Black chicken, white chicken: patriotism, morality and the aesthetics of fandom in the 2008 African Cup of Nations in Ghana1

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse issues of representation, fandom and aesthetics in African football. The paper considers the representation of, by and for football fans through a number of images and overlapping discourses that emerged in the course of the African Cup of Nations in 2008. Among these, the most prevailing was a moral discourse that centred, as in the famous case of the Juju man analysed in this paper, on the role, activities and behaviour of Ghanaian fans. A number of different actors – including politicians, pastors, footballers and the fans themselves at home and in the diaspora – who were concerned with promoting a sense of patriotism and projecting an image of Ghana in the world stage as a nation of law-abiding, God-fearing, peaceful, and respectful citizens equally capable of celebrating, partying and organizing public events, reconstructed fandom in moral and aesthetic terms. In this paper I will concentrate on official and popular discourses through an analysis of media representation and through a number of ethnographic examples collected in the course of the tournament among a group of football fans in Kumasi and Accra and in a religious congregation in Kumasi. By doing so I aim to demonstrate how football fandom, both in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, is central to the making and unmaking of morality, identity and subjectivity.