"TWENDE YANGAAAAAA!!!"

It’s way overdue that I write about the soccer game Hunter and I saw two weeks ago in “capital city!” Dar es Salaam, the city where Borat would go to watch a ladies make a toilet if he were Tanzanian.

Simba-Yanga was the biggest game of the year in Tanzania’s domestic soccer league, the Ligi Kuu. Think Yankees-Red Sox, if there were no National League, no LA at Anaheim, no Detroit, no Oakland, Minnesota or ChiSox. In the Ligi Kuu, Simba and Yanga are the only teams that count. And they are both located in Dar.

It’s called a derby. I had never heard that term until I studied abroad in Europe in 2004. It means a game played between two teams from the same city. Instead of having to come up with something catchy to describe each rivalry – the Subway Series, the Bay Series, the … Deep Dish Duel? – most sports fans in the world would just use the word “derby” to describe Yankees-Mets, A’s-Giants or Black Sox-Cubs. I have a lot of pride in America…n sports. Treason, in my definition, is preferring soccer* over baseball, or basketball, or football, ironically. But even I, a founding member of Team Halloween, have to admit that the fans at international soccer derbies stand alone in their intensity. If you read things that I write, you know that a lot of things are “the best thing ever” in my mind. But please believe me when I tell you that derbies are the best thing ever.

(*The World Cup is different)

I am a storyteller. I view every moment in terms of how it fits into a larger narrative, how I could write about it. So when stories overlap, it adds a sense of order to life, like things are really meant to happen, that everything truly is connected. East Africa is a world away from the former Yugoslavia; in fact, I’d say it is its polar opposite in almost every category. But despite this gulf, I was able to find a bridge, connecting my first two derby experiences, in Sarajevo and Belgrade, with the most recent, in Dar. He is a middle aged man from a place I know very well. His name is Dušan Kondić (Dew-shawn Cone-deetch).

Kondić is the head coach of Yanga, a shortened version of the club’s real name, the Young Africans, who we came to become big fans of within a span of 48 hours.

I ran into him just above the beach at Bagamoyo two days before the game, as Hunter and I were cutting up from the water through the Millenium Resort to get to the main road. He was stern looking, harsh sounding, and with a facial structure like that, unmistakably Eastern European. Wearing a yellow collared shirt with green warm up pants, he looked like a St. Vincent's P.E. coach. A P.E. coach that was a lit cigarette away from placing us on the Adriatic coast.

He was talking to another man, also decked out in a yellow collared shirt with green warm ups. An assistant P.E. coach? No. I'd heard the intonation in his words, the texture of his voice. And I knew. I may not always be able to tell you which country, but I can pick out the sound of a Slav from a mile away. And these guys were Slavs.

"Odakle ste?"

The man, clearly caught off guard to hear a word like that coming from someone not on his staff, didn't respond. He stopped dead in his tracks, turned towards me, looked me right in the eyes and stared. Glared; that’s more like it. For three solid seconds, an eternity in that context. The silence gave way to momentary anxiety. Had I asked it correctly? My Serbian may have deteriorated to the brink of nonexistence in the year since I left the Balkans, but had I really forgotten how to ask "Where are you from?"

"Where are you from?" I asked again, this time in English.

He did a sort of final look down, and finally came out with it: "I am from Serbia."

For months I had known that the head coach for Yanga -- or was it Simba? -- was from Serbia. I couldn't remember his name, but it always stood out among the Baraka's, Elisante's, Juma's and other Bantu names I'd read in the papers, or heard on the radio, like an ić that needs scratching. Plus, it was always funny to hear or read the word Mserbia in the middle of a sea of Swahili.

Found on the ground a week before the game

Now it appeared as if I was in this celebrity Mserbia's presence. Ironic, isn't it? The origin of the word "slave" dates from the days when Slavs on the Danube were in the position later to be filled by black Africans. And I was meeting him just a stone's throw from the old slave forts in Bagamoyo, a town whose name means "Bury your heart," a testimony to the legacy of Omani Arab rule, when it served as the point of departure from the African mainland for all the Bantu slaves brought from the interior by the Arab caravans, bound for the live auctions on the island of Zanzibar, just a few hours by dhow from Bagamoyo.

