BBC
Posted on: Monday, January 2, 2023 – 6:25 am | Last update: Monday, January 2, 2023 – 6:25 AM
Being one of the first young black sports stars of the television era, Pele was loved by Africans across the continent, who identified in him.
As decolonization movements spread across Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pele was invited by the newly independent nations to play in prestigious friendlies with his club Santos and the Brazil national team.
In his autobiography, Pele said that the following decades and subsequent frequent trips to the African continent: “changed not only my view of the world, but also the way the world looked at me.”
Guillerme Nascimento, author of the Santos Club Guide, noted that African travels were “so full of stories that there are no clear boundaries between myth and fact”.
His time in Algeria, for example, was like a movie.
In 1965, young Pele, aged 24, arrived in the country while film director Gillo Pontecorvo was filming the Battle of Algiers.
As a result, it was quite normal to see battle tanks moving through Algiers from the city center to the Kasbah district.
Football-loving Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella scheduled two friendlies for the occasion, one in Oran on June 15th, and the other in Algiers four days later.
On June 17, however, Houari Boumediene, Ben Bella’s defense minister, staged a coup that ousted the president and canceled the second match.
Some credible journalists and historians believe Boumediene may have used the uproar over Pele’s arrival as a distraction to carry out his coup.
Pele’s many visits to Morocco were less tumultuous, but legendary.
It was said that he addressed very kind words to the Moroccan delegation at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, as they were the first African country to qualify for the World Cup since Egypt in 1934.
On another trip, he allegedly talked about Larbi Benmbarek, his Moroccan contemporary, who played for Olympique de Marseille and Atletico Madrid.
He is supposed to have said: “If you are the king of football, then Ben Mubarak is its god.”
6 bottle caps to see the pellet
Pele’s trips to Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have also become shrouded in lore.
During both trips, he was credited with instilling peace in the country he was hosting.
The Nigerian Civil War raged between 1967 and 1970, but when Pele visited in 1969 to play a friendly match against the Nigerian national team, there were allegations that a 48-hour ceasefire had been declared.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Pele said in his autobiography.
Recalling a large military presence in Lagos at the time, he added, “But the Nigerians certainly made sure that the Biafrans did not invade Lagos while we were there.”
There was not much chance of this happening as the Biafran separatists were at least 500 km away and were pushed back by the army.
By 1976, American soft drink company Pepsi had capitalized on Pele’s popularity on the continent and sponsored an East African trip to Kenya and Uganda for the retired star.
There, the “king” succeeded in marketing the drink and ran various football camps for young players in the two countries.
In Kenya, fans were getting in on Pele’s whereabouts by offering bottle caps of the soft drink, 6 for adults and 3 for kids.
Over the years, Pele has visited Mozambique, Egypt, Sudan, Senegal and Ghana.
Besides high-profile visits, Pele has meant a lot to aspiring footballers across Africa.
“When I arrived in Europe, we Africans had nothing but Pele, Muhammad Ali and Eusebio as superstars,” said former Malian footballer Salif Keita.
Abedi “Pele” Ayew, one of Ghana’s most influential soccer players, has even been called a Brazilian soccer legend.
“Personally, I am inspired by his greatness, and to resemble him and carry his iconic name throughout the game and beyond is an absolute privilege and an invaluable honor,” Ayew told the BBC.
Pele has always been a supporter of African progression in the FIFA World Cup tournaments.
His prediction, of dubious validity, in the mid-1970s that an African team would win the tournament before the year 2000 was always a hot topic before the start of each tournament.
It is fitting that his latest post on social media included a few words of congratulation for Morocco’s historic achievement at the last World Cup in Qatar.
“I can only congratulate Morocco for this amazing campaign,” he wrote, “It’s great to see Africa shine.”