Nutmeg Radio

And there it was.  Breaking News:  Togo Team Bus Attacked By Angolan Rebels.

Response:  Angola is a dangerous country and therefore should not be hosting the African Cup of Nations (CAN).

Of all the cogent arguments detailing why Angola should not host the ACN, this might be the worst.  It reeks of a double standard and a level of ignorance that the media is complicit in maintaining.

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The Facts: The Togo team bus was making its way to Angola from its camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo when it was ambushed by rebels.  The team was headed to Cabinda, an oil rich province in Northern Angola with a long and active history of rebel activity.  For decades, groups in this region have been fighting for independence from Angola.  One of these groups, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), claimed responsibility for the attack.

Cabinda is a tiny province isolated from the rest of Angola.  From Cabinda, you have to drive through DR Congo to get to the rest of Angola.  Now, the rest of Angola isn’t tiny.  For those of you in the U.S., Angola is roughly twice the size of Texas.  If you’ve ever driven through Texas once, you would know that driving through Texas twice would require multiple bathroom breaks.  For those of you familiar with Europe, Angola is roughly twice the size of France.

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Most thoughtful people understand that it is a stretch to implicate an entire country for unrest in an isolated region elsewhere in the country.  This principle is easier to understand when you are knowledgeable about geography.  However, this principle may be a bit harder to grasp if, for example, you think that Angola is a small country, or that Africa is a country.  Let’s look at some concrete examples.  If El Paso County, a county on the U.S. – Mexico border, was a conflict zone, you would be hard pressed to find a media outlet suggesting that isolated unrest in El Paso is evidence that the United States is a dangerous place.  Why?  Because a rudimentary look at U.S. geography reveals that the U.S. is huge.  You don’t have to be a geography PhD student to follow this.  Similarly, most Americans would laugh at you for suggesting that an incident in Texas would mean that it is unsafe to host games in St. Louis or New Orleans.  Many Europeans would laugh at you for suggesting that unrest in Corsica would disqualify France from hosting matches in Paris.  But for some reason, when it comes to developing countries, too many people, from pundits to coaches (e.g. Tottenham’s ‘Arry Redknapp and Hull City’s Phil Brown), are too willing to indict a country, if not a continent, based on the activities in a relatively small enclave.  That, my friends, is what we call a double standard.

Angola, like many African nations, does have a troubled past.  And if we’re being honest, Angola’s problems are not all in the past. The Angolan government operates in Cabinda like it is still in conflict.  The government still actively restricts freedom of expression and association in Cabinda.  Human rights abuses, from imprisoning dissenters without due process to cracking down on peaceful opposition, are regularly chronicled by NGOs operating in the region.  Sounds a bit like China, huh.

But when it comes to the ACN, if Angola and the Confederation of African Football are guilty of anything, they are guilty of deciding to host games in Cabinda.   Presumably, someone analyzed the potential venues in Angola for the ACN and decided that Cabinda was a viable host city even though publicly available information quickly reveals that Cabinda is a troubled region.  But we shouldn’t conflate the issue of improper venue selection and the conclusion that all of Angola is dangerous.  Clearly, heads should roll over the decision to select Cabinda as a tournament venue, but there are plenty of places in Angola that can safely host matches.

Double standards and ignorance have clouded the way Africa is perceived by many for too long.  For too many people, countries like Angola take on the characteristics of its most dangerous regions, no matter how small or remote these areas are.  For too many people, Africa is still treated like a country, rather than a continent made up of over fifty distinct nations.  One of the main reasons people still think like this is because media outlets still feed the public’s ignorance.  The media is sophisticated enough to unwind the inner workings of the municipal derivatives industry in the United States, but apparently not sophisticated enough to deduce that the events in a remote province in an African country doesn’t necessarily have a relationship to the events elsewhere in the country or elsewhere on the continent.  If there is a relationship, it is the responsibility of the media to make the connection, rather than simply assuming or accepting that one exists. It is difficult to imagine major media outlets allowing this leap of reasoning to pass the editing process if the region at issue was in the United States or Europe.  But when it comes to Africa, ignorance is permissible and basic geography flies out the window.

This incident has little to do with all parts of Angola, or Africa for that matter, being inherently dangerous; it has to do with poor planning.  Period.   The sooner people realize that, the better off we’ll all be and the easier it will be to start having productive and nuanced conversations about the capabilities of African nations.