"I lived in Serbia for about three months last year," I said.

He seemed surprised. Serbs are usually trying to get out of Serbia. "Tell me, where are you from?"

"America."

"America," he said.

"Uh huh."

"And why were you so long in Serbia?" Now he just seemed suspicious. Like he was in the presence of a spy.

"I don't know, I just liked it. The people, the food, the history ..." Pause for honesty. "Serbian girls."

"Ah yes," he said, smiling, as if he was remembering a time in his life when he, too, was young. "Serbian women are the most beautiful in the world." This coming from a man who moments later told me his wife was African.

"I agree."

"You like Serbia?" he asked after I had already told him that yes, I do like Serbia. The corners of his mouth turned up, just a bit, giving him the appearance of a man who knows something you don't know. "So tell me, what do you think of Serbian people?" It almost sounded as if he was testing me.

I briefly considered trying to explain the nuances of my relationship with the people I met during my three months there -- the Chetniks and the cool people, the three-fingered thugs and those who yearn to be a part of the European community -- but I could tell my thoughts would not be well received. So I just said that I loved them all, with enthusiasm, without reservation. I was trying to get him to open up to me; people are always more prepared to talk to you when they think you're on their side.

"So you see, when you turn on TV, the news say one thing, but truth is another," the man said, as if he was lecturing to a crowded classroom. Truth is one of the first words I think of when I think of the Balkans. Everyone is interested in obtaining the rights to it; no one feels that any sort of search is necessary. "Your government wants Kosovo to be independent because it is a major crossing point for weapons, drugs..."

I'll spare you from the rest.

It had been almost a year since I was in Kosovo, and I couldn't seem to escape from it. In the news, in the speeches George W. Bush was making from Tanzania, in my thoughts, in emails from O.G. Zoka, even on the streets of Iringa, where we'd been just a couple of nights before.

A bar in Iringa, TZ, seen a few days before the game.

The assistant P.E. coach took the baton of Serbian propaganda when the first man, whose name I still hadn't gotten at that point, walked off to deal with something inside the hotel.

"FIFTEEN CHILDREN!" he screamed. "The Albanians, they are having FIFTEEN CHILDREN!" His eyes were just as loud as his voice. "And we Serbs, we are making one or two. Tell me. How can we keep up with that?"

I thought about giving him the answer, but kept my mouth shut.

"You know, we never, attacked, a country, outside of our OWN." He enunciated almost every word to make sure I understood. Bosnia, Croatia, and especially Kosovo, šta je to? The ancient kingdom of Serbia. "We only fought for what was OURS," he slammed home, beating both fists against his chest. "One hundred years ago, we helped Albanian people. We give them house, we give them money, we give them..." he looked at the ground, clearly trying to remember the word for what we were standing on.

"Land? For farming?"

"Yes, we give Albanian people land to farm," he continued. "And now, what? We should give Kosovo to them? Why? Because they have 15 children?" He shook his head. "It is ours. First Serbian king come from there. We will never give Kosovo."

Images of Texas -- or should I say Tejas? – 50 years down the line danced across my mind. Fifteen children. It’s on the horizon in the southwestern United States, but it is part of the reality today in Kosovo. Demographics are much more tangible than history books. And the assistant P.E. coach was trying to deny this fact. The only problem with his defiance, as I once again decided to keep to myself, was that the heart of the Serbian nation was no longer beating in a Slavic body. It had already been removed, transplanted to a nation with even more tenure in the Balkan Peninsula than the Slavs, the ancient Illyrians, known today as Albanians. After nearly nine years of international administration under UN and NATO auspices, Pristina produced a unilateral declaration of independence on February 17 of this year, recognized by almost everyone but Moscow, Belgrade, and a handful of European states with problems of minority populations within their borders.

