From Belonging to Longing: Navigating Nationhood and Allegiance in Ghanaian Football

EPOCH
9 hours ago
8 min read

Emmanuel Adeyemi-Abere | Lancaster University

Next summer sees one of the biggest events in the sporting world. At the twenty-third edition of the FIFA World Cup, forty-eight countries will compete for the right to call themselves the best nation in the game.

Footballers often see the right to represent one’s nation in this tournament as the pinnacle of sporting achievement, shouldering the hopes and dreams of their people against the rest of the globe.

Fans flock in their droves to stadiums with flags, food, and football shirt replicas. Battle lines are drawn as the people back their boys: nothing is more important than the next 90 minutes of action.

The globe is at once united in a melting point of cultures and peoples yet deeply divided by the ability of twenty-two players kicking a spherical item around a grass field. When we deny ourselves the illusion of the seriousness of sport, we acknowledge it is both ‘only a game’ and ‘more than a game’.

In this light, the recent actions of Callum Hudson-Odoi and Eddie Nketiah deserve attention.

A footballer in a blue shirt poses with a gold trophy, holding his gold medal up to a camera. The words ‘FIFA Club World Cup’ are inscribed on the bottom of the trophy. — Callum Hudson-Odoi stands with the Club World Cup trophy, an intercontinental club competition that European clubs have dominated, in 2022. He has also played three times for the England senior team. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons by Mohammad Amin Ansari).

Both were born in London, and until October, it seemed the pair were hoping for the chance to play for England at the senior level, having turned down previous callups from Ghana. But now their nation of heritage has qualified for the World Cup, they could be trying to switch allegiances.

This opportunistic sporting decision is, at another level, a portal into the political world that sport so often conceals. Behind the frustrations of Ghanaian fans and officials alike is the newest layer of a power struggle that has pitted the Western world against an aspirational

African powerhouse.

Not unlike other countries in the region, Ghana’s introduction to football accompanied the arrival of Western colonialists. The history of extraction began as an imperialist and economic endeavour: while Britain farmed metal ores, diamonds, gold, and cocoa from the Ghanaian coastline to Europe, surplus products from Britain were also transported to Ghana to expand capitalistic markets.

Ghana was meant to be integrated into a global system that served the interests of the West over the autonomy and development of its own people. The instrument of football was no exception.

Sailors, colonial administrators, and indigenous students on the coastline began to popularise the sport in the Gold Coast after an exhibition match that involved the country’s first football club, Excelsior, on Boxing Day 1903. While their interaction reflected the longstanding strength of colonial authority in the south of the colony, the interior of the nation was more resistant to this development.

The Ashanti, the great power of ‘precolonial’ Ghana, begrudgingly accepted the presence of the British Crown in their territory at the turn of the twentieth century. Football here did not truly emerge until the 1930s but it quickly became a regional expression of the pride of the fallen Asante people.

The top team in the region, Kumasi Asante Kotoko, adopted its name in 1935 to mark the restoration of Prempeh II to his role as ruler of the Ashanti from exile the same year. The club’s crest, a porcupine, mirrored the emblem of the Asante army, and its supporters saw the side as a symbol of the socio-political independence that the Ashanti people preserved even under British colonial rule.

As the people of the Gold Coast began to embrace their sporting potential, the shackles of colonialism became clear. As a colony, only indirect affiliation was possible with FIFA, the governing body of international football, and participation in the African Cup of Nations (AFCON) was banned.

The ill-fitting garment of a ‘national identity’ left the people between a rock and a hard place. How could Ghana find a place in a ‘modern’ world without the tools to define itself on its own terms?

A great visionary would be required to turn indigenous feeling for self-expression into a force that could unite the regions of Ghana against British rule. That figure would be Kwame Nkrumah, who would embark on a project of politicising football that none of his contemporaries could manage.

Nkrumah was one of the most radical and influential advocates of ‘Pan-Africanism’. He believed that the liberation of the Black diaspora from exploitation was possible if all those of African descent could put asides their differences and come together in an act of ‘collective self-reliance’.

Ghana gained political independence from Britain in 1957 and became a full republic on 1 July 1960. Its newly appointed President Nkrumah wasted no time putting his plans into action.

Football was one of the vehicles through which Nkrumah wished to undo the impact of exploitative capitalist enterprise from the West. He handpicked Ohene Djan as the country’s first Director of Sports, sharing a vision for state centralised development of sport and the nation at large.

The President dissolved the old Amateur Sports Council, organising a nationwide football association in 1957. The creation of an eight-team nationwide league followed in 1959, and by 1960, the Central Organisation of Sports (COS) had emerged as a focal point for centralised budgeting and strategy. Nkrumah cast himself as the patron for COS, acting as an ambassador for Pan-African ideals.

The President was passionate about having a national team that could make an immediate impact on the African continent and global scene. The side took the moniker ‘Black Stars’, alluding to a shipping line operated by Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey, who wished to facilitate greater travel and trade between the Americas and Africa during the 1910s as part of the Pan-African vision.

Nkrumah saw football as a unifying force for African people. He backed the organisation of a West African Soccer Federation in 1959, initiated the creation of a biennial Gold Cup with Nigeria, and sanctioned exhibition games to commemorate Independence Days for Kenya and Zambia in 1965.

A group of men pose for a picture with three trophies on the ground. Five sit in the foreground and six other players stand behind them. All players are wearing boots, striped socks and a team shirt. — Ghana football team members in the 1960s pose with some of Ghana's international trophies. The elite group of football players were selected from other professional teams by Kwame Nkrumah. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Representatives for this agenda on the field were carefully handpicked. With Djan, Nkrumah commissioned the creation of the Real Republikans, a ‘model club’ made up of the best players from the national league. This club would act as a pipeline for talent into the national team and showcase the standard of administrative management that Nkrumah wished to implement across the country.

