Reflections on a bunch of Canadians who thirty years ago threw a football around a Tanzanian school yard every Monday afternoon.
This month is the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Kinondoni Touch Football League.
Maybe “Football League” is a bit grand. It was really just a bunch of guys getting together every Monday afternoon to throw the ball around for an hour and then adjourning to the pub for talk about what was going on at work. But our playing field was in Kinondoni, a suburb of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; our pub, which was right out of a Somerset Maugham short story, overlooked the Indian Ocean and our work was helping Tanzania with its post-independence experiment in social and economic development.
We were bunch of Canadians in our twenties, on CIDA or CUSO contracts, who were part of Canada’s extensive and mostly valuable support of that experiment.
Every Monday afternoon we would gather under one of the flame trees that surrounded our playing field and choose up sides. And then to the amusement of the school children, who were drifting off the field as we were starting our game, one of us would throw our oddly shaped orb into the air and the rest of us would run after it.
The league flourished for only two or three years and had a changing cast of players as rookies arrived from Canada and veterans returned home to get on with their lives. At the time it seemed like an ordinary group of people who had come to Tanzania for a various reasons. Altruism. Adventure. Experience. A respite between school and the real world. Most of us were regulars, but there were irregulars such as “Our Man in Mkamasi”. From time to time, he would emerge from the Mkamasi Wildlife Reserve, to play football, have a beer and entertain us with stories, no doubt tinged with a touch of hyperbole, of living in the wilds of Africa.
In retrospect it was not such an ordinary group. Thirty years later, the League’s alumni include a bank president, two presidents of major Canadian universities, an Ambassador and a Bay Street Q. C. One of our colleagues, though I don’t recall him ever playing football, sits on the Supreme Court of Canada. At one point, “Our Man in Mkamasi” was a Member of Parliament.
Most of us did not pursue our early interest in economic development, but some did, either continuing to work in the developing world or in the Canadian north.
The post game talk on the patio of the Oyster Bay Hotel focused almost entirely on Tanzania. Its dreams. Its future. Its President and “Founding Father”, Julius Nyerere, whose ideas and idealism energized our work places. Its politics. Its development strategies and projects. And Canada’s role in those dreams. It was exhilarating to be part of Tanzania’s fledgling democracy and economy. And it was heady stuff since we held jobs in the Tanzanian civil service whose responsibility far out weighed our experience.
But we talked mostly about Tanzania not just because it was our passion. It was also about the only thing we heard about. In those pre-satellite, pre-CNN, pre-internet days our isolation was almost total. The October Crisis that was riveting Canadians back home, passed almost unnoticed among the players of the Kinondoni Touch Football League. Our focus was on the wisdom of Ujamma villages, the coup in Zanzibar and Canada’s ill fated investment in a modern bread factory in Dar es Salaam.
We played only one away game, a Challenge Match with the American Embassy. It was without doubt the dirtiest athletic event I every played in. This was, of course, understandable when one considers that the game was played at the height of the Vietnam War and we were a bunch of liberal Canadian aid workers and they were mostly employees of the US Information Center, which was generally acknowledged as the place that was used to provide cover for the CIA agents in Tanzania.
Elbows flew between players who were twenty-five yards away from the ball. Our two cultures managed to down a beer or two after the game without incident, but neither side issued another challenge.
The League sputtered to an end as contracts ran out and we returned to the real world. But looking back over the past 30 years, lifelong bonds were created during our years in Tanzania and The Kinondoni Football League’s Monday afternoon games. Some active, very close, lifelong friendships, but among most of us a sort of familiarity that allows us to slide comfortably into conversations without the need to reconnect through incidental conversation about children or current jobs. No matter how long it has been since the last meeting. Whether it is as someone passes through Toronto or Ottawa or Calgary or Vancouver and a dinner or beer is shared. Or when the phone rings and lunch is suggested or a favour asked. Or a trip is planned to include wherever “The Ambassador” is currently posted.
Not sure what the bond is. Perhaps it was being part of a noble experiment in nation building into which each of us poured a great deal of emotion and effort and which to-day many analysts feel was a failure. Perhaps it was simply because we were young and isolated together in a country and culture far from our own. Or perhaps it was throwing a football around in a school yard for an hour each week and sharing a couple of pints afterwards.