Yanga, Drums and Heartbeats

Imagine the most high energy sporting event of all times - maybe a Yankees vs. Red Sox game seven at Fenway. That begins to tap into the feeling of what it was like on Saturday at the National Stadium in Dar Es Salaam watching Yanga (the hometown favorites) take on E'toile D'or in a the Tanzanian Premier League match. Begins. Hardly compares, though...

The place is just seeping with raw, visceral energy, exploding with bright yellow and green team colors and dire pride.

It was sports amplified in all of the pure, true ways.

Picture it: a professional game with no corporate sponsors all up in your face. Get rid of lights, jumbotrons and pre-recorded music and replace them with hundreds of bongo drums and booming echos of Kiswahili songs. You could literally feel your heartbeat in the music.

Midday sun heating up every beat and body. Infuse the stadium with the smell of thousands of real humans who aren't afraid to touch each other and sweat.

Epic. Just epic. And although Yanga blew E'toile out of the water, the pace and athleticism of the players was spectacular. Tanzanian football is known to be rugged and unrefined. Talented athletes, who, unlike North African teams like Nigeria and Senegal, don't have very sophisticated high-level training. The result is a wild, but incredibly entertaining form of the game.

Bringing my camera wouldn't have been the smartest idea. But I did manage to sneak out my cell phone and snap this shot. The beautiful roundness you see in the foreground is the tiny boy who watched the match from my lap. No idea where his parents were. Didn't matter. He, like I, was there to watch the match. He was so young that his fingers and ears were still almost see-through fragile...yet he know what offsides was and followed the game with sick focus. He actually threw his hands up at the ref at one point.

I was in charge of providing padding, he was in charge of waving our Yanga flag.

Sweet day for this fan of the World's game.

p.s. The National Stadium was probably built in the 50s. Has an asphalt track around it, no lights, and peeling pink paint. It was the same stadium that Nyerere, the first president of an independent Tanzania was sworn in at.