News this week that Didier Drogba may play after all at some point in their World Cup campaign is good news for his Ivory Coast squad as well as for those who search for larger connects in sport. Profiles in anticipation of the World Cup,begun on Friday in South Africa,have lingered longest on Drogba to underline what football means in Africa. Drogba,who plays for Chelsea,was given by his parents to the care of relatives in France when he was just five. With an uncle for a football player,his was an early immersion in the world of professional sport. But as he ascended the deeply hierarchical arena of league football in Europe,picking up dual citizenship in France along the way,it was in his home country that he asserted footballs unique place in the continent. As Bloomfield writes in his survey of Africa from its football fields,Most national teams are worshipped by their fans,but in Cote DIvoire the bond is that little bit deeper. Les Elephants (as the team is known) are not just a soccer team. To many,they are the men who ended the war. (Yes,the edition under review is American,so the use of soccer.) Soon after Drogba played his first match for Ivory Coast,a coup attempt by rebellious soldiers was unsuccessful but bloody; and with the rebels retreated to the north,the country was drawn into a long civil war. Drogba made much of the united colours of the Ivorian team in 2005 when Les Elephants qualified for the World Cup for the first time. And in 2007 when a fragile peace was being stitched together,he persuaded the government to schedule a World Cup qualifier in Bouake in the north. In many narratives since that day,that match won the peace for Ivory Coast. Bloomfield,who was Africa correspondent for The Independent,finds that Drogba is now part of the lexicon in Ivory Coast. Bottles of beer are called Drogba because of his endorsement. Drogba is a position on the football field. Drogba-ness,moreover,is shorthand for service to the nation when it needs so. So it was that Les Elephants did not bail out when Cabindan separatists attacked the Togo team during the Africa Cup of Nations in Angola this year. Their families and clubs wanted them out,he told Sports Illustrated,but: We spoke together as a team and decided to stay. When the crisis started in Ivory Coast (in 2002),one of the first countries to come and help us was Angola. This was more than football. A lot more than football. But as Bloomfield journeys across the continent,he finds that elsewhere too football has linked to a higher purpose. For the World Cup hosts South Africa,for instance. Unlike rugby and cricket,football was played and followed by blacks and Soweto has always been the popular headquarters of South African cricket. The South African Football Association had tried all sorts of ploys to be able to participate in the Africa Cup of Nations as well as the World Cup without sending a multiracial team. In an absurd compromise it suggested,unsuccessfully,an all-white team for the World Cup in 1966 and an all-black team in 1970. This is why many argue that the unity forged by Nelson Mandela during the 1995 Rugby World Cup is an incomplete story without the Africa Cup of Nations hosted and won by Bafana Bafana (the SA team) a year later. Football had its special place and Bloomfield points out that in the 1970s and 1980s,the nigh noon of apartheid,white football players had started playing in black teams and that the only large-scale gathering of blacks allowed by the government were for their matches. Football it was too that won from the government a concession for political prisoners on Robben Island though not for Nelson Mandela to be allowed to form a football league. But if football has presented a way for nations and the continent to imagine themselves,it has also been a tool to whip up nationalism and reinforce divisions. Egypt,which banned the sport as a distraction after the 1967 Six-Day War,almost went to war with Algeria after losing a World Cup qualifier last year. The ethnic divides that almost tipped Kenya into civil war recently are mirrored in its football. Cameroons leaders have used it to overcome popular discontent. And to read of football in Somalia is to understand what it means to play by the rules in a failed state. As Bloomfield roams the continent to put Africas soccer in context,he also puts it in a contemporary context,with its political changes and social and economic ferment. So,with six African squads in the running this World Cup,linger on their profiles longer and look beyond the football stats.
