Mark Namanya is based in Uganda where he is the sports editor for the Daily Monitor. In November we posted an article about Mark’s impressions of South Africa and the impact of Western media on his preconceptions of the country. Mark has written one article so far for the Twenty Ten Project’s Africa Media Online. The article focuses on the 100 year rivalry between two soccer clubs based in Cairo, Al-Alhy and Zamalek. He gives an account of how this soccer made capital becomes “football crazy” on the day of this yearly soccer match.

Crazy fans enjoy life in the slow lane

Mark Namanya/Daily Monitor/Twentyten

Location: Cairo, Egypt

Take an iconic city, quadruple its population, add a few million foreign visitors, throw in the mother of all traffic jams for good measure and then stage one of the most passionate sporting occasions imaginable and what do you end up with?
“Madness,” most people would call it.
In Africa, they have another word for it: “Cairo”.
You certainly have to be crazy – and football crazy in particular – to venture out into the streets of the Egyptian capital on the day of the Al Ahly-Zamalek derby.
Few sporting occasions around the world can match its intensity. The two clubs have a rivalry which can be traced back almost 100 years and which has dominated Egyptian football for as long as most people can remember.
When the two sides meet – or, indeed, when Egypt take…

FOR THE FULL STORY OF 860 WORDS CONTACT pictures@africamediaonline.com

The Dream Team will be producing content all the way through the end of the World Cup and beyond. If you are intersted in purchasing some of our content or commissioning a specific piece please feel free to contact us.

Nanama Keita is a Gambian journalist who has written articles for a number of Africa publications including the The Daily Observer and a range of online websites including Gambia Now.

In this article Nanama talks about the Ghanaian national team being the first team to qualify for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Here is a snippet of the text article. You can purchase the full article the Twenty Ten Project’s Africa Media Online Website

Ghanaian opportunity

Nanama Keita/Daily Observer/Twenty Ten

When Ghana became the first African country to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, the cash register started ringing in the West African nation.
The Black Stars over-came visiting Sudan 2-0 in the Group D joint qualifiers in Accra on September 6, to earn themselves a second successive appearance in the 79-year-old World Cup tournament.
The World’s most prestigious football event, which is played once every four years, will come with its usual tears, controversy and the triumphs and millions of us will be bound to our seats for four action-packed weeks.
Although the tournament will be over in just four weeks, the economic legacy of the 32-team tournament may be felt longer in the cocoa-rich nation of Ghana.
With qualification now in the bag, the Black Stars and their faithful, now believe huge financial opportunities will come pouring into the country.
Projections, based on the team’s first-ever appearance in Germany 2006, suggest the gold-rich West African nation could benefit from up to US$15m.

FOR THE FULL STORY OF 701 WORDS CONTACT pictures@africamediaonline.com

In this post we feature the work of Joseph Opio from Uganda. Joseph wrote a great piece on the failed rising of a potential soccer playing great called, Nii Lamptey of Ghana. Nii was supposed to be the next Pele, “So dazzling was the Black Starlet that Pele remarked that “Lamptey is my natural successor.” The Brazilian legend had just watched Lamptey pick up the FIFA U-17 World Cup and the Golden Ball for good measure. Lamptey, midfield sorcery notwithstanding, had managed to top-score with four goals as well.”

Here is a snippet of the rest of this article, which can be purchased via our website:

The tragedy of Nii Lamptey…and his quest for redemption

Article Synopsis: Lamptey was once Ghana’s most precocious gift. But his star flared all too briefly before being extinguished by a cocktail of dodgy agents, a numbing lack of education and treasonable neglect from the game’s overseers.

Text: Greater Accra, Ghana: Cocoa is Ghana’s leading export. But, lately, cocoa’s visibility as the country’s main foreign exchange earner is, at least symbolically, running into a challenge from Ghana’s talent at football.

Football has established Ghana as a hotbed of talent. And seduced, hawk-eyed scouts scour this terrain of 22 million, desperate to unearth the next big thing…or for the most optimistic, the next Nii Lamptey.

If the name rings no bell, dear reader, blush not! Lamptey was once Ghana’s most precocious gift. But his star flared all too briefly before being extinguished by a cocktail of dodgy agents, a numbing lack of education and treasonable neglect from the game’s overseers.

