AMEN: A tribute to grassroots football in Africa

In the midst of the hype and attention surrounding the World Cup, photographer Jessica Hilltout traveled to Africa with a mission of her own: to capture a different look on the meaning of soccer in Africa.  Throughout the trip, she exchanged manufactured footballs for homemade ones.  Not only did she return home with thirty-five homemade balls, but she also put together a roadbook of photos and stories of the locals she encountered. One of my personal faves from the roadbook is this poem:

Go here to view more pictures Hilltout captured during her nine month trip.

From the NY Times:

CAPE TOWN — Jessica Hilltout, a nomadic, Belgian-born photographer, loaded sacks of deflated soccer balls onto the roof of a battered yellow Volkswagen Beetle last year and began a seven-month road trip across Africa to document the continent’s love of the game. She found it in villages where children played with joyous abandon on dusty patches of ground, sandy beaches and lush fields, far from the stadiums where Africa’s first World Cup would be held.

She captured their sense of play in lyrical images hanging now in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Brussels galleries. Gleeful little boys in Burkina Faso leap in exultation as their team scores. A young fisherman goes airborne as he hits a header on a beach in Togo. Barefoot boys in Ghana lope gracefully across a field as their slender, elongated shadows chase them.

As the World Cup draws to a close this week, with international teams playing on fields edged by ever-changing digital advertisements for the likes of Adidas, McDonalds and Coca-Cola, images of the highly commercialized, FIFA-sanctioned soccer will not be the only lasting ones.

“The beautiful game exists in its purest form in what I saw — people playing for the joy of playing,” Ms. Hilltout said in an interview here.

The most oddly soulful of Ms. Hilltout’s images are of objects: the homemade balls fashioned by children from plastic bags, old socks and rags, tied up with string or strips of tree bark. Some children inflated condoms — commonplace and free on a continent beset by AIDS — wrapped them in cloth to make them heavy, then in plastic bags to seal them and finally bound them in twine. These ingenious, improvised balls bounce like real ones for a few days before the air escapes.

Ms. Hilltout, 33, accepted these balls, each like a small, hand-wrapped gift, from the children who made them when she gave them the factory-made kind they longed for. She photographed their balls resting on cracked earth or cupped in hands with nail-bitten fingers. The people she met in some 30 villages stretched across west and southern Africa had no organized support: no free uniforms, no corporate sponsors, no subsidies of any kind. The walls of the gallery exhibit their feet, often bare or in flip flops or mismatched slippers with a toe peeking through a hole.

“So many people have so much and do so little with it,” she said. “The people I met had so little yet managed to do so much with it…”

To read the rest of the article, go here.