A do or die encounter for Azam, Simba today

FOOTBALL mouthing is finally over and Azam FC and Simba Sports Club are today expected to show Tanzania fans who is better than the other. For over two weeks the two clubs and Simba in particular, were engaged in war of words over what they were capable of today.

The day finally provides the opportunity for both teams to prove to the rest of us why we need to either side seriously. Two things are at the stake for both teams today, namely, the all-important points and more importantly, prestige.

Azam have always had problems whenever they played against Simba in the past. And today it remains to be seen whether they would be able to overcome such problems.

Between the two, Simba badly needs a win today having already lost to their arch soccer rivals early in this season’s Vodacom Premier League. If Simba loses today, they would have relegated themselves to the third slot, in terms of Dar es Salaam’s top guns.

That’s why their match against Azam today is more than a league match, as it revolves around their prestige as one of the oldest clubs (with Young Africans) in East and Central Africa.

Azam on the other hand equally need to win the match today in order to stamp their footprint as top club in Dar es Salaam. Yes, they need to get out as quickly as possible from Simba and Young Africans shadow.

In fact, between the tree top Dar es Salaam clubs, Simba, Young Africans and Azam, the Dar es Salaam ice cream makers have every reason to seize the top spot in Dar es Salaam on account of the massive money they spent in building up their club.

Indeed, given the massive financial resources the club has poured in strengthening the club, there is no reason why they should play a second fiddle against both Simba and Young Africans. While Simba would be playing today to get both points and recoup their past lost glory in Tanzania.

Apart from seeking points and prestige, Azam will be playing the match today to test whether they have a strong side for the CAF Cup tournament they are scheduled to play in less than two months from today.

Therefore if they can beat, convincingly, Simba today, the victory would serve as an indicator to the club’s technical bench to what extent they need to work on the team before the start of the CAF Cup tournament.

Both Azam and Young Africans who would be competing in the CAF Cup and the Champions League respectively, have absolutely no reason why they should not go beyond the preliminaries. For the past three consecutive years, both clubs have failed, miserably, to go beyond the continental clubs’ preliminaries because of various factors which include, among others, poor preparations.

If the two clubs fail, once again, to go beyond the preliminaries, both chief coaches should expect to be shown out of the door. And they should not expect any Tanzanian soccer fan to sympathise with them.

Indeed, it’s high time Tanzanians started to take continental soccer tournaments more seriously. For the time of fluffing in each and every regional and continental soccer tournament need to be brought to a halt.

Tanzanian soccer clubs need to recoup their past glories when they used to call shots in the region. Both Kilimanjaro Stars and Zanzibar Heroes showed clearly, during the just ended CECAFA Challenge Cup in Ethiopia, that finally Tanzanian soccer players are shaking off the rust they have had for years. For much as they were knocked out of the tournament, this time around they were better organized and played better.

Good performance has to start at club level and today’s encounter between Simba and Azam need to mark the start of what Tanzania soccer fans expect from their teams. As is well known, between any two teams, there will always be one winner, but that’s not a problem. What matters most is how the two teams are going to showcase their game.

Ultimately, people want entertainment, they want to be showed well,calculated build ups that reflect that the teams have been highly trained by experienced coaches. Therefore we expect to see the best brand of soccer, we need to be convinced by both teams that they have what it takes to play against the best team outside Tanzania.

In short, Tanzanian clubs in the Vodacom Premier League need to start producing the kind of soccer performance that should make soccer fans from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi to feel the need of traveling to Tanzania to watch them. In 1970s whenever Young Africans played against the then Sunderland, present day Simba in a derby in Dar es Salaam, Kenyans and Ugandans used to travel to Dar es Salaam to watch the encounter.

The same was true when Uganda Cranes and Harambee Stars clashed in Kenya or Uganda. Tanzanians travelled to the two countries to watch the encounter between the two soccer giants. The same thing came to pass when Luo Union played against Abaluhya United, the present day AFC Leopards in Nairobi. Their matches used to attract hundreds of soccer fans from outside Kenya.

Therefore the day the three Dar es Salaam clubs will start attracting fans from across Tanzanian borders will mark a new development in the country’s soccer history.

Microaggressions Matter

When I was studying at Oberlin College, a fellow student once compared me to her dog.
Because my name is Simba, a name Americans associate with animals, she unhelpfully shared that her dog’s name was also Simba. She froze with embarrassment, realizing that her remark could be perceived as debasing and culturally insensitive.