Ghana’s first genuine wonder kid burst into prominence at the 1991 World Youth Cup where his golden potential made other whiz kids like Argentina’s Juan Sebastian Verón and Italy’s Alessandro del Piero look like base metal.

So dazzling was the Black Starlet that Pele remarked that “Lamptey is my natural successor.” The Brazilian legend had just watched Lamptey pick up the FIFA U-17 World Cup and the Golden Ball for good measure. Lamptey, midfield sorcery notwithstanding, had managed to top-score with four goals as well.

“When Pele said I could go on to become like…

FOR THE FULL STORY OF 825 WORDS CONTACT pictures@africamediaonline.com

Arnaud Thierry Gouegnon of the Ivory Coast, has taken a series of interesting photo features over the course of the last several months. One of them has already been featured in an earlier blog post that highlighted the fact that we are now providing our stories in both English and French. Below you can find some images from a couple of Arnaud’s other photo features – Fabriquants de Maillots and Le Numero 9.

Ahmed Jallanzo is a well respected photojournalist from Liberia, popularly known as “Action in the Lens”. His images have appeared in news papers such as the New York Times and with organizations such as the European Press Agency. Ahmed takes pictures of a range of issues relevant to Liberian politics and society, many of his images focus on the role of soccer in Liberia and its politics.

In this photo feature titled, Technology and Football, Ahmed focuses on capturing images that highlight the impact of technology on the way that soccer is viewed in Lagos, Nigeria. The impact is both positive and negative as Ahmed points out, “Technology is attracting millions of people in Lagos to home videos, large television screens in cinemas and public places. Modern Technology is gradually drawing away people from the live games in stadiums.”

Here are a few images from this photo feature. If you want to purchase any of these images or see the rest of the feature please follow this link:Technology and Football.

La fièvre Didier Drogba (TG)

The Didier Drogba fever (English below)

Thierry Gouegnon/Twenty Ten

Lieu: Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

De tout les grands footballeurs nationaux et internationaux que la Côte d’Ivoire a connu, le capitaine actuel des « éléphants », (l’équipe nationale ivoirienne de football) ; Didier Dgrogba est celui qui a le plus conquis le cœur de bon nombre de fans de foot tant sur le plan national qu’international. Beaucoup d’entre eux ne jurent que par lui, un amour sans limite dont ils sont des milliers à lui exprimer directement ou indirectement soit, en lui dédiant une chanson, une danse, une marque de bière, une attitude…

Nous avons donc dans notre reportage, approchés ces Ivoiriens, fans de Drogba pour dégager l’immensité de l’amour qu’ils éprouvent pour leur idole.

Location: Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Didier Drogba commands a cult following in the Ivory Coast. Fans hang his picture in their homes and places of work, vendors fill their stalls with football shirts printed with his name, and one man has gone as far as to name an entire village ‘Drogbakro’ in his honour.

The talented captain of Ivory Coast’s national team, The Elephants, has become a brand name. A brewery in Abidjan has produced a beer called ‘Drogba’ and a local mobile phone company has released a new line of cell phones with the player’s name emblazoned on its cover.

Whether it is an individual fan who names his son after the football legend, or a pub that shows its loyalty by having posters of Drogba on its wall, the people of Ivory Coast…

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Here are a few images from this story taken by Thierry Guegnon:

Emmanuel Quaye is a photojournalist based out of Accra, Ghana. He has produced two photo features for the Twenty Ten Project so far. In the two photo essays that Emmanuel has produced we get a great sense of the historical and contemporary roles that soccer plays in the lives of people in two different parts of Africa – Ghana and Nigeria.

The first feature, The Legends, focuses on the forgotten legends of Ghanaian soccer. These great players have been forgotten in today’s contemporary rush for money and fame, while these legends chose to play for their country out of a sense of pride and duty. “To wear the Black Stars football jersey was once considered a great privilege, and the dream of many young men. Some turned down lucrative offers to play football overseas, all for the love of their country.‘We were made to feel a sense of pride and we were prepared to die for the nation and not for money,’ said one retired football legend. Some of these heroes refused to wear football boots when they toured Great Britain as a mark of the pride they had in their homeland. Despite their glory days and the service they did for their country, many of these soccer legends now live in destitution. Some have died paupers, others are bed ridden or ill and cannot afford medical attention.”