"I only have one more question for you," I said, trying to change the topic from the K-word to something a little more pertinent. "You're a Serb, but you're also a soccer coach.“ Do you smoke cigarettes?"

This is not an official figure, but I once heard that 78 percent of Serbians are regular smokers. I thought the number too low. Not just for Serbia, but for the entire region. Of all the people I met in the former Yugoslavia, I think I can count on both hands the total number who didn’t smoke. And they were almost all girls.

"No, no." He shook his head and took a step back, smiling, as if he was used to getting shit for it back home.

"OH MY GOODNESS!" I yelled, reeling backwards. "OH! MY GOODNESS!"

As I took my fifth backpedal, done for dramatic effect, I nearly ran right into Kondić, whose name I still did not know at that point. He had skipped politeness and gone right into K-word propaganda when I approached him on the boardwalk.

“Do you smoke cigarettes?” I asked. If anyone was going to be the Jim Leyland of the group, it was Kondić.

“No,” he said, trying to keep up the Serious Serb act, but clearly amused at my theatrics.

“OH MY GOODNESS!”

Both of the staid old men were laughing when the young assistant, probably in his 20’s and tall like a Montenegrin, walked up.

“What about you? Do you smoke cigarettes?”

He shot a glance at both of his superiors and then looked back at me. He shook his head. Another no. Three in a row.

The odds of asking three Serbs in a row if they smoke, and getting three no’s, is on par with Don’t-Call-Me-President Putin ordering an invasion of Kosovo to restore it into Belgrade’s authority.

The young assistant, who reminded me of the cool kids I met in his hometown, Belgrade, never even thought to bring up Kosovo when he found out he was talking to an American. He just wanted to talk about soccer. No cigarettes, no nationalism. I guess that means there's hope for change in Serbia.

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What I didn't mention from my conversation with Kondić was the part about soccer. Yes, he'd admitted, he was the coach of Yanga -- that explained the pack of athletic, Tanzanian 20-something's, also dressed mostly in green and yellow, that were milling around the beach when Hunter and I had first cut up through the Millenium boardwalk. And yes, there was a game coming up, the last one of the season, a mere formality, seeing as in the four months since he'd taken the job as head man, Kondić had led Yanga from ninth place to league champions. Win, lose or draw, they would be hoisting the Ligi Kuu Vodacom Cup over their heads come the final whistle on Sunday in Dar.

"Who are y'all playing?"

"We are playing Simba."

A Serb, a soccer derby, and not shit to do.

"Hunter," I said, as we were walking back to our guest house, "we need to go to this game."

Two days later, we were up before dawn, trying to catch the first vehicle out of town, bound for Dar es Salaam.

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If Kondić was the bridge that connected a sense of Balkan brate-hood to the trio of derbies, than another man, a Tanzanian in the age range right in between ours and the Serb’s, emerged as the character in this story that continued the theme of local hospitality. His name is Innocent. That's what he told us, at least.

"Innocent! My name is Innocent! That is my name!”

As we soon realized, though, there was good reason for him to be so demonstrative in telling us his “real” name: everyone else and their mother calls him Osama.

Innocent until proven guilty

And he was clearly a Muslim, or at least half Muslim, talking to a couple of Americans in a city that had an Al Qaeda bomb bring down the U.S. Embassy in 1998.

The fact that we were all milling around across the street from the stadium in the same pre-game watering hole, creatively named Stadium Bar, getting drunk and watching the seedy display of Tanzanian cultural contradiction, brought to you by Tusker Lager!, proved his innocence just fine in my book.

Gross.

Grosser.

Brought to you byyyyyyyy TUSKAHHHHHH!

It was Osama’s fresh style that got my attention initially. I had never seen anything like it before. People who have the balls to walk out of their house looking like that are the kind of folks that I like. He would have been amazing at Assassins, I thought, as I watched him back-slapping, holding court and guzzling Castles like the gas tank inside my mom’s new SUV.

