×

The Football Factory's hooligan assembly line

The 2015 season of the Kenya Premier League was supposed to kick off this afternoon.

Robert Asembo, an official of Football Kenya Federation said, after a meeting with Sam Nyamweya late last year that, “we (sic) have always wanted a single league that begins in August in line with the rest of the world.

“So we will transit with a two-tier league that will run from January to June (in 2015). And then fine-tune the details to begin a single league beginning in August.”

Almost inevitably, like those car mechanics who fine tune car engines into eternity, eleven days into the New Year, the Kenya Premier League Limited fixtures of 2015 are not yet out and neither is the kick-off date known.

So the only football games Kenyan fans will watch today are the English Premier League ones, and the only Kenyan we expect to see playing football on TV today is Victor Wanyama, in the Southampton-Manchester United tie at Old Trafford.

The mandarins of Kenyan football, as local sports journalists refer to them, do not even seem to know whether we will have a sixteen- or eighteen-team league.

NO SHIRT SPONSOR

The off-field chaos extend to arguably the biggest team in Kenya, Gor Mahia, who did not have a shirt sponsor for the better part of the last season. To add injury to this insult, Kenya Revenue Authority then slapped K’Ogalo with a Sh 118 million back tax estimate, with a KRA official saying “Gor has been identified as one of the non-compliant tax payers.”

This made some Gor fans, the Green Army, to walk around nude at the Jomo Kenyatta Sports Ground in Kisumu, on the day the club won the 2014 KPL title. “This ritual demands we be naked the way Kenya Revenue Authority wants to strip us naked,” one of them reportedly said.

A section of these fans, or hooligans then walked in their birthday suits to the eateries along the lake shore, demanding they be given soap to bathe in Lake Victoria or “else we will drown you over here,” the bullies playfully told the women selling fish by the lakeside.

PROBLEM TO YOUR SOLUTIONS

This writer remembers encountering the Green Army late last year after they had played a match at City Stadium. They had, thankfully, won.

I was on a scooter to the Central Business District and a rather fat fan jumped on right behind me, almost causing the front pedal of the motor-bike to ‘wheely,’ as he shouted, “I am demanding to be air-lifted to the Tom Mboya statue.”’

As the boda-boda rider and I made our way up into the CBD with our overweight hitch-hijacker, this writer saw the T-shirt slogan that summed it all up —
“We are the Problem to All your solutions.” You could call that hooliganism, but no one quite sums up the football hooligan problem like British writer and ex-soccer street thug, John King, in his book The Football Factory.

King, a hardcore Chelsea hooligan and member of The Firm (vile and violent Chelsea supporting street thugs, before the EPL came into being and football there got gentrified) in the 1980s, writes not only about the testosterone- and lager-fuelled bellicose fury of The Firmers, but is also a savage social document.

Talking about a London street fight between Chelsea and traditional enemies Tottenham Hotspurs’ fans: “The two mobs clash again, and this time it’s less frantic, trouble flaring across the street, mostly punches and kicks, a couple of blades coming out, flashing in the early Sunday afternoon sunlight, sparks of a silver fear which make you pull back and everyone mob together and do in the (knife flashing) offender. Rod, the Lord of karate, using his know to bruise the wielder’s throat, sending the cunt spluttering into the Tottenham crowd, choking on his blood and four letter words...”

Talking of the way the police deal with the street brawlers when breaking up these vicious football fights, King says: “The police have got all their numbers covered and you know that any complaint you make against police brutality will come to nothing.”

The police love football fans because they can do whatever they want to them.

SCUM OF THE EARTH

“We,” writes King, “are lower than Blacks because there’s no politician going to stand up for the rights of mainly White hooligans like us.”

Without irony, King defiantly whines: “And we don’t want their help. We stand on our own feet. There’s no easy place to hide. No Labour council meeting protecting us because we are an ethnic minority stitched up by the system.

“The old bill (police) are the scum of the earth. They are the (expletive deleted) of creation. Lower than Blacks, Pakis, yids, whatever, because these minorities at least don’t hide behind a uniform. You gotta respect that.”

The following Friday, after the street fight against the Spurs’ hooligans, King gets himself some ‘bird’ action in cheap London, the 1980s fashion style and machismo swimming across in this section.

“Her body’s well put together and she’s in jeans, baggy round the waist, showing the shape of her behind. We sneak past her mate in the flat, a girl with a fat belly from being preggers with a bloke who has either run off to sea or gone in to prison. The fat belly girl is watching telly and eating a box of chocolates and wishing life was like it is in the love story and videos she likes watching...”

King goes for a piss in his ‘bird’s’ bathroom, but when he returns, she has passed out from too much drink.

THE GREEN ARMY

Knackered himself, King picks a blanket off the flat floor, coils into a chair and goes to sleep, sneaking out at dawn, silently, to catch a taxi home.

“Don’t sit at home flicking channels expecting someone to live your life for you,” he advises the expectant young lady as he steals out into the light of early Saturday.

And perhaps this is the underlying message of The Football Factory, and the basic philosophy of fans like Huruma’s Titus Omondi who last year admitted to FeverPitch that he had attended all of Gor Mahia’s fixtures in 2014, saying, “we will follow K’Ogalo to every part of this country. Even if the venue is Kapedo, we will still go.”

The chronicles of a lost tribe — the Green Army in a divided nation where the real army at times seems to be failing in insecurity, disenfranchised masculinities fed up of being told that they are worth nothing in a divided nation full of misery.

A chap like Titus may then leave the collapsing buildings of Huruma for Kapedo, to follow K’Ogalo, to chase the dream of winning a 2015 KPL trophy.

Because, in a country where dreams become slowly unhinged, sometimes that is the only dream that remains valid: a season-long dream worth following to the ends-of-the country.

Tony Mochama was the 2014 Sanaa Theatre Awards for best writer in Arts and Culture.