I am ready to be hurt again. But first, let me tell you about the glory days.
In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey marched up and down the streets of Harlem declaring a Black kingdom for this world. “Back to Africa” was his message. He had just formed a shipping company, the Black Star Line, to carry Black people and crucial goods across the Caribbean with dreams of expanding to the African continent and opening ever-widening diasporic routes toward freedom. W.E.B. Du Bois, a notable hater, labeled him “a lunatic or traitor,” a position he would eventually soften by moving to Accra to live out his last days in the early 1960s. Uncle Sam, an even bigger hater, sent FBI agents to sabotage and arrest him, which they did on trumped-up mail fraud charges in 1922.
This didn’t stop Garvey’s work from leaving a lasting impression on Kwame Nkrumah, a young university student who had traveled from the Gold Coast, then a British colony in West Africa, to southeastern Pennsylvania in 1935. He soon took the baton from Garvey, scheming for larger networks of solidarity across the Atlantic. In 1957, when Nkrumah led Ghana to independence, advancing Garvey’s dream of creating a new, independent African nation, he honored Garvey by placing a Black Star in the center of the country’s flag. He also opened a new Black Star Line to replace Garvey’s, which had folded after the latter’s arrest. And, when it came time to name that new nation’s football team, he christened them the Black Stars.
From the team’s inception, the Black Stars have embodied a Pan-Africanism that extends beyond symbolism. Ahead of the 1966 World Cup, the Black Stars led a continental boycott after FIFA allocated a single spot for the continents of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The boycott worked, and at the next tournament, Africa was finally given its own slot.
Throughout the 1960s, the Black Stars excelled on the field as well, enthralling fans from Tripoli to Luanda and Khartoum and back, winning the Africa Cup of Nations in 1963 and 1965, and reaching the finals in the following two editions. The ensuing decades were also successful: The Black Stars won the tournament twice more, in 1978 and 1982, and finished as runners-up in 1992. Over those decades, children fantasized about stepping into the boots of heroes like Frank Odoi, Abedi Pele and Karim Abdul Razak.
Still, it wasn’t until 2006 that Ghana first qualified for the World Cup. That year, the likes of Richard Kingson, Sammy Kufuor, Michael Essien, Sulley Muntari, Stephen Appiah, and Asamoah Gyan brought Ghanaian Jama—a Ghanaian adroitness, ingenuity, and flair akin to Brazil’s ginga—to the international stage and go on to form a constellation in their own right.
Back then, it was impossible to get a cab anywhere whenever the Black Stars were playing, as drivers remained parked to immerse themselves in the game spilling out of the radio. I remember once being caught out by the start of a match and rushing—as much as that is possible—on a Trotro, a privately owned minibus. I was so enraptured by the game on the radio that I couldn’t tell if the sways and bumps I felt were from the potholes the Trotro failed to evade or the vicarious feeling of the shifts and glides of Appiah—nicknamed, naturally, Tornado—who seemed to orchestrate every attack.
These days, the Black Stars have become a bit of an embarrassment. Some Ghanaians now actively root against the team, something I witnessed while watching the 2023 AFCON group-stage game against Egypt in a jam-packed open-air plaza. When Mostafa Mohamed scored to equalize for Egypt, condemning Ghana’s chances of progressing past the group stage after losing our first game, the crowd erupted in joy. I couldn’t parse the cognitive dissonance. I asked the person standing next to me, who explained that a bunch of people had placed bets against the Black Stars. A local prophet had predicted Ghana wouldn’t win, emboldening more people to gamble. They were happy to go home with something rather than nothing.
There is a sense that corruption around the Ghanaian Football Association has devoured any interest and investment in sporting excellence. In recent years, international tournaments have primarily served as vehicles for individuals with connections to the FA and Sports Ministry to saddle the state with debt and line their pockets with funds intended for field maintenance, academy development, and even player payments. During the 2014 World Cup, Ghanaian officials had to fly cash to Brasilia to pay national team players, who had threatened a boycott until they received the money they were owed for qualifying. A parliamentary inquiry was launched, revealing a cluster of scams and rackets justifying the players’ paranoia. In the end, no one was held accountable.
Afterward, a friend who attended the games at that tournament as part of an official fan group organized by the FA told me about the mind-boggling situation they found themselves in soon after arriving in Brazil. The people who were supposed to book hotels for some fans pocketed much of the money, booking accommodations so far from the stadiums that their group missed their first game because they were caught in traffic. They decided to watch the second game from a cheap hotel, which, as it turns out, did not have international broadcasting. So the Ghanaian fans, who traveled to Brazil to support the team, called their relatives in Ghana just to listen to the English-language television commentary for a game that was being played kilometers away, a game they had tickets to attend.
John Mahama, whose lenient administration turned a blind eye to such debacles, is back in power, having won elections in 2024. There is, generally, a general sense of relief and optimism in the country after the previous eight years under Nana Akufo-Addo, arguably the worst and most corrupt president Ghana has had since becoming a democracy in 1992. Yet President Mahama’s record around the World Cup and the lack of enforcement of any changes recommended by the parliamentary inquiry remain a cause for concern.
Here is where old hopes, fantasies, and wishes upon stars come in. A brilliant performance by the Black Stars, after all, would be a perfect distraction. Who can ever forget the excitement of Osman Bukari scoring in the 89th minute against Portugal in the 2022 World Cup and SIUUUING in front of Cristiano Ronaldo? As of this writing, many of Ghana’s best players—Mohammed Kudus, Kamaldeen Sulemana, Abdul Fatawu Issahaku—are recovering from injury. Antoine Semenyo, a winger for Manchester City, has had a long season. To add to the uncertainty, Otto Addo, the coach who led Ghana to the last World Cup, was fired in April after a string of losses in pre-tournament friendlies, with months to go before this year’s tournament. Carlos Queiroz—a storied assistant manager at Manchester United and most recently the coach of Oman—has been brought on to steady the ship. Whether his pragmatic, compact style of play is what the Black Stars need remains to be seen. Still, he has excited fans with his pedigree and a recent declaration: that the soul of the Black Stars is youth.
So, as the Black Stars prepare for a knockout round that could eventually take them back to Garvey’s New York City, all we have is the hope that a return to the hallowed grounds of their radical ancestors will inspire a crop of young players to thrill their supporters and once more make Pan-African dreams a reality.