Simba SC vs. Yanga SC

Yesterday, I finally made it to the stadium in the image at the top of this blog. I’ve wanted to change that photo for quite some time now because I am nowhere near that part of town when I am at UDSM and also the sky view of a part of Dar es Salaam really makes it look so much more peaceful than it feels. I wrote in my first post about how Dar es Salaam means “Haven of Peace” but our experiences yesterday were quite distant from anything peaceful. It all goes back to our lectures a couple weeks ago on safety and security.

As I’ve written previously, messages on security on campus and around town have been pounded into our head early on in this program and made a lot of us paranoid. This made trying to arrange a trip to Taifa Stadium to watch a soccer match between two local teams much more difficult as we had to make sure we took appropriate transportation and went with informed and trustworthy people. We didn’t even end up going to the game with the local people who originally invited us because not everyone thought they could trust this guy and they sullied his image with our program director who hadn’t even met him but is already suspicious of everyone. We still wound up with a very large group though with all 11 people from CIEE going as well as about 12 or so mostly European people who are students here and two people who work in the links office at UDSM. The Links Office is a service set up for exchange students and I wrote about how Batista, one of their employees, went with us to Morogoro the weekend before this.

It was an incredible hassle to organize this whole trip as we weren’t able to get tickets until just a day or two before the match and at a price double what we were originally told (still only about $8 USD though). I have to thank Jacob, my Danish floormate, for doing most of the hard work necessary to actually get the tickets, though because he knows me best of all the people in CIEE, I became responsible for coordinating everything amongst our own scattered group. (Special note here though is that poor Jacob couldn’t even make it to the game because he has malaria and the other girl who went through all of the trouble to get the tickets also missed the game because she was taking him to the hospital.) I also said I would find us group transportation because I thought that would be a little easier than it ended up being. After burning through the same number of minutes in about 24 hours that previously took me three weeks, most of us were on our way to the game in a hired daladala with almost enough seats. It took a lot of stress but it was relieving to finally be on the way using a driver we’d used before and have a ticket in my pocket. As for the others who took their own transportation, they were no longer my problem.

About 18 of us were dropped off less than a kilometer from the entrance to the stadium and the walk there wasn’t very difficult but more just incredibly busy and a little exciting. The lines to get in were a bit interesting though as it seemed like it was some sort of attempt to break the Guinness record for largest mass spooning session, but I guess that’s what you do when you don’t want to get cut in line. Actually that’s probably why so many people got in front of me and throughout our group in line because we didn’t quite play ball. It was a crazy scene though as a police officer (all of the police in this story look like soldiers, by the way, with that same pea green uniform, berets, red shoulder things and other indications that seem more militaristic than normal civilian police) on a horse just rode into the waiting crowd and started swinging his stick-whip wildly. I hadn’t quite figured out why or at who at this point and even this morning as I write this, I still am not completely sure. It seemed like that guy had just rode out when another cop, this time on the other side of the crowd, starts swinging his baton at people and making them all back away. It’s discouraging to not only worry about getting beaten by other soccer fans but also the police.

As if that weren’t enough excitement though, our super nice guy, friend and guide, Batista, whom I’ve only ever seen smiling, has got a guy by the wrist who tried to reach into his pocket. Seeing the fire in his eyes as he was about to kick this guy’s ass was actually pretty frightening to me and the crowd tried to calm him down and get him back in line. Still pretty spooky though but I guess that’s what Halloween is about, right? It was good to finally just make it through the gates into the area outside the stadium though with all of my stuff in my pockets still. It wasn’t that I did notice a hand on my hip near my left pocket but probably that I had my hands pressed to my sides at pocket level while stretching my t-shirt down below my pockets so as to cover them well might have kept me theft-free for the time being. At least a quarter of the 25 or so people who went to the game yesterday had someone else’s hand in their pockets at one point.

The two teams playing were called Simba SC and Yanga SC which are two of a few teams local to Dar es Salaam. Yes, Simba means “lion” in Kiswahili for those Lion King fans out there. I think SC either stands for soccer club or sports club but I’m pretty sure that Yanga is for “Young Africans”. Prior to the game, Simba’s record was 9-0-0 which is pretty unbelievable and they’d already defeated Yanga once this season. This game was significant though not only because both clubs are good, but they have the two largest fan bases in the league and they are also both local so there is a rivalry. This is probably why the game was played at this stadium instead of the smaller ones they usually play at. I also learned long after the game that they only just recently let them play their games in Dar es Salaam again because the rivalry was so intense. This rivalry became much more apparent once we got to the game though.

