I have told this story before. But it bears re-telling in the current circumstances. More than 30 years ago, a friend was involved in a car accident. He was driving back home in the wee hours of the morning, after an all-night party. No one quite knows what happened, but the accident was dreadful enough to leave him hospitalised in critical condition. By the time his dad got to his bedside, his mum and grandma were done crying. More hawkish than both female parents, my friend’s father reminded him about existing concerns over how fast he drives and wondered how that might have contributed to the accident.
Grandma would have none of her son’s callousness. She invited him to be more grateful to God that the outcome of the accident was not worse than his son ending up in a hospital bed. According to grandma’s narration of the accident, just before my friend ran into whatever it was that violently and illegally stopped the car he was driving, a black cat walked across the road. That, apparently, was how my friend accounted for the accident to both his mum and grandma. Evidently unimpressed, his dad asked my friend, “After how many bottles of beer did this cat appear?” Limbs in casts and groggy from the sedative, my friend could barely repress a chuckle. He had been outed!
Yes. Africans do not die. They are killed. And as kids, this knowledge came in handy. We did not fail examinations. No. Rather, we were handed poor grades by malevolent teachers – and in the case of external examinations like the WAEC and JAMB, demonic markers who “will never see God’s face”. If only these demons stopped their mischief at playing God with our examination scripts. Like gremlins, they were in the works, and everywhere, too. Cancers? Depression? Suicide – “God forbid!”? These were failures of the Caucasian’s constitution, and of his growing isolation from God. The only way an African could present with the symptoms associated with any of these ailments was if a witch – or similarly evil-eyed folk – put a hex on her.
It was that simple. It has always been. And it still is.
Not surprisingly, across “the fields of her endeavours”, the African similarly imagines herself at the business end of ceaseless conspiracies. In truth, what else could the host of enemies be up to, if not plotting her undoing? A few years ago, she would have eventually showed up at the shaman’s place in quest of an amulet with which to ward-off the evil designs of friends at play, and colleagues at work. Today, churches will do just as fine – completely repurposed from places where the faithful seek divine grace, to places where you pray for all manner of infirmities and afflictions to befall one’s enemies.
The match last week between Morocco and Senegal that brought the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) 2025 to a close underlined the vulnerabilities of this way of thinking. At the top of the conspiracists’ explanation for the many controversial incidents in a match that brought out the ugliness in the continent’s approach to competitive conduct was the one that suggested that following the Senegalese team’s decision to abandon the match (after the Moroccans had been awarded what it considered a dubious penalty) the Grand Pooh-Bahs of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) suffered seller’s remorse – the confederation was until that point, the narratives tell us, hell bent on handing the competition’s winner’s trophy to the Moroccans. The latter were the hosts, after all, and it was only fair that they be recompensed for the financial burden of what was, indeed, a rich spectacle.
Immediately, CAF, reportedly stitched up an agreement that had the Senegalese return to the pitch on the understanding that the Moroccans would make a meal of the resulting penalty kick. Brahim Abdelkader Díaz, the tournament’s eventual lead scorer dutifully obliged. Pat to a “T”? Yes. A very tidy explanation for what, during the live match, were pretty untidy sequences of events. But despite conspiracists’ beautiful explanations, life is a succession of coordination games. For instance, what began as a Hawk-Dove game when the Senegalese Coach called his team out, quickly morphed into a Stag Hunt one as the captain of the Senegalese team managed to get them back into play. In between, the levers that the big cheeses at CAF would have had to pull in the 10 minutes or so during which that match threatened to turn into a farce and the number of persons that had to be on board to coordinate the eventual outcome – as described by this conspiracy theory – were just too many for that explanation to make sense.
This was the most convoluted – if most illustrative for the purpose of this piece’s underlying premise – of the conspiracy theories that have been spawned by the Morocco versus Senegal AFCON 2025 final match. There are lower order similar explanations of diverse events which occurred during the match, some even more macabre (the notion of the “juju ball” and “towel stealing” episodes are emblematic of these). All point, though, to the African’s loathing of simple explanations, abhorrence of the possibility of random occurrences, and willingness to hoist alleged malicious intentions of third parties on petards that belong to him or her as a natural agent.