Everyone seemed to know this dude. Only that kind of guy could pull off the half beard. I stared right at his eyes for about 20 seconds, waiting for him to see me, so I could beckon him to come over to where Hunter and I were standing. He was greeting all around, kissing cheeks, giving long distance points to his homies at far ends of the bar, getting ready for the game. I noticed the color of his shirt almost immediately; the whole Stadium Bar was divided into yellow and green, red and white. I remembered Yanga’s colors from the players on the beach.

Finally, Osama looked my way.

“Njoo!” I mimed, using the Tanzanian hand motion for the word “come,” too: instead of pulling the air towards you with your fingers, Wabongo point their palm in your direction and clasp their hand into a fist in rapid succession. “Njoo!”

His yellow t-shirt with the word Yanga printed in green, front and back, made me happy – after all, Hunter and I were big Yanga fans by this point. Even though we didn’t know the name of a single player as of yet. I asked him about the beard. From what I could gather – Osama was speaking pretty fast, with a lot of slang – the reason for it was “because our job is half done.” Osama is as big a Yanga fan as I am Astros. “We already won the championship, and once we beat Simba, it will be complete, and I will shave the rest.”

The Tanzanian version of a Playoff Beard, I guess.

The scene at this place before the game was something that would have been extremely overwhelming for me had it gone down before I became comfortable in an ocean of black Tanzanians. Sure, there was Where’s Waldo? guy.

See him?

But that wasn’t making us any less conspicuous. It was a film negative equivalent to an analogy once given by my mother’s childhood housekeeper, an old, Southern black man named Frank, who was explaining why he hadn’t chosen the cream colored model when buying a new car: “Because in that cream colored car, I looked like a fly in a pint’a sweet milk.” Hunter and I were albino flies in a pint of sweet milk at midnight.

“Mzungu!”

“Eh, Mzungu!”

“Oya, Mzungu!”

“Jambo, Mzungu!”

At what point do you just stop acknowledging this?

The Safari’s helped me to just stop caring. Hunter and I have gone through different stages of go-to beers in our ten months in Tanzania. They’re all mostly the same price, but improvements in taste come at the expense of the alcohol content. Safari’s, if you get a fresh one, aren’t bad; but if you get a bad one, they suck. They’re called nondo, steel, in slang. TK drank upwards of 13 of them on the First Annual Nairobi-Moshi Rd. Pub Crawl. We drank quite a few ourselves that afternoon, before, during and after the game.

Hunter was even wearing a Safari t-shirt, which he’d gotten for free from a brewery representative looking for highly visible, human billboards. I’d gotten a green Ndovu Lager shirt, which was better looking objectively, but nowhere near as cool as Mwindaji’s Safari threads.

Somehow, we found ourselves walking in step with Osama up the road and towards the stadium gates once we’d finished off our last semi-cold nondo. It was just like Skila had done in Sarajevo, or Vlada in Belgrade. I’ve never been to a derby without a local friend taking me to the best spot in the house and introducing me to all his friends in the bleachers as well.

Just getting into the gates was more chaotic than anything I’ve ever seen at an American sporting event. The cops in Tanzania don’t give a shit about Rodney King type considerations. They beat first, ask questions later. One police officer I actually ran into at the bar before and after the game; he was drinking the whole time, maybe inspired by the guy from the field party in “Dazed and Confused,” who was only there to do two things: drink some beers and kick some ass.

They were in full riot gear. Again, a thread that connects these three stories.

Whack! Whack! WHACK-WHACK! Jesus CHRIST that must hurt to get hit on the legs like that. Or, since most people on the East African coast are actually Muslims, MashaaLAH that must kill.