Simba has been having an incredibly successful season and were probably already popular before now, but I have seen red and white (their team colors) all over town on flags and such for weeks now. I was originally planning on going to the game dressed in Simba colors but I was swayed the other way right before we left for the game, here’s why: I usually prefer to root for the underdog instead of just joining the bandwagon, I was not at all emotionally invested in either team so I didn’t think it would really matter, Yanga’s colors are green and yellow. Now there is another game that should be finished by now between a green and yellow team and a team that wears red and white so what would any good Duck fan do? I am still eagerly awaiting the results to see if my Ducks were able to fall the Trojans in Autzen by the way. Please don’t break my heart. Returning to the story though, I went to the game in my “Live Green, Yell O” 2008-2009 University of Oregon spirit tee which for those of you who don’t know is yellow with a green superman-like emblem in the center. Dylan, from Beaverton, also came in a green U of O shirt to the game. A few of the other people had on some red and white but for the most part the others wore neutral colors; a wise decision.

We walked up to one of the top levels of the stadium and just going in to find some seats. I hear an uproar right as we walk out towards the seats and I look down at the field to see if perhaps the teams took to the field or something, but there was nothing there. It only took a couple seconds to realize that they were booing me because I had entered the Simba section wearing Yanga colors. I saw all of these wide-eyed people standing and pointing at me, probably shouting some horrible obscenities that I haven’t learned to translate yet and I sort of thought that it was just friendly coaxing so I played along and pretended to cover up my shirt. They wouldn’t actually kick me out would they? As the rest of the group is searching for seats, I’m being pushed away and told by a soldier that I’m in the wrong section and need to leave. I grabbed Dylan and the soldier said he would show us where we were supposed to be. The rest of the group didn’t even notice we were being escorted out to rapturous applause but the police officer just pawned us off on some other guy wearing green and sent us on our way. It was at this point that we’d given up on ever seeing the rest of our group again or even making it home.

“That was intense,” I thought as I told Dylan that we probably wouldn’t survive the walk to our daladala after the game and perhaps it would be best to just get into a cab quickly after the game and escape alive. I guess at least we’d be sitting with people who would be really into the game and not likely to murder us for our “allegiance”. It proved incredibly difficult though just to find the correct entrance for our tickets, but when we got outside the stadium again, we saw some other white people from our group walking up towards we had to go. After unsuccessfully trying to flag them down or getting a glimpse of where they were headed, we resigned once again just to take our seats and figure it out from there. Only by pure fate did we see them again taking their seats right in the section where we were supposed to sit though and thank God we were in Yanga territory. The people I mentioned earlier in Simba colors had to buy yellow jerseys and received applause from the fans as a result. I don’t know if you can actually buy Yanga jerseys though as most of the people we saw were wearing South Africa soccer jerseys, or Brazilian ones, and there were a few people in Packers gear. One guy was even wearing a Sean Kemp jersey. I think we got some slack because we are white but the local fans who found themselves in the wrong section were not only booed and ostracized but had their shirts literally torn off of their torsos before being ripped to shreds and tossed down to the field. Dylan and I discovered that we probably got off pretty light. We also were all well aware that this wouldn’t be the innocent soccer game that we thought it would be.

The actual stadium was in unbelievable shape and has been the only (and I honestly mean only) building I’ve seen in the entire country that has been maintained. They said it just opened up two years ago but even other buildings still being built already look weathered. It seemed out of place but just being there in such a different seen really transports you to a place that doesn’t feel quite like the rest of the Tanzanian experience so far. It was kind of nice to forget just where I was for a while but it didn’t last forever. The actual game was pretty uneventful and not really worth writing about other than the fact that the refs most definitely are not whistle-happy but during the game, one guy in Simba colors came into a section near ours and provoked some Yanga fans. For a while most everyone that could watch this drama unfold was watching this instead of the actual game. As I saw this guy getting punched in the face and pushed over the railing into the little dugout thing separating the bleachers from the field, I turned my head in time to see Yanga get scored on due to just poor defense. It wouldn’t surprise me if they players were watching this scuffle too. It’s important to note here that there are about two to five soldier/policemen at each entrance to the stands and they all have batons and/or a gun for launching teargas. I’m sure they were aware that this guy was in serious danger but none of them really did anything to put an end to it. The guy climbed out of the sunken area, wielding some mangled metal thing that might have been a frame for a chair but had probably been hurled at him a couple minutes before. With a menacing look in his eye he made his path directly back to where he had been assaulted earlier with one goal only: retribution. He walked through at least four sections during which not a single policeman walked down and put a stop to it. It was like a car crash that you can’t help but stare at as he got closer and closer with this lethal object in his hand and clear intent. I was frightened that I was going to witness a murder instead of just a soccer game. Thank God it was broken up before it could come to fruition but it was still a clear reminder that we had to be careful now more than ever.