The second feature, Makoko Sedation, focuses on the role that soccer plays in the lives of the inhabitants of the Makoko slum in Lagos, Nigeria. “Soccer sedates the inhabitants of Makoko, a slum in Lagos in Nigeria.The slum with an estimated population of 50,000 people, does not have good roads, the area lacks potable water and the waterside is devoid of a sewage disposal system. This results in high morbidity from malaria, diarrhoea and other infectious diseases.” For many of the inhabitants soccer is the religion that enables them to forget the conditions that they live in, “Friday Oliseh, a resident, said soccer is like a religion which unites a nation. To Kwame Asante, a Ghanaian migrant, soccer is like a medicine which cures all diseases. ‘With soccer you forget all your problems,’ he said.”

Here are some of the images from the two features. You can see more of Emmanuel’s work and those of the rest of the team at Africa Media Online website.

Andrew Esiebo has produced three great photo features over the past several months. Andrew is a respected and internationally recognized photographer who has had exhibits and residencies across Europe. His work has focused on urban portraiture, his images taken in Nigeria and Ghana capturing the essence of the story and conveying the importance that soccer plays in the lives of people across these two countries.

Games of Hope is a photo feature about the betting “pool houses across the country. The bettors play every week in the hope of winning the jackpot of up to 400,000 Naira – the equivalent of the average annual wage among workers in Nigeria. However, most bettors walk away empty handed and console themselves in the company of friends who gather at the pool houses to relax and engage in other forms of recreational activities such as card games, draughts and Ayo (a Yoruba board game).”

His second photo feature, Surviving Dreams, has 20 black-and-white images that tell the story of coach/evangelist, Sunny Omini, “an ex-football star who promising career was cut short by injuries. He later went into coaching but quit suddenly to become a Christian missionary. Years later he returned to the game, setting up the Signal Meteor Football Academy, a grassroots training academy for young men in danger of social exclusion. Today, he works with around 30 young men on what he calls a ‘church on the field’, helping them to build a brighter future through soccer.”

In his third feature, Soccer Worlds, Andrew captures images of the many spaces around Ghana that people find to play soccer in, “Open pieces of land in the country side, city main road, beaches, empty market grounds or the streets themselves – the game brings them alive.” These images are part of a bigger series of work that Andrew has been working on called Soccer Worlds.

See more of Andrew and the Dream Team’s work at African Media Online.

We will feature some more of the Dream Team’s work on the blog over the coming weeks. But why not view or listen to all over their stories now?

“Until recently, Malawian football has been nothing to write home about. The memory of their 1984 appearance in the Africa Cup of Nations was starting to grow dim and supporters of The Flames, as they are affectionately known, were starting to lose hope.
With a grand entrance, The Flames thumped World Cup finalists, Algeria 3-0 on January 11, 2010, propelling them into the quarter final of the tournament that doubled as a FIFA World Cup qualifier.
Much of their success has been attributed to the rising soccer star, Chiukepo Msowoya, who has been nicknamed ‘Wonderstriker’ on the official FIFA World Cup website.”

I have added a couple of the images that are part of the photo feature, which you can find here.

Malawi's rising Soccer Star and 2008 footballer of the year Chiukepo Msowoya plays with the ball at Kamuzu Stadium October 29, 2009 during preparatory training for COSAFA games scheduled for October 31, 2009 in Zimbabwe. © Amos Gumulira/ Twenty Ten Project/ Africa Media Online

Ivorian defenders Bamba Souleymane, shirt no.4 and Gosso Gosso, right, tries to stop Malawi's upcoming top goal scorer Chiukepo Msowoya during a joint 2010 World Cup and Africa Cup of Nations qualifier game between Malawi and Ivory Coast at Kamuzu Stadium in Blantyre, October 10, 2009. © Amos Gumulira/ Twenty Ten Project/ Africa Media Online

Malawi's goal poacher and 2008 footballer of the year, Chiukepo Msowoya during preparatory training on October 7, 2009, for the World Cup, Africa Cup of Nations qualifier game between Malawi and Ivory Coast played on October 10, 2009. © Amos Gumulira/ Twenty Ten Project/ Africa Media Online