Africa: The Playing Fields of Brazzaville

Africans treat soccer as a form of refereed tribal warfare. Nigeria once upbraided a Ghanaian team for hexing the Nigerian goalie with black magic. In 1959 a game in the Belgian Congo between the Luluas and the Balubas touched off a three-day war in which 20 people were killed. Fortnight ago, the former French colony of Gabon sent a team to Brazzaville in the neighboring ex-French Congo* for a game of soccer. The toll so far: nine dead, 70 injured, and several thousand citizens transformed into refugees.

The game in Brazzaville was an important elimination match in the bitterly contested Coupe des Tropiques. Congo won it, 3-1, but the Congolese spectators decided that the margin was too small and that the referee, supposedly a neutral from the Central African Republic, favored the Gabonese. So the crowd roughed up the visiting team.

It was a minor expression of displeasure, with only a few wounded and hardly worth making a fuss about, but reports drifting back to the Gabonese capital of Libreville said that at least two of the Gabonese soccer eleven had been slain. To avenge their heroes, Gabonese fans fell upon the Congolese community that has existed there since French colonial days.

President Leon M’Ba called in the army, but before order could be restored, five Congolese and four Gabonese had been killed. Said a patriotic Gabonese athletics official: “They scored more goals but we killed more Congolese.”

Not satisfied with that narrow triumph, Soccer Fan M’Ba ordered deportation of all resident Congolese, who have never been very popular in Gabon, even among nonsports lovers. About 2,000 Congolese were shunted into hastily assembled concentration camps, then shipped down the Africa coast to a Congo port. The Congo in turn retaliated against Gabonese citizens living in Brazzaville. Mobs ripped into the Gabonese neighborhood of Poto-Poto, devastating shops and homes and injuring dozens of Gabonese. Only the intercession of Congo President Fulbert Youlou prevented a massacre. “Try to control yourselves,” soothed Youlou, “and we will emerge greater because of this trial.” He proclaimed a day of mourning for the Congo’s “national martyrs.” At week’s end both countries rejected an offer to replay the game on the neutral turf of the Central African Republic, and formally broke off “athletic relations.”

*Not to be confused with the Congo (Leopoldville), the former Belgian colony that usually causes all the trouble.