Togo, which occupies a sliver of land between Ghana and Benin on the Gulf of Guinea, is a soccer-loving country, and the news that a mysterious group of easily winded players had impersonated the national team provoked a public outcry. Investigations were launched, and the nation’s sports minister muttered to the press about “shadowy handlers” and “mafia groups.” After what must have been a grueling piece of detective work, the investigators pinned their suspicions on Tchanile Bana, a former national-team coach who had recently been suspended for taking another fake team to a tournament in Egypt. Bana confessed, apologized, was banned from the game for three years, and insisted—maybe a little too fervently—that he had acted alone.
In the United States, Bana’s misadventure caused a minor ripple of amusement, then disappeared as soon as the next prostitute-soliciting high-school football coach rolled into view. In Togo, however, this bizarre story has continued to dominate the public’s attention. Over the past few weeks, it has gone beyond a simple case of mistaken identity to include layers of conspiracy, fraud, corruption, political instability, and horrific violence. The fake team that played in Bahrain, then, can be seen as a stand-in for all the difficulties that face African soccer, where sports and political instability are often juxtaposed and where day-to-day reality can be starkly different from the cheerful picture painted during this summer’s World Cup in South Africa.
To understand the situation in Togo, you have to go back to the afternoon of Jan. 8, 2010, when the national team—the real one—traveled by bus into Angola’s Cabinda province, the site of its first match in the Africa Cup of Nations tournament. The game never should have been held in Cabinda, an oil-rich region with a long history of violent secessionist conflict. The decision to stage part of the Cup of Nations there was widely seen as a move by the Angolan government to reassure oil companies that it was fully in control of the province.
It didn’t work. As the Togo team’s bus crossed into Cabinda, armed soldiers from a separatist sect opened fire, killing the driver and two staff members and wounding several players. The team’s French manager, Herbert Velud, was shot in the arm. For around half an hour, the rebels fired on the bus with machine guns and fought with the team’s Angolan security force while the players crawled under the seats. After the attack—which the Angolan government used as an excuse to crack down on human rights activists—Togo withdrew its team from the Cup of Nations. Incredibly, this withdrawal led Togo to be banned from competing in the next two tournaments. The ban was later rescinded, but not before Emanuel Adebayor, Togo’s star striker, retired from international soccer, saying that he was “haunted” by what had happened in Cabinda.
Long before the bus shooting, Togo had one of the most dysfunctional soccer cultures in the world, one marked by a range of scandals and tragedies that extended from World Cup labor disputes to helicopter crashes. Only a month before the attack, FIFA had disbanded the country’s soccer council, which was headed by the brother of Togo’s semi-dictatorial president, and installed an interim committee led by Gen. Memene. The interim committee was supposed to be replaced by a permanent federation this July, but—partly due to the chaos that followed the Cabinda attack—its mandate was extended by three months, with new elections scheduled for October.
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