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The Rise of Victimhood Culture

It’s a good example of what social-justice activists term microaggressions—behaviors or statements that do not necessarily reflect malicious intent but which nevertheless can inflict insult or injury.
I wasn’t particularly offended by the dog comparison. I found it amusing at best and tone deaf at worst.

But other slights cut deeper. As an immigrant, my peers relentlessly inquired, “How come your English is so good?”—as if eloquence were beyond the intellectual reach of people who look like me. An African American friend once asked an academic advisor for information about majoring in biology and, without being asked about her academic record (which was excellent), was casually directed to “look up less-challenging courses in African American Studies instead.”

I, too, have sometimes made what turned out to be deeply offensive remarks unintentionally. So I am in no rush to conclude that any of these people harbor ill intent. In fact, they’re probably well-meaning and good-hearted people.

But the fact remains that those words were fundamentally inappropriate and offensive. Even though I don’t think the student really meant to compare me to a dog, the incident nonetheless stayed with me. The impact of her words and actions mattered more than her intent. It is all too easy to hurt and insult others without exercising vigilance in interacting with those whose lived experiences are different than our own.

This particularly matters in the context of universities. Colleges are charged with providing an education in an environment in which everyone feels welcome. However, for historical reasons, people of color, LGBT people, and others who do not conform to the dominant demographics prevalent at most institutions of higher education in this country already don’t always feel included or welcome. As campaigns like I too am Harvard or the satirical film Dear White People have attempted to illustrate, microaggressions targeted at minorities only serve to amplify those feelings of alienation.

This is because microaggressions point out cultural difference in ways that put the recipient’s non-conformity into sharp relief, often causing anxiety and crises of belonging on the part of minorities. When your peers at a prestigious university express dismay at the ability of a person of color to master English, it calls your presence in that institution into question and magnifies your difference in ways that can be alienating. It can even induce imposter syndrome or stereotype threat, both of which I have felt while studying at Oberlin. The former is feeling insecure, undeserving, or unaccomplished enough to be in a particular setting while latter is the debilitation that can arise from the constant fear of validating a stereotype about people from your identity groupings.

The turn towards political correctness in academia, to which the concept of microaggressions belongs, is sometimes mischaracterized as an obsession with the creation of victims or shoehorning radically liberal ideas into college students. Others have argued that political correctness evangelizes a new kind of moral righteousness that over-privileges identity politics and silences conservative viewpoints.

What these critics miss is that the striving for “PC culture” on college campuses is actually rooted in empathy. The basic tenets of this culture are predicated on the powerful impulse to usher both justice and humanity into everyday social transactions. Given the visible (albeit slow) rise in diversity on campuses, the lexicon of social justice invites students to engage with difference in more intelligent and nuanced ways, and to train their minds to entertain more complex views of the world.

Take for instance, the prevalent use of non-traditional gender pronouns at Oberlin College, a practice becoming increasingly common elsewhere, as well. They acknowledge that people can identify with many genders, not just along the binary of male and female. Using a person’s preferred or desired gender pronouns (such as the gender neutral “they” instead of she or he) is not a meaningless exercise in identity politics—it is an acknowledgement of a person’s innermost identity, conferring both respect and dignity.

The ability to deftly navigate these finely textured strata of diversity in the face of changing demographics and societal values, coupled with the intensification of globalization, is a skill that can only pay dividends for all students as they prepare to confront a future that will be marked by an intricate pluralism.

Last week, my colleague Conor Friedersdorf cited the website Oberlin Microaggressions as an example of political correctness run amok. Unearthing one extreme confrontation between a white student and a Hispanic student over the former’s allegedly appropriative use of a Spanish word, ignoring many more obviously offensive examples on the site, Friedersdorf extrapolated from that single incident to argue that Oberlin is the archetype of a malignant “victimhood culture” in which college students are instrumentalizing oppression as a means to accumulate higher social standing through eliciting sympathy from others.
He quoted from a sociological study that supports his argument:

The culture on display on many college and university campuses, by way of contrast, is “characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties … Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.”

But there is nothing glamorous about being subjected to racism, and certainly no social rewards to be reaped from being the victim of oppression in a society that heaps disadvantage on historically marginalized groups. So why would people willingly designate themselves as victims if they do not truly feel that way? The only people who benefit from oppression are the ones who are exempt from it—not the ones who suffer through it.

The study quoted by Friedersdorf chastises those who mobilize in response to the injustices they perceive. He cosigns the definition of microaggressions as “a form of social control in which the aggrieved collect and publicize accounts of intercollective offenses, making the case that relatively minor slights are part of a larger pattern of injustice and that those who suffer them are socially marginalized and deserving of sympathy.”

