Inside AFCON from a Black American’s perspective

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Officially, the crowd attendance at the African Cup of Nations final between hosts Ivory Coast and Nigeria was tallied at 57,094 people — but who can say for sure?

That figure couldn’t possibly account for the herds of supporters who sprinted through the parking lot of the Stade Olympique Alassane Ouattara, forced their way past the entrance gates, and descended on the stadium, forcing everyone inside, ticketed or not, to squeeze into the few remaining seats, the steps beside them, and the walkways between sections. No way could it include the hundreds of tournament volunteers who abandoned their posts and became spectators as soon as the first whistle blew, singing and swearing and dancing along with the rest of us as les Éléphants of Côte d’Ivoire continued their mind-boggling fairy tale of a title run, coming from behind to beat Nigeria 2-1 and earn their third AFCON championship.

I’m fully convinced that people would have watched the game from the rafters if they could. And that’s exactly why I traveled here.

I’ve been plagued by soccer fever for nearly 30 years and have been following Africa’s biggest tournament for half that time. While watching its chaotic events unfold at the 2021 games in Cameroon, I made a rhetorical note to myself: 

The next AFCON is in Côte d’Ivoire, I wrote. 

I should go, right? 

It wasn’t just that most of my travels across Africa have been to anglophone countries and that I yearned to balance that out with experiences in francophone places, if only to use my six years of French classes and sporadic Duolingo jaunts. Nor was it simply because I sensed AFCON improving each cycle, from the intensity of the competitions to the quality of the officiating, and wanted to experience it in raw form before it risked getting co-opted the way so many of the best things do.

Those were all factors. But as a Black American whose cultural relationship to soccer has been characterized more by lack than abundance, more by erasure than elevation, I wanted to know what it would feel like to dissolve in rapture inside a stadium full of people who looked like me, and with whom I was bound by the some of the same splintered transatlantic ancestry; where rooting for everybody Black wouldn’t be limited to a handful players on a team, or a handful of teams in a tournament; where I could scream and shake my butt without feeling as though my body was being policed, cast into the shadows, or thrust into an exotic spotlight; where I could enjoy the beautiful game and just be.

Attending AFCON gave me all of those things in ways I’d hoped for and that exceeded my imagination. It wasn’t a distraction from the genocide in Gaza or other exploitations of power taking place all over the world, but a reminder that joy illuminates our humanity in the face of destruction, that community is a survival tool, and that soccer, in its purest expression, can still offer possibilities for the world we envision.

A foreigner’s entry to Ivory Coast requires a blank page in their passport and a yellow fever vaccination. It also requires a capacity for surrender, tenacity, and a sense of humor.

Abidjan, the commercial capital, will keep you waiting — in traffic, in line at the supermarket, at your table in a restaurant. And it will not always reward you for your patience. Sometimes, what you receive in return might even feel like punishment, to which you can only humble yourself to reach for that patience again, and again, and again. That emotional gauntlet, and the only reasonable response to it, was captured in the chant that fueled Ivorians throughout their team’s AFCON run: “On vaut rien, mais on a qualifié,” which loosely translates to “We’re worthless, but we’re qualifying.”

As in: Nobody looks at a 1-2 group stage record that included a 4-0 thrashing by 88th-ranked Equatorial Guinea and the immediate firing of coach Jean-Louis Gasset, and feels optimistic about taking home much of anything by tournament’s end. But then Morocco drew with the Democratic Republic of Congo in the group stage, creaking the door open to the knockout stages just wide enough for Ivory Coast to squeeze into.

With new manager and former Éléphant player Emerse Faé as coach, the team faced Senegal in the round of 16, slipping past the reigning AFCON champions on stomach-churning penalties. Their quarterfinal against Mali crackled with drama. Ivory Coast played the entire second half with 10 players after losing central defender Odilon Kossounou to yellow card accumulation in the 43rd minute. Substitute striker Oumar Diakité ground out a go-ahead goal in the waning minutes of the second half of extra time to cement their victory. None of those performances were particularly clean, but they were effective.

Soon, “On vaut rien, mais on est qualifié” could be heard everywhere from busy intersections over transport conductors’ directives to smoky nightclubs between DJ sets. The lack of pretense from Ivorians about their team’s troubling performances and quizzical success tickled me, but it also felt like a unique offering. 

