digital texts that center on queerness, and erotic pleasures, born-digital literary forms that challenge the dominance of hetero-normative analyses in African literature. Hence, the volume’s significant dilation on queer politics means we can read it as an important intervention in queer digital studies.

In his closing chapter on social media, the digital emerges as a quotidian zone for the performance of class identities among the literary publics he analyzes. For writers in particular, everyday online experiences are as real and tangible as the dailiness of non-digital spaces. As the author astutely argues, social media for writers such as Chimamanda Adichie and the late Binyavanga Wainana functioned as the location for the free play of literary circulations, personal status updates, and stories conveyed to thousands of followers who may or may not be fans and ‘friends.’ In Adenekan’s brilliant explanation, literary fandoms and friendships as generative sites of artistic practices online often mean that African writers and their publics online socialize both through the written word and through emoticons, emojis, GIFs, and images. Although the book contends that, like linguistic texts, these visual forms of “digital communication all possess aesthetic value” (145), it probably misses a chance here to show the overlapping relations between the ontological visuality of social media and the performative assertion of literary agency among writers. In other words, if African literature online is a class affair among African digital subjects as Adenekan suggests, how are other cultural producers outside of that elite space using selfies, GIFS and other images to equally perform the quotidian? While this question may not be of immediate concerns to the author, it very likely reveals how a disposition for the performative on social media cannot be divorced from both the expression of quotidian aesthetics in literature and the theatrical constructions of comic selves that form a huge archive of political speech on the social web. As the reference to Adichie’s Instagram post in the book’s opening shows, social media offers a playful arena of self-fashioning for writers that suggests that these two latter layers of representation are worthy of more scrutiny.

While this important book restates, and almost romanticizes, the popular idea that “cyberspace represents freedom and democracy” and that “fictional narratives reflect both the restrictions of the printed word and the freedom of online publishing (14), it sometimes takes for granted the extractive relations that exist between the corporate owners of the net’s infrastructures and African digital subjects using these ‘free’ platforms. Indeed, Adenekan recognizes that digital environments are “capitalist commercial mechanisms” and social media are “money-making ventures” that bring artistic practices and commercialization in a “symbiotic relationship” (6). As the author himself might be quick to admit, there is certainly more to be said here. We may ask, who is documenting the large data being produced on social media by African writers and for whom? Also, how does ephemera on social media affect the type and function of the archives produced by writers online?

These questions aside, Adenekan’s African Literature in the Digital Age matters as a field-defining work. It impels the reader to refuse the single story of Africa as a continent that is perpetually confronted with an increasing digital divide and its class politics. Although the digital divide is real, and restates one of Adenekan’s central arguments on class, this book excellently reveals many other stories and narratives. These stories foreground erotic archives, queer subjectivities, the disruptive figure of the modern girl, and other digital subjects whose artistic representations online Adenekan astutely renders legible. The author has done the excellent work the rest of us must now build upon.