But it makes sense that marginalized groups would attempt to form coalitions and enlist allies.  They are severely underrepresented on most campuses. At Oberlin, for instance, black students form only 5.2 percent of students, Hispanic students 7.2 percent, and Asian Americans 4.2 percent. Minorities, by virtue of their being in the minority, do not and cannot exert robust social control of any kind at elite universities like Oberlin. When appealing to other students and administrators for validation and support after encountering discrimination, such students are scarcely clamoring to be seen as victims. They’re grasping to gain some small degree of power that can amplify their voices, where their concerns are so often silenced or ignored.

Coming to VCR near you: 'Simba's Pride'

It's hard not to notice the billboards and TV ads heralding the arrival of the sequel to the most successful animated film in history.

But unlike the 1994 box-office hit, which grossed nearly $800 million worldwide, Disney's "The Lion King II: Simba's Pride" will not be opening at a theater near you today. It will make its debut at video stores.

"Lion King II" ($27) is following in the paw-prints of Disney direct-to-video sequels based on its animated musical features "Aladdin," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Pocahontas."

Video follow-ups to animated features have become a thriving industry: They are cheaper to produce than feature movies. While their quality may be less than stellar, this won't be true of "Lion King II."

In the sequel, Kira, Simba's daughter, and Kovu, Scar's hand-picked successor, fall in love and work to bring peace to the Pridelands. However, Zira, Scar's loyal follower and Kovu's mother, has different ideas.

Most of the vocal talent is back, including Matthew Broderick (Simba), James Earl Jones (Mufasa), Robert Guillaume (Rafiki), and Nathan Lane (Timon). Neve Campbell is the voice of Kira and Suzanne Pleshette is the evil Zira.

I was certain that Simba was going to give entree Americana a try. : Land of the Sweet Martini

I was lying on my bunk half-asleep when my wife shook me and whispered, "There's a lion outside the tent."

I sat up slowly and stared at her, running the notion through my head. There's a lion outside the tent.

"That's an interesting idea," I said upon careful reflection.

"We're not talking theory here," she said. "We're talking teeth and claws."

She had seen him through a tent window. I didn't look because I avoid anything I am not familiar with. We didn't have lions in East Oakland.

If I closed my eyes, however, I could imagine the beast sniffing through the heavy thicket around our campsite. He had never smelled an American before and was wondering if we tasted anything like gazelle.

I could not answer that because, while I have smelled Americans from New York to San Francisco, I have never eaten one. I have also never tasted gazelle.

But I was certain that Simba was going to give entree Americana a try. I had visions of him bounding across the Masai Mara with me in his teeth, and an editor at the L.A. By God Times saying, "He was what? Eaten by a lion? Did he say anything about a Thursday column?"

It all began at cocktail time.

We were on safari in Kenya, which, for the benefit of those who attended public school, is in East Africa about two inches below Europe and just across the Big Water from Ronald Reagan's America.

It was the vacation of a lifetime. Africa spread out before us under a blazing red sunset in almost surrealistic beauty. Wildebeests thundered past in huge billows of amber dust. Brilliantly colored birds flashed rainbows to the twilight.

We were sitting around a campfire watching the sun go down. Actually, I guess, we were watching the Earth go up. I was sipping a strawberry martini. The reason I was sipping a strawberry martini is that the native bartender, whose name was Wilson, had purchased sweet vermouth instead of dry vermouth.

What the hell. I'm adaptable. Hold the cherry.

We were enjoying the moment with other members of the safari, two of whom were named Bud and Molly. The pleasantry of my manner, never so serene, even impressed my wife. Under normal circumstances, I would never drink with anyone named Bud and Molly.

African safaris abound with Buds and Mollys, a good number of them from the San Fernando Valley. Because I am obligated to confine my essays to Valley-related subjects, I employ every device possible to find a connection wherever I am and whatever I'm doing.

Desperation fosters strange techniques. In Kenya, I called: "Is anybody here from Chatsworth?"

The best that emerged in our particular group was a middle-aged lady with blue hair from Van Nuys and a playful old man from Laurel Canyon.

I find playful old men annoying. Old men ought to shuffle and drool and walk around with their flies unzipped. They should not bounce and giggle.

But the lady with blue hair fascinated me. She was pale-skinned and wore white. In certain lights, she appeared transparent. The Semi-Invisible Woman.

Midway through cocktails, Patrick Pape, who ran the camp, called me aside.