Not the calf, not the shin, but that muscle in the front, the one that is so difficult to stretch – that’s where they aim. Vlada, the common-law brother-in-law of O.G. Zoka who took me to Red Star-Partizan in Belgrade, told me stories of the days before Milošević was forced out of power, how the cowboy cops would go to town with surgical like precision on non-violent protesters clamoring for his removal. O.G., too, told me stories: “Those guys know what they are doing. They know where to hit you so they do not break your bones, but you are hurt really bad.”

Whack!

A group of five or six cops with those Plexiglass shields, helmets and batons were doing just fine at keeping at bay a crowd of over 100, maskini who couldn’t afford the TSh 5,ooo ticket to get in. Our tickets had been 8,000, a little less than $8. The cops manning the gate ushered us in with urgency, protecting the sheep surrounded by a pack of wolves, panting at the sight of two rich Wazungu who might give them the money to buy a ticket of their own. “Oya Mzungu! Naomba pesa?” Whack! Don’t bother the Wazungu, says the riot cop’s baton. I tried to get my ticket back after handing it to one of the cops – yes, they use polisi to tear tickets and whoop ass – but he tore it to shreds, preventing any possibility of a pass back through the chain link fence.

Sentimentality is not a feature of life in the Third World.

As we entered the compound, I noticed that the cops, too, seemed to be boys with Osama.

Osama was clearly stoked to be able to show off his new Wazungu friends to the rest of the Yanga faithful up high in the bleachers to the right of the entrance. You got the feeling after just a few moments in our seats that we had met the right dude. He just has that charisma that you’re either born with or not. People were drawn to him; they listened to him, respected him. And showing up to the Simba game in tow with two white boys, the flies in the pint of sweet milk reversed, was only adding to his street cred. And they speak Swahili?! Osama was scratching our backs; our presence was scratching his.

“Simama, simama,” he motioned. Standing is actually more comfortable than sitting in those bleachers, which like all other things in Tanzania, show an utter disregard for trifling matters like fire codes. It was more packed in those seats than in the back seat of a daladala at rush hour. I was glad to stand up, like Osama asked.

He pointed to all the Yanga fans to my right, to my left, behind me, and motioned for me to get them riled up. I felt like one of those Spanish conquistadores viewed as a deity by the indigenous population; when I spoke, they responded in thunderous tones.

“TWENDE YANGAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” I roared to the sea of yellow speckled with green to my right. “AHHHHH!”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!” they boomed in reply.

Almost every single person in my scope stood up and began pumping his arms. Every hair on my body stood at attention. I bet Hitler knows exactly the kind of adrenaline I’m talking about.

I turned to the eight rows of Yanga fans cramped into the rows above us: “TWENDE YANGAAAA!”

“AHHHHHHHH!!!”

To my left: “SIMAMENI! TUPIGE KILELE YANGAAAAA!!!!”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

Osama’s mind at this moment: Nice, Mzungu!! He handed me a bottle of Konyagi, a cheap gin/vodka hybrid that really is, as is advertised across the country, “The Spirit of the Nation.” It was like a scene from a medieval war movie, and Osama was handing me some really symbolic sword to hold up for the troops right before leading them into battle. They saw this white kid with Osama holding up a bottle of Konyagi and exhorting them to get rowdy, and get rowdy they did.

The one twist on the ambience at an African soccer game, as opposed to the kind of revelry you find in Europe, is the drums. East Africa is not as musical as the stereotype of Africa would lead you to hope – that’s West Africa – but at Simba-Yanga, they were in full force. The rhythm formed the background hum to the symphony of sounds that overloaded the senses. Songs, cheers, insults (neither Hunter nor I could recall ever having heard the words msenge, a derogatory term for a gay dude, or kuma la mama yako, a phrase that has to do with your mother’s…

Anyway.

The game was anticlimactic.

Boooring part

It was bila-bila, a scoreless tie. Not that it mattered. Like I said, Yanga had already wrapped up the regular season title; this game was meaningless as far as affecting the standings. The Young Africans were going to be raising the big silver trophy over their heads come the 90^th minute whether Simba scored zero goals or 100. But that didn’t do anything to dampen the fire that exists between these two clubs.

