Craig Bellamy building foundations for the future stars of Africa
In Sierra Leone, a country haunted by civil war, the best young football talent is being given a chance by an unlikely benefactor.
Football as a force for good. You will hear plenty of this over the next few weeks. Football, Africa, humanitarianism; great concept. Yes, concept. But we have found that it can work. We have found it here in Sierra Leone, which by every estimation is one of the ten poorest nations on the planet; and we have found it thanks to Craig Bellamy.
Yes, Bellamy. If you were to draw up a list of footballers most likely to save Sierra Leone, Bellamy would probably finish pretty near the bottom, too.
But first meet John, Issa and Suleman, three of the 16 under-12s recruited as the first-year intake of the Craig Bellamy Foundation Academy. The school Bellamy has built for them in Sierra Leone will be ready in September, so we meet them instead at school in Ghana, where they have been for the past two months.
It is safe to say that none of them had been on a plane before and that only John had prior knowledge of what it is to get and expect three meals a day, or wear football boots, or have electricity and running water. Yet they are united in that they are three of the best young players in the country and that all their lives are rooted in one of the bloodiest civil wars known to man.
But ask about their new lives and they will look you in the eye and tell you. “It’s nice here,” Issa says. “We like the food. Chicken and rice.”
“No, we like the football better,” Suleman says.
“Our dream is to help Sierra Leone get to the World Cup,” John says.
They have been encouraged to dream beyond football, too. After football, Suleman wants to be an economist and John a journalist; Issa says he wants to be a medic so he can be the team doctor.
They have also been encouraged to talk about the civil war. Issa goes first and, without apparent emotion, tells this story: “The rebels went to my mother’s home. They said, ‘Let one person die for the whole family.’ My father said, ‘Take me.’ But they said, ‘No. We want the boy.’ That was my elder brother, Abdul. They killed him. Then the elder rebel said he wanted to have sex with my mother. My father — they held him down and they beat his legs.”
Suleman says: “They took my father’s property and they beat my father. My uncle was in his house when he heard a bomb; he came out of his house and another bomb exploded. My father told me this; this is how my uncle died.”
And this is John, who is truly a miracle. When he was a newborn, rebels came to his home and they told his mother that they were going to take him. His mother pleaded to keep her only son, she explained that he was ill and would die, and a female rebel took pity on her, let her keep the baby and gave her some money for medicine.
But John has been brought up knowing more than that. “My mother explained it all,” he says. “I wasn’t born when this happened: my grandmother was cooking one day and they were told, ‘The rebels are coming.’ They ran away, there were bullets everywhere, but the rebels came from the other side and caught them. They said they wanted to kill one. My grandfather said, ‘Me.’ But they said, ‘No,’ and took my uncle. My mother says, ‘I just heard one gunshot.’ ”
No one yet has any idea how their traumatic history will affect these boys. For now, you wonder about the present culture shock — leaving home, new school, new way of life — but the school reports are glowing. They are louder and more exuberant than their Ghanaian classmates, their tendency to settle disputes with a fight has been schooled out of them and they are very popular. One English volunteer says: “They are the most grateful people ever.”
And everyone is raving about the play they put on for Bellamy, a morality tale about a dope-smoking loser who takes the wrong path and a good guy who takes the right one. They wrote it themselves and finished it with a song. Bellamy says he is as impressed with the play as their football.
They are in good hands in Ghana. They are staying at an academy called Right To Dream, a template for Bellamy’s every aspiration. Right to Dream also scouts the best kids in the country, it places huge emphasis on education and it teaches the boys about social responsibility. Go out and find your success is the message, but come back and help the next generation.
Around the school hang a number of inspirational quotations from black leaders. The following from President Obama is at the heart of the message: “We must start with the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans.”
But the new recruits from Sierra Leone are more interested in the “graduation map” pasted on to the wall at the school entrance.
It is a massive map of the world and it shows mugshots of the Right to Dream graduates: some playing football in Belgium, the player in Sweden, those at university in England and the growing number of football college scholarships on the East and West Coast of the United States.
Such success is years away for Bellamy, but the Manchester City player’s eyes bulge at the prospect. “I need that map,” he says. “I have to have a map like that where the younger players can see it and say: ‘Look what could happen to me.’ ”
Twenty-four hours later, Bellamy has bid goodbye to his boys and the plane is landing in their homeland. Word has got out and, thus, waiting at the airport are scores of children in Bellamy Fan Club T-shirts. His personal security is waiting for him, too, and it is required. This is the start of the madness; Bellamy is mobbed.
He is not the first to come here. David Beckham and Ryan Giggs have been on Unicef duty to raise awareness, Iker Casillas, the Spain goalkeeper, came promising a Real Madrid academy but has delivered nothing.
