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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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.