Historically, the burden of race in the U.S. has complicated the ways in which Black people critique each other when around white people. For some of us, that burden has created tension between our obligations toward honesty, our desire to provide unbridled support for Black athletes, and our awareness of the doors we might open for outsiders to pile on if we show up for each other with anything less than dogged positivity. But those burdens don’t appear to exist in Ivory Coast, or AFCON at large. Jokes and pettiness are encouraged, which is why Ivorian supporters brought “On vaut rien, mais on est qualifié” into the stadium for the semifinal against the Democratic Republic of Congo, the team’s first definitive victory since their opening match victory over Guinea-Bissau.

The host nation’s mind-boggling ascent to the finals, combined with a highly touted online ticketing system that was plagued with problems, created a scramble for tickets unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. They were simply nowhere to be found, at least in an official capacity. My emails to the Confederation of African Football were met with official language that sent me right back to its non-functioning website, or to local post offices wrapped in queues of people who’d been waiting much longer than I had, only to be told by officials to come back again tomorrow. Some people I spoke to had already been doing that for days.

I asked everyone I encountered how to buy a ticket — hotel managers, university students, security guards, visitors sitting next to me at bars, taxi drivers. Some didn’t even bother to hold back their laughter at my naiveté. Others asked if I had any connections to the president after they realized I was serious about my question. But most directed me to the place marginalized people default to when they’ve grown accustomed to the absence of infrastructure: the black market.

The day of the final, I arrived at the stadium hours before kickoff with my friend and a new acquaintance I’d made while waiting in a fruitless line for a ticket a few days before. He’d spent our taxi ride fielding phone calls from his friend, who lived in Ebimpé, the village located just outside the stadium, and had offered to hustle tickets for us. The highest list price of an AFCON ticket was about $25. On the black market, ours cost nearly five times that amount. The transaction took place in a dense intersection just outside the first security checkpoint a mile away from the stadium, a tangled exchange of fists closed over cash and gently folded paper tickets, all in full view of nonchalant police officers. I’d been advised to avoid digital passes with easily replicable QR codes, but even with my physical ticket, there was no way of knowing it was valid until after we took a bus to the stadium gates and walked half a mile to the final security checkpoint where it would be scanned.

I’ll never know if my ticket to the final was legitimate because of the stampede — and at this point, I don’t care. If anything, I’m relieved to know my U.S. dollars went directly to people who live in Ebimpé. And anyway, it’s difficult to imagine having watched the final any differently, crammed on the stadium steps between a young Ivorian woman waving the jersey of Achraf Hakimi, a wry poke at the Moroccan star whose missed penalty kick paved the way for Ivory Coast’s advancement, and a small child who sat between his mother’s legs, mouth closed and eyes wide open to the spectacle. I was touched by the way everyone made space for each other, regardless of how they’d found their way into the stadium. It felt like an unspoken acknowledgement of the kind of surrender, tenacity, and humor needed to get by in a city like Abidjan.

I felt fortunate to ride the waves of Ivorian fans’ emotions that night, commiserating with them when Nigerian captain William Troost-Ekong opened the scoring in the 38th minute, nodding along to their scathing condemnations of every errant pass or missed scoring opportunity, and spilling over with hugs and high-fives when Ivory Coast scored once, and then twice to earn their third AFCON championship.

As the stadium crew transformed the battlefield into an awards stage, the crowd vibrated to “Coup de Marteau,” the addicting Ivorian tournament anthem, shuffling their legs into the air, shining their waists to the night sky. A fan standing near me started shouting a remix of her country’s beloved chant, swapping the latter part of the phrase for a more relevant one: “On vaut rien, mais on est champions.” We’re worthless, but we’re champions.

Hours later, my friend and I spilled out of the stadium and made our way to a roadside food stall where we dug into platters of grilled tilapia covered in onions and tomatoes, attiéké (fermented cassava ground down to the consistency of couscous), alloko (fried plantains), and fries. As we ate, people rode past on motorbikes, blowing into vuvuzelas and dancing, occasionally hopping off for high-fives and a drink before continuing home.

I know better than to over-romanticize my relationship to Africa as a Black American with my relative privileges, but traveling to Ivory Coast for AFCON, speaking the universal language of soccer even as I trudged through conversations with my intermediate French, was one of the most expansive and transcendent sporting experiences I’ve ever had. It allowed me to see and be seen, to hold and be held, and to contribute and receive, all in seemingly equal measure.

To me, AFCON is so much more than an international soccer tournament. It’s a blueprint for how people can live and solve problems together, learn from and teach one another, and envision and work toward a future of equity, justice, and joy, no matter how impossibly far away that feels from our current reality.