There weren’t any flares during the game. I saw a few afterwards, but something tells me they had been saved for the championship celebration, like pioneer kids saving that one piece of candy their Pa gave them for a special occasion such as this. In Sarajevo, and especially in Belgrade, it was like the 4^th of July in the stands, a continuous flow of red and white smoke signals visible from Mars.

Sarajevo.

Why there is no snow on Kilimanjaro anymore; yet another thread

But in Dar, it was drums, Konyagi and kuma la mama yako! Tanzanians are even poorer than Bosniaks and Serbians; they just didn’t have the cash for pyrotechnics, is my guess.

The hospitality hadn’t been restricted to Osama. Within five minutes of squeezing our way into a spot just big enough for the two of us on the concrete bleacher steps, other Yanga fans had sought to help us blend in a little more. Our promotional Safari and Ndovu beer t-shirts, colored dark blue/electric blue and dark green respectively, weren’t cuttin’ it. From out of nowhere, Hunter was handed a yellow knit cap by a person to his right, the word ‘YANGA’ woven in with green thread. And from just over my left shoulder, a weathered black hand placed a yellow CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the one and only Tanzanian political party to ever hold power) bandana into my own. Since I’m the one who looks Jewish, it would have been more fitting had I been the one wearing the Yangulke, but at least my deal kept my hair out of my eyes.

Shalom.

The Simba faithful were all gathered down below, which is fitting, since Simba is below us. I’m a huge Yanga fan, remember? Even though I still don’t know know the name of a single player.

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

It’s always fun to pick a team for no particular reason and then be die hard. Stewy was the only person I ever saw walk around Belgrade wearing Partizan gear, and he never even went to a game! The two times he was bold enough to flash his black Partizan hoodie, a total of about three minutes between the incidents, he had Serbs talking shit to him in a language he understood as if he had grown up in the Balkans. It was all because of the Gypsy trinket exchange one late night in Novi Sad -- when a drunk stranger traded a Bic lighter for a cracked, plastic Partizan key chain – but Stewy was still the biggest Partizan fan in all of Belgrade.

And I was acting like the biggest Yanga fan in all of Dar es Salaam during halftime, when I went back across the street with Osama to grab a quick beer at Stadium Bar.

“Kwa nini umevaa rangi ya Yanga!” one fan yelled at me. He was wearing yellow and green himself, but for some reason he was taunting me about why I was wearing the colors of Yanga.

“MIMI? WE umevaa zile rangi!” I shouted back, asking why the pot would call the kettle yellow and green.

My dad has always told me that one day, I’m going to mouth off to the wrong person, and they’re gonna kick my ass. I was thinking about that while talking shit to all the Simba fans, risking my physical safety for a team I really didn’t care at all about. (I just liked them because of the Serbian connection, but then I found out that both teams are coached by a Serbian).

I mentioned the role the Safari’s played in relaxing my annoyance to being called Mzungu by the entire Stadium Bar clientele while we were pre-gaming. Well, they also made me a lot less worried about taking pictures in public. People get pick-pocketed in TZ all the time, in broad daylight, and I am constantly on guard whenever I’ve got my camera with me. But I was drunk at this point. And I had Osama with me.

It came in handy to have such an mkubwa with me when I ran into this kid.

I simply told Osama I wanted to take pictures of this kid; usually Tanzanians are not down with white boys snapping away without paying them something. But when I’m with Osama, I know I’m exempt from such taxation.He snapped something at the kid in Swahili that I didn’t understand, and I snapped away to my heart’s content.

And to think, I’ve now seen a kid with an old school jersey from my high school in Houston, Texas, AND a dude wearing an old school jersey from my club soccer team in Houston, Texas.

WEST U JERSEY

Nice, Houston.

