By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

The last time Morocco hosted the African Cup of Nations (AFCON) in 1988.It lost by a single goal in the semi-finals to eventual winners, Cameroon, who advanced to the final where they overcame Nigeria to emerge as champions.

Eight years earlier, at the same stage, Nigeria defeated Morocco by the same margin on its way to winning the tournament at the expense of Algeria.

On Sunday, 18 January 2025, Morocco confronts Senegal in the finals of the AFCON 2025 tournament having avenged historic semi-final losses to both Cameroon and Nigeria in the quarter and semi-finals of the competition. The final match will be staged at the stadium in the capital city, Rabat, named in memory of the brother of Morocco’s penultimate King Hassan II and uncle of current King Mohammed VI, Moulay Abdallah ben Ali Alaoui, who died of cancer in December 1983 at the untimely age of 48.

David Goldblatt begins his magisterial book, The Age of Football: The Global Game in the Twenty-First Century, with the observation that despite its colonial origins, football in Africa has “served widely as an instrument of the independence movement and, later, in the shape of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and the continental tournaments it created, a practical example of pan-African co-operation and identity.” Reflecting this history, African football has been called “the rebellious game.”

Amidst the football spectacle that will unfold in the match, the AFCON finals in Rabat on 18 January 2025 will symbolise an underlying narrative in African football that it hitched closely with the narratives of Africa’s histry and its politics. It will pit two countries with some of the oldest traditions of organised football in Africa under the watch of a man from the first country to play the game on the continent.

164 years after the first official game of football on the African continent, a black billionaire from the country where the game made its African landfall, Patrice Motsepe, will orchestrate the ceremonies of the AFCON finals as the president of the CAF. His elder sister, Dr. Tshepo, happens also to be the spouse of South Africa’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa. Few, if any, among the Cape colonists who brought the beautiful game to the continent could have divined the trajectory or symbolism of this moment.

Africa’s earliest documented football match reportedly occurred in 1862 between “white colonial bureaucrats and soldiers in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, South Africa.” It did not involve any natives. In a symbolism of the journey to the right of Africa’s populations to participate in a kickabout, the two teams that will line up in the finals will represent two of the countries with the more established traditions of organised football on the continent.

Association Sportive et Culturelle (ASC) Jeanne d’Arc, Senegal’s oldest football club, was founded 102 years ago in 1923 in capital city, Dakar. It has existed continually since then and beside cross-city rivals, ASC Diaraf, remains one of the two most successful football clubs in the country. The club was originally founded by French Catholic missionaries in pursuit of the legend of colonial civilising mission of creating fit young men of character. Interestingly for an institution dedicated to promoting a colonial vision of masculinity, they named it after France’s patroness saint, Joan of Arc, in a symbolism of faith, strength and colonial domination. In doing so, they also created the first seeds of indigenous resistance.

Those seeds were sown earlier in Africa’s Maghrebine coast. In 1906, the first Earl of Cromer and long-serving British Consul-General in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, oversaw in what has become known as the Denshawai Incident the unfair trial and brutal execution of four Egyptians accused of causing the death by heatstroke of a British official, whom they prevented from feasting on their pigeons. The backlash from Egypt’s population ultimately led to the resignation of Lord Cromer in 1907 and inspired a fierce nationalist movement.

While the elite politicians bickered as to how to organise, Egypt’s student movement founded Al Ahly (National Club) in Cairo, a football club rooted in the idea of national pride and unity and with a mission to resist British colonial oppression. Five years later, cross-city rivals, Zamalek Sporting Club was founded as the team of the elite or middle class.

According to World Football, the contest between Al-Ahly and Zamalek is one of the greatest rivalries in world football. Football journal, FourFourTwo, warns that it is “more than a game.” Having begun as a contest between nationalism and colonial collaboration, it has evolved be defined by status and ideology. In reference to this rivalry, French journalist, Laurent Campistron reports a supporter of one of these clubs as having told him: “In this country, you can eventually change your religion or your wife, but never your club.”

Nine years before the formation of Al-Ahly, in June 1898, Club Sportif (CS) Constantinois was founded in Egypt’s neighbour, Algeria. If Egypt was an early model of the nationalist possibilities in football, Algeria was the place that crystallised the insurgent character of football in Africa. David Goldblatt recalls that Algeria’s “football clubs served as clandestine cells for growing nationalism”.

In the middle of the murderous War of Independence, Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) founded its own national football team in 1958, persuading 30 established stars of French football of Algerian origin to abscond to Tunis where they founded Le Onze de l’Indépendance (the Independence Eleven). That team helped to establish the diplomatic credentials of the FLN long before independence in 1962 and the admission of the country into the ranks of FIFA two years later in 1964.

A leading member of the eleven was Rachid Mekhloufi, St-Etienne’s star striker who was to be in France’s team to the 1958 World Cup. At his death in 2024, it was said of Mekhloufi that “he was more than a footballer who mesmerised fans on the pitch. He was a symbol of resistance to many Algerians.”.

The Beautiful Game took nearly two decades to travel from Algeria to its neighbour, Morocco. When it landed in 1917 at the waning of the First World War, it was through French colonial enthusiasts in the form of Racing Athletic Club (RAC) of Casablanca. The game was later to find an insurgent home in Morocco’s most populous city, leading to the foundation in May 1937 of Wydad Club by an elite group of Moroccan resistance to French occupation led by Mohamed Benjelloun Touimi, who would later become a leading member of the International Olympic Committee. 11 years later, in March 1949, a group of working-class youth equally resisting French colonial rule founded cross-city rivals, Raja Club Athletic. Raja’s proletarian origins would later earn it the sobriquet, “The People’s Club“.

These long traditions of community formation and nation building are what give the AFCON its unique place in the hearts of Africans everywhere and in the firmament of world football. These are not traditions that engage the blinkers of the denizens of the world game in the FIFA.

Committed to extracting every penny of profit from the game, they have decided to kill the competition in its current biennial format. Morocco will be the penultimate in this format. The joint hosting by the countries of East Africa in 2028 will be the last. When it resurrects in 2032, it will be held every four years. AFCON-winning manager, Claude Leroy, has described the decision as ‘stupid’.

Many see “colonial overtones” in FIFA’s underlying reason for the change in the calendar of the AFCON which is mostly to suit the convenience of the European game. The irony should ring quite potent that the African game – rooted as it is in anti-colonial history – will be forced to play vassal to the interests whom it had to fight for the oxygen of its own existence.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu