This month's festival pick...

All Africa Games, Oct. 4-18, Nigeria

By Patrick Totty

The word “festivals” usually conjures up images of music, dancing, crafts or national celebrations. But in human history, some of the earliest and most important festivals, such as the Olympics, centered on sports and athletic competition. That’s why we’re spotlighting the upcoming 8^th All Africa Games (AAG) in Abuja, Nigeria, Oct. 4-18, 2003, which will be one of the largest sporting events ever held on the African continent.

The games, founded in 1965, had a fitful schedule as various host countries underwent political and social turmoil over the next 13 years. After a nine-year hiatus, the games resumed in 1987 and have kept to a four-year schedule ever since, rotating among various African cities, including Cairo, Egypt; Nairobi, Kenya; Harare, Zimbabwe; and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Africans from every corner of the continent – Berbers, Arabs, Sudanese, Congolese, Afrikaners, Ghanaians and more – may participate in the AAG’s 22 sports, which range from track and field, baseball, gymnastics and soccer to badminton, taekwondo, archery and bicycling. Organizers are expecting to draw 6,000 athletes from 53 countries, making the AAG a virtual mini-Olympics.

This year’s edition will take place in Abuja Stadium, now undergoing construction. Abuja, Nigeria’s inland capital city (the former capital was at the port city of Lagos, the largest city in the country), lies about 300 air miles north of the Gulf of Guinea in western Africa. The capital administers a territory of 356,000 square miles – about twice the area of California – and a population of nearly 120 million people, by far the largest in Africa (and almost twice the size of Egypt’s population, at 66 million, the second most populous in Africa).

Given Nigeria’s size and regional importance, hosting the AAG is a long-awaited coup. The presence of so many athletes will draw attention from 1,500 journalists, and the presence of high government officials from around the world.

In some ways the games will be a preview of the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Since 1960, when the slender barefoot Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila won the marathon at the Rome Olympics, and 1965 when the jaunty Kenyan miler Kipchoge Keino set world records in the 3000 and 5000 meter runs, Africa has become the home of the world’s greatest distance runners. East Africa, including Kenya and Ethiopia, came to dominate distance racing for years, until successfully challenged in the 1990s by Morocco and Algeria.  

Originally the games were the brainchild of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics movement. De Coubertin’s notion was that an all-African games would serve to unite the native peoples of the badly divided continent. But the idea of any event that might serve to unite the energies of the then-colonized Africans was offensive to the English, French, German, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese governments that had carved empires out of the continent.

In the post-WWII era, the idea was resurrected as the Friendship Games, held among Africa’s French-speaking nations. As English-speaking nations joined the games, they were renamed the All Africa Games in 1965.

The AAG’s web site is sophisticated and information-rich: http://www.8allafricagames.org/index.htm