You may read my reflections on the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations here. The first essay is on the intimate moments 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 brings Nigerian literature into conversation with its football, examining both as 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.
James Yékú 