Africa Cup of Nations 2008

The Burkina Ghana border
Photo: Emily Babin



Spend enough time in Burkina Faso and a trip to Ghana almost feels like going home. It starts at the border- in Burkina you wait under a tree while the officials inspect your passport. A few meters away in Ghana, you are taken into a newly refurbished, concrete building. Somehow it seems like the vegetation has already increased, leaving behind Burkina’s sparse, scrubby sahel for lush grasslands, forests, and jungles. The animals are fatter. Toilets are still a hole in the ground, but it’s a nicer hole in the ground.

In the capital city of Accra, more wonders await. The roads have lines painted on them to delineate traffic lanes. There are overpasses and underpasses. There are grass borders lining the sidewalks- matter of fact, the presence of sidewalks at all is something of a shock. The taxis are maintained; freshly painted, not a cracked windshield to be seen. Remarkable.

It doesn’t stop there. The women selling food on the side of the road cook on gas stoves instead of wood. A quick meal consists of fried rice with a piece of chicken, for a dollar. For another dollar you can wash it down with a big bottle of Castle Milk Stout, the best beer in Africa, which tragically doesn’t make it north to Burkina.

The development extends to smaller towns as well. I went to visit my friend’s village, about an hour from Accra. It was smaller than my village in Burkina but there were paved roads, running water (sometimes) and electricity. She lived on the third story of an apartment building, on top of a hill overlooking a jungle valley. I joked, with only slight exaggeration, that we don’t have any of those things in Burkina- jungles, hills, or third stories.

Lest I get carried away, I should point out that Ghana still falls squarely into the “developing nation” mold. Ghana is ranked 135 out of 177 countries on the United Nations development index (Burkina, by comparison, is currently 176). Large parts of the population still live in crippling poverty, battling hunger and disease. And, of course, paved roads and electricity aren’t everything. When the same friend came up to my village, which, with the exception of the cell phone tower, has very few ostensible symbols of modernity, she was overwhelmed with the hospitality and welcome she received, something that was missing from her busier, more developed town.

Ghana has other things going for it as well though, both natural and man made attractions. There are waterfalls and botanical gardens, and Kakum National Park where you can hike along a series of bridges suspended 100 feet up in the air in the jungle canopy. There are dozens of old European forts and slave castles, though in the interest of good taste I won’t describe the conditions in which slaves and prisoners were kept.

Disturbing colonial legacies aside, the main attraction Ghana holds, to Peace Corps volunteers in landlocked countries anyhow, is the beach. You have your choice of laidback beach side towns like Busua, with seafood stands everywhere and Black Star Surf Shop, the first and so far only surf shop in Ghana. There are also remote, isolated resorts where you sleep in huts right on the waterfront and hunt for nesting sea turtles, and tiny fishing villages where you can rent canoes and tour the inland mangrove rivers, keeping an eye peeled for monkeys, birds, and crabs. A note of caution- best not to go swimming in the immediate vicinity of the villages, for the beach still serves as the communal toilet, with ample visible evidence.

Our visit to Ghana coincided with the 2008 CAN, African Cup of Nations. Sixteen national soccer teams battled for the biannual title of champion of Africa. Here was a chance to see in person superstars like Didier Drogba of Cote D’Ivoire, Michael Essien of Ghana, and Samuel Eto’o of Cameroon. The Burkina Etalons (Stallions), alas, didn’t make the cut, so we were compelled to shift out loyalties to the Black Stars of Ghana and get caught up in the fervor and excitement of the rest of the country. We watched the Ghana-Nigeria quarter-final from a bar in a tent city that sprang up outside one of the stadiums. When Ghana came back to win 2-1 in the closing moments, despite being a man down thanks to an extremely questionable red card, the entire space erupted into pandemonium, police and security jumping up and down and screaming along with everyone else, all the women vendors running around hanging out condoms to all who wanted them.

If Ghana is a rung up the development ladder from Burkina, the stadiums, built new or refurbished for the tournament, are another several steps towards the top. The tickets have an electric chip in them, which you wave at a sensor to pass through the turnstiles. Inside looks like just an American stadium- row after row of colored seats, film crews everywhere, vendors roaming the aisle with drinks and snacks. The spectators, too, were another side of Africa, many of whom had traveled from their home counties to support their teams: western dressed, eyeglass wearing, digital camera brandishing fans. This was Africa with money, about as far removed from village as you can get without crossing an ocean.

The toilets . . . Well, they were still holes in the ground, but they had clean, shiny ceramic floors, and, in a shocking turn of events, toilet paper was provided, a luxury I’d take over a stool to sit on any day.

The atmosphere of the Africa crowd is a bit different from its American counterpart. Not once did I see the wave, or was subjected to cheesy music from the PA system to rally up the spectators. It wasn’t necessary. Instead, each nation had its own band planted in the seats, complete with trumpets, tubas, and all varieties of drums. The bands played nonstop for the entire game while the rest of the fans, gaudily dressed in national colors, some painted, danced in their seats and in the aisles. Corporate sponsor Pepsi handed out thundersticks and they became props, sometimes obscene ones, to the dancing.

This was the case even in the more sparsely attended games. While the playoffs sold out most of their seats, some of the earlier match play, especially between distant countries whose fans couldn’t easily make the long journey, were nearly deserted. The entire stadiums appeared empty. There have been bigger crowds- no joke- at our village matches in Burkina, where players wearing sandals compete on barren, rocky ground, with goalposts but no nets, the field boundaries marked by a line in the sand. The villagers line the sidelines two, three, four deep, crowding ever closer to the field until security comes by, waving sticks threateningly until the fans back up, only to advance again as soon as security moves on to other parts of the field. Fistfights among village partisans are not unheard of. And the same passion is visible, expressed in a less violent way, back in Ghana at a Senegal v. South Africa game, both teams already excluded from advancing in the tournament, but the handful of fans present dancing, dancing, singing, laughing, shaking their thundersticks and dancing some more.

Vacation time is limited, and we couldn’t stay for the final. We saw Ghana fall to Cameroon in the semi-finals on our way home, watching in a hotel lobby in Kumasi with a curiously subdued crowd. Later that night we saw live as Les Elephants of Cote D’Ivoire fell to Egypt 4-1, thanks to some disastrous play by Cote D’Ivoire’s backup goaltender. The injury to Elephants’ starter Barry Copa was upsetting not only because of his previously brilliant play, in contrast to the understudy’s passive catastrophe, but because Copa looks just like my friend Halidou from village. Not the short, stocky contractor Halidou, but the tall, lanky gold miner.

Back in Ouaga, Burkina’s capital, we shared the disappointment of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa when Egypt defended their 2006 championship, upending Eto’o and Cameroon 1-0. It’s up to the rest of the continent, then, to start practicing for the 2010 tournament, to be held in Angola. Will Burkina make the cut? It would be their seventh tournament appearance and first since 2004. Fans and supporters will just have to wait and see.