So when Bellamy promised huge investment, no one believed he would follow through. Yet this is his fourth consecutive summer trip, he has spent nearly £650,000 from his own pocket and his ambitions will probably take that figure over £1 million. That pretty much explains the mob.
He has come here with Tom Vernon, a 31-year-old from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, who is the genius behind Right to Dream and is a consultant on the Bellamy project. Vernon thought that Africa had ceased to shock him, but he says “coming to Sierra Leone from Ghana is a greater culture shock than arriving in Ghana from the UK”.
Scouting the first recruits was an odyssey in itself: travelling the length of the country, mostly on dirt roads, fights breaking out on the side of the pitches and the countless times they had to stop the weighing scales — which they brought to help to determine the children’s ages — from being pinched.
But then the challenge became the parents. In Ghana, they understand the value of a football academy; in Sierra Leone, they did not understand what they were, they just knew that a decade ago when people were taking children from their parents, it was to turn them into soldiers. John’s mother, Celina, in particular, needed calm persuasion.
But we have jumped ahead. When Vernon first came here to do a feasibility study, his report to Bellamy said: sorry, it ain’t going to work. Why?, Bellamy asked. Vernon’s explanation was as follows: there is no structure here in Sierra Leone, they love football, but they have no organised youth football, no organised leagues, there is no way to scout the diamonds.
So Bellamy decided to start the league himself. It is called the Craig Bellamy Foundation (CBF) League: 40 teams in four regions of the country, giving employment to 40 coaches and 40 managers. And very specific rules: you don’t get your full league points unless your team all go to school. You get extra points for community projects.
When we go to see a CBF League game in Freetown, the capital, the manager of Syke Rangers tells of her team’s latest project: clearing the grass around their training pitch to stop spectators being bitten by snakes. And the stats are stunning: secondary school attendance levels around the country are 21 per cent, for CBF League teams, it is 84 per cent.
This probably explains why the CBF is the only project in Sierra Leone funded by Unicef. After the first year’s $100,000 (about £68,500) contract was up, when Bellamy went back for more, the answer was: no problem, and we’ll double it.
On the second day in Sierra Leone, we travel for an hour and a half alongside a coastline so heaven-sent, they filmed the old Bounty ads here.
The road is mostly dirt track and rutted, but when we reach the village of Tumbo, we turn left up towards the hills and two gleaming new buildings. This is the academy, the beacon of hope: dormitories, classrooms, cafeteria, electricity, water. Plus a pitch, dug into the hillside, newly laid, awaiting grass and its September arrivals. With future year groups, more classrooms, more pitches and an AstroTurf surface will follow. Bellamy’s pride is tangible.
One of the heroes of Tumbo is young Issa. Locals recall the day the CBF trials were held and, having been chosen, Issa, playing barefoot, went round shaking all the coaches by the hand.
But Bellamy is the real star. In the room that will become the children’s dormitory, he holds a meeting with their parents; some have travelled for more than three hours to see him. John’s mother, Celina, is resplendent in a white, flowery dress with matching headscarf. The looks on all their faces suggest a combination of humility, gratitude and astonishment; before them sits the Barclays Premier League millionaire footballer who has presented opportunities of which no one dreamt.
Bellamy tells them how their boys are progressing in Ghana. “They are a credit to their parents and their country,” he says. He also emphasises the importance of their education, that he would love them to become footballers, but doctors and lawyers, too. “Trust me, I will do everything I can for your boys,” he says. “I want them to succeed in life as much as my own children.”
He then asks if they have any questions and two parents put their hands up. They both say the same: no questions, just “Thank you”.
Q& A
Why Sierra Leone?
Craig Bellamy had a friend there, working up country, and four years ago he was persuaded to go out and visit him. So he arrived, unheralded, with no plan apart from his intention to stop and play football whenever he saw a game being played. He had long considered some kind of charitable use of his wealth and his first thought was a boxing gym in Cardiff. But Sierra Leone — the poverty, the friendliness he encountered and the love of football — won him over completely.
What’s in it for him?
Pride and self-satisfaction. Recent history is full of tales of young Africans being flogged into European football, but:
1, Bellamy does not own these boys’ registrations, they are not his to sell.
2, If there were any profit in this, it is a huge investment that would not pay off for eight to ten years, until the players were worth something.
3, You would never go to Sierra Leone to hunt for players to sell; you would start in Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast, where there is a structure to the game.
A nation’s battle
8½ Years since the official end of the civil war. There should be a thriving tourist industry here, but it has been damaged by the erroneous association with Blood Diamond, the film starring Leonado DiCaprio.
12 Expected employees — teachers, coaches, groundstaff, cooks — at the CBF Academy.
16 Boys in the first-year group.
41.24 Average life expectancy in Sierra Leone, the sixth-worst in the world.
70.2 Percentage of the nation living below the poverty line.
1,684 Players enrolled in the CBF League.
