Post-AFCON Reflections: The State of African Football

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Join us on Tuesday March 5th at The Africa Center for a panel discussion with Sean Jacobs, Maher Mezahi, and Fiifi Anaman that explores the development of football on the continent and the issues that are most consequential to its long-term growth. The panel will be moderated by Tunde Olatunji of the Africa Center. 

While the product on the field was the main focus, the tournament also offered insights into the health of African football as a whole, and served as a backdrop for many other important social, geopolitical, and economic developments on the continent. There were on-field protests by players calling attention to conflicts at home, the transfer of the fans’ ire from just the players to include the poor performance of their national footballing bodies, and all of this in the context of a country–Côte D’Ivoire–that is less than a decade removed from a devastating years-long conflict and yet came together impressively to excel as hosts. As football continues to intersect with other aspects of social life, checking in on the state of the sport in Africa allows for a fairly wide, multidimensional look at society more broadly.

SEAN JACOBS: Sean Jacobs is associate professor of international affairs at the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School. He is the publisher of Africa is a Country, a site of criticism, analysis and new writing. The writer Teju Cole described Africa Is a Country as “basically the inside of my head.” His book, Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization, was published on May Day 2019. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked for the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and as a journalist. He has been awarded Fulbright, Shorenstein, Commonwealth, Africa No Filter, and Shuttleworth fellowships.

 

 

 

 

 

MAHER MEZAHI: Maher Mezahi is an Algerian football journalist based in Algiers. He has covered North African football extensively, with his work published in international publications such as the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, ESPN Africa and Al Jazeera English.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FIIFI ANAMAN: Fiifi Anaman is an award-winning Ghanaian writer, broadcaster and author based in Accra. Although versatile, he specializes in football writing. He began his career as a blogger in 2012, and has since gone on to feature on/write for many outlets, among them: BBC, ESPN, SuperSport, Daily Telegraph, Business Insider, Goal.com, Copa 90 and FIFA/Gracenote. He served as the host of the AE Mediacom-produced ‘Sports Xtra’, which aired on Kwese Free Sports (CH. 289 on Kwese Decoder) from Monday to Thursday; 7:00-7:30pm. He also hosted the sports talkshow “Football 360” on Joy Prime TV. In December 2015, he was named the “Best Writing – Column” award winner at the Sport Media Pearl Awards – the inaugural global awards for sports jounalists organized by the International Sports Press Association (AIPS). He was the only African nominee as well as the youngest nominee at the ceremony held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He is the co-author of “The Black Star: Autobiography of C.K Gyamfi” C.K Gyamfi, who died in September 2015, was a Ghanaian football legend who was a joint-record three-time winner of the Africa Cup of Nations and the first African to play professionally in Germany.