We opted to leave a few minutes early at the advice of Batista so that we would miss the chaos and maybe stand a chance of making it to our daladala who agreed to pick us up. We were a little more numerous now because some people came from different places to get to the game but we were also a little slow at getting moving and this may have been our downfall. Although we could see a lot of people trickling out of the stadium at the same time as ourselves, it seemed to be only rowdy Simba fans in every direction after we got out of entrance gates. The game still technically wasn’t over yet, but it was clear that Simba would get the victory and our color choice made us an even easier target for ridicule from those wearing red and white. We didn’t have excellent cohesion as a total group and some of the slower walkers and stragglers soon found themselves in danger. A group of men surrounded some of the people who were the furthest back and they were only able to get free almost unscathed thanks to a couple quick shoves from our buddy from Wisconsin. Other people further up realized that they couldn’t see some of our group any more that were in the situation I just described so they tried to call them. One guy had the fun smacked out of his hand and was only able to recover the battery and battery cover. Another girl from our group had an attempted snatch at her phone but she flailed her arm loose before the guy just punched her in the face and ran away. At what had to be almost the exact same time, at least one of the girls from our group had her purse snatched. I don’t think she let go easy though and might have been yoked by the purse strap around her neck a little bit. We heard her scream and turned around to see this chaos unfold. One person pointed out the guy who was clearly holding something under his shirt and walking away quickly but he was amongst maybe 15 other people who all seemed aware of just what was going on but had obviously chosen the side of the thief over that of the foreigners. We paused to regroup and it took what seemed like a tense eternity to get everyone together and moving again.

At this point, the game was officially over and the Simba fans had come jogging out of the stadium in a solid mass and cheering down the streets. They caught up with us pretty fast, especially because we were stopped and waiting. Someone snagged the purse of local girl though and she shouted “Mwizi!” (“Thief!”) and looked so estranged and helpless. We needed to leave and soon. We formed a tighter formation to move down the street and eyed everyone with immense suspicion. There was a lot of distress amongst our people and even being in the daladala with the windows shut didn’t make anyone feel much safer. We easily had more than 25 people in this one little minibus for more than an hour on the ride back and everyone was still just trying to process the madness that just happened. I’m the worst in these situations because I make too many jokes and it’s almost never me who these bad things happen to so I’m usually the last voice people want to hear. Still, I can’t help myself but try to lighten the mood sometimes.

It had been a stressful, dangerous, frightening, you name it day but we pulled up to our residence hall finally. All anyone really wanted was to call someone they love, eat some dinner and have a beer to relax. I returned to my room about two seconds after the door shut and I found I had a new roommate. I knew he would be moving in this weekend and I kind of expected him to be there when we got back, but it still could have come at a better time. I’m still meeting him and getting acquainted so I’ll write more about what he’s about when I figure out how that is. Even after we had a couple drinks and dinner though, I walked back with my friend Elise to her dorm and we saw someone lurking in the bushes outside of her residence hall. This could have come at a much better time too.

This is the experience I signed up for though and it’s most definitely a rude awakening but there are several risks that exist everywhere we go. I was trying to be proactive and didn’t have anything happen to me really so I’m pretty fortunate in that sense though it’s still tough to witness. I just got a text message from Dylan who went to the mall to get internet and check the scores to the Ducks/Trojans game. I guess Yanga’s loss last night wasn’t a bad omen after all but I can’t help but imagine now how my life would be much different were I at home now instead of here. I would have loved to see the Ducks stomp USC but my life has been a series of poor timing. I’m generally in the wrong place at the wrong time it seems but I can’t imagine it any other way. Everyone has different experiences and all I can do is have my own.