Americans have reasons to root for Ghana

The Black Stars ended the U.S. World Cup run, but their country is a longtime fan of ours.

By Jonathan Zimmerman

I'm an American, but I used to live in Ghana. So last weekend's World Cup match between the two countries presented a sports-fan dilemma.

I ended up rooting for Ghana. And so should you, once you've absorbed the shock of its 2-1 overtime victory over the United States.

The first reason is the simplest: Ghanaians love America. In a 2009 survey by World Public Opinion, 76 percent of Ghanaians reported a "mainly positive" view of U.S. influence in the world. Compare that with France (36 percent), Germany (18 percent), and Russia (7 percent), and you get the idea. Only 60 percent of Americans said our influence was positive; by that measure, Ghanaians like us more than we like ourselves.

Their pro-American sentiments date back to Ghana's founding leader, Kwame Nkrumah, who spent 10 years in the Philadelphia area while earning degrees from Lincoln and Penn. After returning home to spearhead his country's campaign for freedom from Great Britain, Nkrumah would become a vociferous critic of American foreign policy.

But he retained a strong affinity for America, as a nation and as a concept. Drawn especially to the civil rights movement and its soaring affirmation of American ideals, Nkrumah hosted Martin Luther King Jr. and other African American activists at Ghana's 1957 independence celebrations. He also provided a refuge for civil rights warrior W.E.B. Du Bois, who was hounded out of the United States and is buried in Ghana.

Nkrumah admired Americans' optimism, vitality, and informal spirit most of all. In my favorite picture of him, he's teaching the "High Life," a popular local dance, to Peace Corps volunteers. (Ghana was the first country to welcome the Peace Corps.) It's hard to tell who's having more fun - Nkrumah or the volunteers.

Nkrumah saw Ghana as the vanguard of African freedom. That's why he adorned the new Ghanaian flag with a black star, recalling the short-lived Black Star shipping line of Jamaican Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, who hoped to transport black people between the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.

So it's especially fitting that Ghana's Black Stars - that's the name of the national soccer team - are the only Africans in the quarterfinals of the first World Cup on African soil. A headline in South Africa's Mail & Guardian last week declared, "We are all Black Stars."

In our land of multiple professional sports leagues, it's hard to imagine soccer's stranglehold on the African psyche. In Ghana, I never saw anyone playing, watching, or discussing any other sport. When the Black Stars were on the air, everything else came to a halt; giant crowds gathered around outdoor televisions, greeting each goal with whoops and horns. All-night dances and prayer vigils marked the victory over the United States.

That, too, is a legacy of Kwame Nkrumah. He poured scarce resources into Ghana's national team, and he helped establish the Africa Cup of Nations tournament. Eventually, he predicted, soccer would "earn for our dear continent a greater respectability and recognition at the universal level."

It hasn't turned out that way. That's mainly because of the continent's poverty; Forbes recently ranked Ghana's economy ninth worst in the world. How do you field a hot team without cold, hard cash?

But there's something else. Despite the hype and horns, many Africans don't really believe they deserve a place on the world stage. Most of the African national teams, including Ghana's, are still coached by non-Africans.

Ask people in Africa about this sorry fact, and they may say something about the non-African coaches' wider "international experience." But dig a bit deeper, and they'll tell you that the top African stars - who often play professionally in Europe, under European coaches - wouldn't obey a fellow African. Kwame Nkrumah would have been dismayed at that.

But Nkrumah would have been proud to see Ghana advance to the round of eight, where it will play Uruguay on Friday. He would welcome the support of Americans, a people he loved and admired. And he would be astonished to hear a bold slogan resonating across Africa and around the globe: Go, Black Stars!

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He taught in NYU's study-abroad program in Ghana in 2008 and 2009.