Jesus Cup is now over. The 6-week sport and culture extravaganza hosted and organized by Bosco Boys has been brought to an end for another year. Bosco Boys itself had mixed success, winning all the volleyball cups and the girls’ football and netball trophies, but flopping in the boys’ football and basketball.
JC2011 was overshadowed by controversy throughout. It began with the ludicrous indexing system for every participant (see rants in previous posts) which caused countless arguments. I’ve suggested that next year they could try having only a height restriction, which might prove easier to oversee.
As for the matches themselves, they were consistently dogged by dodgy refereeing decisions. Almost every football game involved a refereeing mistake that inevitably led to heated scenes between rival teams, coaches and spectators who were never backwards about coming forwards to berate the opposition. One team would then sit down, strip off and refuse to continue. Sometimes even the referee walked off, complaining about the lack of respect he was being shown. Twice in one day I witnessed whole-team strops which took a quarter of an hour to sort out and later heard about a full scale brawl incited by an incident in an under 14s football match. People here take winning very seriously.
The final under 17s match held on the last day proved to be just as explosive. Ngamwanza (a project for street children) v Kuwinda (a team made up of local people from the slum) finished a bitterly-fought 1-1 draw and had reached 7-all on penalties. Kuwinda saved the 15th penalty only for the ref to blow his whistle and say it should be retaken as the ‘keeper had strayed off the line.
This was the spark which ignited the tensions that had built up through the game. The Kuwinda team was incensed at the referee and the subsequent debate escalated until over 100 people were crowded together arguing and threatening each other.
Typical Kenya, I thought. Over-officiousness, tribal conflicts, accusations of corruption and ultimately no resolution except disgruntlement and grudges. And throughout the arguing the hip-hop music continued to blare out and the fans who weren’t interested in the bickering just kept dancing.
After 20 minutes of watching the commotion, I got bored and walked off. In fact, I don’t know who actually won the game, but as there were disturbances during the award ceremony from Kuwinda people I presume that they went on to lose.
These disturbances grew and quickly led to out-and-out violence as people picked up sticks and began to throw stones. The two policemen who were there to control the crowd of hundreds could only stand by and watch, cowering behind their batons. Fortunately for me, I was apart from the fray when the violence proper kicked off and one of the boys just told me earnestly to get out of there quickly.
I returned later to see that the police had arrived and that the referee was being put in an ambulance. He had been beaten severely and had serious injuries to his head and shoulders.
He had been the target of the violence initially, but this had soon spread to general looting as the people from Kuwinda slum began to run off with anything they could lay their hands on. Fr Sebastian’s camera, the laptop and speakers which had been playing music and even the parked cars were all targeted. Extra police arrived relatively quickly, only to be driven away by stones. They only returned an hour later once everything had calmed down.
Unfortunately, before “the war” - as the boys now call it - one of the Bosco boys had borrowed one of my point-and-shoot cameras to take some pictures. It wasn’t until later in the evening that he came to me and confessed that a group of young men from Kuwinda had beaten him and taken it from him. It was the only thing that was stolen during the fracas.
The loss of the camera itself hasn’t been too bad (I had accepted the risk of the camera being broken, lost or stolen when I handed it out, which is the same reason as to why I never let anyone touch my new expensive camera), but I was very upset by the thought that my careless supervision had made the boy become a target. Luckily he wasn’t hurt, but it was certainly a sober ending to what should have been a celebratory day.
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