"Look," he said, flashing his light toward a clump of bushes. Yellow pinpricks glowed in the shadows.

"Fireflies?" I asked.

"Lions' eyes," he said.

"Wilson!" I called. "Bring me another sweet martini."

Patrick assured us, however, that there was nothing to worry about.

"No one I know has ever been eaten by a lion," he said cheerfully, then added, "although a friend was once bitten in two by a hippo."

The playful old man bounced and roared, animal-like. The lady with blue hair turned toward the campfire and vanished before my very eyes.

That night, the lions came. Fifteen of them. They prowled through camp, snorting and coughing.

"I didn't know they coughed like that," my wife whispered, fascinated.

Bright people have an interesting way of facing danger. They analyze it. I tend to scream and run. It's an ethnic trait. Raw emotion.

We hollered for Patrick.

"Stay in your tents!" he called back.

"I have to use the can," Molly shouted.

One of the lions roared loudly.

"Maybe not," she said.

Patrick chased the lions with his Land Rover half the night. They kept coming back. It was more African than I ever expected, but, then, Africa is the land of the unexpected.

"Don't worry," my wife said. "I'll protect you."

Thus comforted, I rolled over to try sleeping again when she suddenly yelled. I thought a lion had entered the tent.

"A spider!" she said, pointing.

Spiders are ugly as hell, but they are smaller than me and they are not carnivorous. I smashed it with a People magazine.

"I can take lions," she said, "but not spiders."

I went to sleep and dreamed about someone being bitten in two by a hippo. I believe it was Molly. She had moved to Chatsworth.

Mama Simba Wins at Hollywood Park

Mama Simba, beaten in recent starts in Arkansas and Illinois, made her return to the West Coast a triumphant one Wednesday with a 5 1/2-length victory in the $50,000 allowancefeature for fillies and mares at Hollywood Park.

Ridden by Kent Desormeaux , Mama Simba was timed in 1:21 3/5, four-fifths of a second off the track record for seven furlongs.

Brazen, with Chris McCarron aboard, finished second, and Nice Assay, ridden by Laffit Pincay, was third

Mama Simba, the 6-5 betting choice, paid $4.60, $2.60 and $2.10.

The Richard Mandella-trained Mama Simba was unsuccessful in stakes races at Oaklawn Park at Hot Springs, Ark., and Sportsman's Park at Cicero, Ill., in her two previous starts.

Jason Raize, 28; Played Simba in 'Lion King'

Jason Raize, who played the grown Simba in the original Broadway company of "The Lion King," has died. He was 28.

Raize died Feb. 3 in Yass, Australia, southwest of Sydney, according to Chris Boneau, a spokesman for the Disney musical. The cause was suicide, Boneau said.

Raize was chosen for the role of Simba, who changes from a callow young lion into the aware adult played by Raize, after a series of grueling auditions before "Lion King" director Julie Taymor and choreographer Garth Fagan.

The musical, based on Disney's successful animated film, opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre in November 1997 and is still running in New York City and around the world. Raize played the part for nearly three years.

The competition for the role of Simba was fierce because the musical required "triple-threat work -- singing, dancing and acting -- that you don't get to such an extent in other shows," Raize recalled in a 1997 interview with Associated Press.

"It was more the sense of who can take the challenge and not be daunted by the task."

Raize, who had hoped to break into motion pictures, was the voice of an Ice Age boy last year in the Disney animated movie "Brother Bear."

Originally from Oneonta, N.Y., Raize worked at the Orpheus Theater there while still in his teens. He was reared in an isolated area of the Catskills; he said he did not grow up seeing theater or movies.

During his brief professional career, the actor performed in a variety of shows, including a "Jesus Christ Superstar" tour with Ted Neeley, "Gypsy," and later a "King and I" tour starring Hayley Mills.

Raize is survived by his father and stepmother, Robert and Monet Rothenberg of Oneonta; and his mother, Sarah MacArthur of Wrentham, Mass.

Kimba and Simba

To settle the simmering Kimba-Simba controversy ("A 'Kimba' Surprise for Disney," July 13), I have a suggestion. Why not resurrect and restore the classic "Kimba, the White Lion" episodes and air them with reasonable fanfare on, say, the Disney Channel?

Then everyone can decide whether Disney owes animator Osamu Tezuka appropriate screen acknowledgment. At the same time, Tezuka's groundbreaking series (and its equally engaging, rarely seen sequel, "Leo the Lion") can be exposed to a whole new generation of youngsters and animation buffs.