Winners of the AFCON in 1963 and 1965, Ghana also earned a memorable 3-3 draw against five time European champions Real Madrid in a friendly. To the rest of the world, Ghana appeared to be an emerging force in the sporting scene capable of competing with the best in the football business.

But the vision would not be fully realised. Ghana remained reliant on primary commodity exports of raw resources like cocoa and as global prices dropped, economic unrest emerged. Ethnic unrest from the Ashanti had never gone away, and in these conditions, political dissent grew louder.

In 1964, the President declared Ghana to be a one-party state, and an explosive ending to his political reign was in sight. A military coup d’état began on 24 February 1966, only a matter of months after the Black Stars defended their AFCON title, and Nkrumah was booted out of power.

The aspirational vision of Nkrumah still remains embedded in the Ghanaian national consciousness. However, the country has never managed to fulfil the dreams of its forefather. If anything, the country has continued to stray further from the light, still shackled by a colonial past.

By 1982, Ghana had become known as the ‘Brazil of Africa’, winning their fourth AFCON title. But within twenty years, more than half of their national team played their club football abroad. The foundations for domestic football had eroded as the country’s best talent was shipped to Europe.

State developmentalism gave way to an era of political turmoil and economic dependency. Nkrumah’s ambitious industrialisation and nationalisation projects had placed a burden of $1.1 billion in foreign debt on the national economy, and further borrowing appeared to be the only solution.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) presented Structural Adjustment Programs as a solution. However, these loans came with demands on the government to encourage privatisation, reduce state intervention in the economy and cut public expenditure. Remaining infrastructure for the domestic game collapsed with this defunding, and the prospects of indigenous Ghanaians dwindled.

Three players look at a white spherical ball on a grass field. Two of the men are sliding on the floor, one in a red and white shirt with red shorts and one in a blue and white shirt with white shorts. — Abedi Pele, Ghana’s most celebrated footballer, goes in for a tackle as a player for Olympique Marseille in the 1991 European Cup Final. He was one of several high-profile Ghanaian internationals to leave his home country in the 1980s. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons from OM le maudit).

Without control over the domestic development of their game, Ghana’s drainage of sporting talent started to mimic colonial processes of economic extraction. The introduction of Bosman ruling in the 1990s meant labour laws relaxed in Europe, and clubs saw the opportunity for cheap labour.

Private, corporate sponsored academies exploited the weak infrastructure of domestic football in Africa to find the best players in the continent: the biggest in Ghana is the ‘Right to Dream’ (RTD) Academy. Set up in 1999, this academy scouts teenagers, provides coaching, and generates revenue from transfers of its alumni, who are vulnerable to being treated as speculative ‘venture capital’.

Many graduates have fallen foul of underhand partnership agreements. When Premier League club Manchester City signed a ten-year deal with the Academy in 2010, they agreed a deal to acquire RTD players under the age of 18 for free. None of the 11 individuals who signed for the club made a first team appearance, being treated as speculative assets with little regard for their sporting potential.

More recently, the likes of Mohammed Kudus, Ernest Nuamah, and Kamaldeen Sulemana have benefitted from making the more manageable step to Danish club FC Nordsjælland. But the problem remains that Ghanaian football cannot get a genuine grip of its own talent’s development.

The newest dimension to this challenge of nation building has been the role of the diaspora.

The Black Stars have been burnt by the challenge of cobbling together a fragmented group of players on the biggest stage. They crashed out of the 2014 World Cup after disputes over player bonuses, discipline, and the expulsion of German-born Kevin Prince-Boateng from the team. That exit was one of the darkest days in the team’s history, but it does not mean the project is doomed to failure.

Members of the diaspora also often fail to find a place in the ‘modern’ world, neither fully embraced in the West, nor completely connected to the motherland where ties are ancestral, not experiential. Their struggles cannot be solved by the return to an imagined ‘nation’ or some triumphant act that unites blood bound Ghanaian people. They are always chasing an illusion.

Sport forces athletes to make choices of representation that do not truly reflect reality. And the sense of dislocation that can come from not having an identity anchored within a stable territory is a dividing line that frequently decides the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in global politics and global football.

Based on power structures, countries like Ghana will always fight with one hand tied behind their back. Yet, in the ‘make-believe’ battleground of football, it is always possible to upset the odds.

In the foreground, people wearing yellow and white shirts are jumping up and down to celebrate a goal from their team. A flag with the word ‘Ghana’ and the symbol of the Black Star is held aloft. In the background is a banner that reads ‘DSTV Sport’, an African broadcaster that allowed people to connect to the action. — Ghana fans goal celebrating against Serbia national football team at the 2010 World Cup. People are also holding vuvuzelas, a horn that makes noise to create atmosphere in stadiums and watch parties. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons by Kwame Nkansah).

Ghana narrowly missed out on a historic place in the World Cup semi-finals in 2010, exiting to approval from the rest of the continent as ‘Heroes of Africa’ that invoked Pan-African imagery.

Instead of thinking about belonging, maybe we should talk about the politics of ‘longing’.

National team manager Otto Addo has stressed it is all about ‘unity’ in the dressing room. In the last three years, the likes of Tariq Lamptey and Antoine Semenyo, both English-born, displayed desire to play for the Ghanaian national team, and they were welcomed in the camp. Selection policy is not just about sporting ability: it also holds a mirror to the question of who the nation wants to be.

A culture of commitment, professional pride, and joy in chasing the dreams of one’s ancestors are not ideas unique to a particular people. They are values that can transcend national divides to bond individuals in pursuit of bigger objectives. Nkrumah’s vision of a ‘model club’ may not be compatible with the constraints of the modern game, but his ambitions still linger in the Ghanaian imagination.