Recipe for Victory: Hard Work and Pigeon Blood

NAIROBI, Kenya —  When the four soccer teams from sub-Saharan Africa take the field for their World Cup matches starting today, they will receive the usual support from coaches, trainers and, in all likelihood, “team advisors” who are actually traditional healers known as juju men.

The juju men won’t be offering tips on game strategy. Their job will be to facilitate a win by discreetly scattering charms on the field, putting hexes on opponents and smearing their teams’ goalposts with magic potions to keep the ball out.

Although juju men are commonplace at African soccer matches, their presence--and influence--has been such an embarrassment that the sport’s governing body in Africa recently banned such “team advisors” from being part of a squad’s official entourage.

“Image is everything,” stated the Cairo-based Confederation of African Football before the African Nations Cup in January in Mali. The group said it instituted the ban to avoid presenting “a Third World image” during the continent’s premier sporting event.

“We are no more willing to see witch doctors on the [field] than cannibals at the concession stands,” the CAF declared in a statement that caused juju men from Senegal to South Africa to howl in protest.

“They are throwing out the baby with the bathwater just because some soccer administrators wish to appease the white man more than honor African culture,” one traditional healer from Swaziland responded.

So far, only the South African Football Assn. has announced that no traditional healers would “officially” accompany its World Cup squad to Japan and South Korea.

But soccer commentators doubt that South Africa and the three other African countries--Nigeria, Senegal and Cameroon--would leave their juju men home.

“To depart for an international competition without consulting or including sorcerers is akin to going to an exam without a pencil,” the authoritative African Soccer magazine said in a recent issue.

The CAF and, indeed, many Africans frown on juju, saying it has no role in modern soccer. Since the CAF ban, columnists, soccer analysts and fans have been debating in newspapers, Web sites and chat rooms about the efficacy of juju and its history in African soccer.

Many fans agree that for the teams to be successful, they need to combine skill and rigorous training with soccer savvy. But those who discount soccer sorcery do so at their own peril. Just ask the Elephants.

In 1992, Ivory Coast, whose soccer team is nicknamed the Elephants, won the African Nations Cup in a nail-biting penalty shootout against Ghana. Many Ivorians credited the victory to a band of juju men enlisted by the sports minister to give the national side an extra advantage.

When the minister reneged on promises to pay the juju men, they promptly slapped a hex on their national team. The result: a dismal 10-year slide for the Elephants.

Only last month, Defense Minister Moise Lida Kouassi went to the juju men’s village to beg forgiveness and make amends.

“I’m offering a bottle of liquor and the sum of” $2,000, he said, “so that the village, through the perceptiveness of its wise men, will continue to help the republic and, in particular, the minister of sport.” Africans are quick to point out that players from Western nations practice their own form of juju when they wear lucky charms, pray before an important match, cross themselves after the national anthem or form a ritual huddle.

Even basketball superstar Michael Jordan could be accused of practicing a little juju for wearing his old University of North Carolina shorts under his NBA uniform.

But in Africa, there is little subtlety when it comes to superstitions.

In a 10-page special report, African Soccer magazine recently documented how teams splatter pigeons’ blood around the dressing room to ward off evil spirits, bury the remains of animals in their opponents’ half of the field, and sacrifice cows, goats and other animals to collect blood for players to bathe in.

Some teams even slash their own players’ bodies with razor blades to rub a “magic dust” into their bloodstream.

“I used to get cut so much I was just like a ventilator,” a former South African player said. “They used to cut us everywhere.... They would use the same razor blade on everyone.”

Another former Ivory Coast star recounted how at a previous African Nations Cup, about 150 juju men set up camp in their hotel rooms, making players take baths in large pots filled with various concoctions. Despite the elaborate juju rituals, the Ivorians were kicked out in the first round, losing to Egypt and Cameroon.

Defenders of soccer sorcery say that juju men merely psych up players. They are no different from the sport psychologists that many U.S. professional teams maintain on their staff.

Jackson Ambani claims to have motivated some of the best players in East Africa during his 40-year career as a juju man.

The chalkboard tacked up to the front door of his one-room shack in the sprawling Kangemi slum outside Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, advertises Ambani’s day job as one of the hundreds of thousands of faith healers throughout Africa. They use herbs and prayer to ancestral spirits to cure malaria, gonorrhea, even lovesickness.

During the soccer season, Ambani is in high demand. The top soccer clubs in Kenya and even coaches from the national team come calling, supplying Ambani with the names of the opposing teams’ players.

This week, the 74-year-old Ambani demonstrated how he puts the names in a small terra-cotta urn, pours in the blood of chickens, goats and other animals, and sprinkles in some of his special magic dust, which he keeps in a plastic Skippy peanut butter container. After plugging the holes in the urn with some goat horns, Ambani fires up the brew on a kerosene stove.

“When I do this, even though the other team may have good players, they will never perform well,” he said, breaking out in broad grin.

“They will miss the ball and see things that are not on the field. I am a spoiler.”

On some occasions, Ambani slips into soccer stadiums at dawn to plant bones and parts of animals at “essential places” in the field.

For his services, Ambani charges from about $20 to as much as $2,000--depending on the level of the game.

Ambani, who said he wore No. 7 when he played for his village soccer team in western Kenya, said he enjoyed working and talking sports with soccer players. But since he purchased a cellular phone, his business has become a virtual Dial-a-Juju. His clients now simply telephone in their order. When they don’t pay, he reverses the hex on them.

Nicholas Musonye, secretary-general of the Council of East and Central Africa Football Assns., which runs soccer in 13 countries, said he has urged his members to stay away from Ambani many times, to no avail.

Across Africa, Musonye said, football associations use their sizable “research budgets” to hire witch doctors and keep them happy. Musonye lamented that the same groups pay their players small stipends and fail to correct their poor diet or replace their ragged uniforms.

“Juju doesn’t work,” Musonye said. “The road to success lies in hard work, hard work and more hard work.”

He chuckled, then said: “If juju worked, then African teams would win the World Cup every four years, but that still hasn’t happened once.”