Osama had been great to us and all, but at the end of the day, he is a Tanzanian who was way nicer to us than he needed to be. That normally means one thing and one thing only: we’re going to be expected to pay him for his services. I’d bought him a beer during halftime, a Castle, 200 shillings more than the Safari I was drinking, as a sign of appreciation, but I hate – HATE – the fact that friendship so often comes with a price tag in Tanzania. That’s where there is no string connecting the Balkans to this country; hospitality there was real and unconditional. I didn’t pay for the last 60 nights I stayed at the Three Black Catz, for Christ’s sake! I met a German girl in Bagamoyo who had stayed at the Backpacker’s Hostel in Arusha for three months, and she recounted how one worker would always ask her in a panic whether or not she had paid yet for the day, every day. So Hunter and I were assuming that the axe was about to fall as the injury time wound down on the 2008 season. We discussed our exit strategy – fast, and without looking back – and prepared to make a dash for it through the dense forest of Yanga and then Simba fans that separated us from the Olympic sized track on the ground level.

We could hear Osama calling out for us as we left without saying goodbye. “Bili! Mwindaji! Subiri!” But we didn’t look back, as agreed. In our minds, a clean break with Osama, before he had the chance to spoil it by asking for money or even demanding it, was the best end to what had been a great day. “Don’t give ‘em a chance to break your heart”; that’s been our motto since early on in A-Town.

But Osama, tall like bin Laden, was faster than we expected. He caught up to us right as we were about to hang a 180 and head for the exits. Rather than sticking out his hand or asking why we had tried to leave without telling him, he led us first onto the track...

Where even the handicapped were gettin' their groove on

... and then onto the pitch. Osama wanted to take us onto the field for the trophy celebration.

I’ll never forget a particular phone conversation I had with my friend Ted last summer, during my two-month transition period at home, about what to expect in Tanzania. He had been there for six weeks as a high schooler on a Putney trip, and like me, is a rabid sports fan. The thing that stands out above all other pieces of advice that Ted gave me that day was his description of the national team soccer game he went to right after arriving in TZ: “It was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had in my life. They treated us like we were a bunch of VIPs. People were getting up and moving so that we could sit front and center, which were like the best seats in the house. We were the guests of honor, just because we were Mzungu’s."

Hey, being a Mzungu also comes with the perks of getting robbed and lied to, so I’ll take some preferential treatment when I can get it. Like walking onto the field to mingle with all the Yanga players and coaches, meet all the best players, who were friends with Osama to the last one, pose for photos with the league commissioner, and even go up and say what’s up to those three Serbian coaches who probably thought they’d never see me again after making a brief appearance in their lives two days before in Bagamoyo.

“Congratulations!” I yelled when I came face to face with Kondić. I couldn’t remember how to say it in Serbia; stupid! We shook hands, and he just looked at me like, “Who in the hell IS this kid?”

Osama was having a grand old time. But it had been a scoreless tie, not a win … would that mean he wasn’t going to shave the other half of his beard?

“We are champions!” I heard Kondić yell when the trophy was making its way out. And I was on the field with my camera, as if I had a press pass. I did have a press pass. It was called white skin.

The funniest thing about it was that I bet you every single one of those players has a day job, and is still poor. Tanzania has never made it to the World Cup, and isn’t looking like it’s about to contend any time soon. They have no players in Europe. They have no money to develop young talent. Ninety five percent of Tanzanians answer with the name of an English Premier League team when you ask which football club they support. In a way, the beauty of the Ligi Kuu is that it still has that amateur spirit that you find today only in college sports in America. The fans support the team; there is no bandwagon element. We weren’t the only ones on the field. Tons of other fans came down, too, though I never could tell exactly which criterion the riot cops were using to discern between those who were to get a front calf beating and those who were to be given a pass. It was a big party. Everyone was smiling, laughing, hugging, and posing for photos.

Brought to you by Vodacom! though. I guess it’s not that amateuristic. More like a Minor League Baseball game, I suppose.

But not really. I love baseball. But there is nothing quite like a good old fashioned derby.