Orville Taylor | Good show, Morocco, but Jamaicans can do much Moor

Make no bones about it, I wanted to see a sub-Saharan African country in the semifinals and even final. Indeed, it would have meant the world to me had it been Ghana or Senegal, two countries where I believe my DNA originate. Nonetheless, Morocco is a compromise, because, for all the shuffling and denials, the Mediterranean Sea gently nudges the disbelievers into the reality that Morocco is squarely part of the African continent. True it is Islamic, true it is Arab, but unless one uses a strange kind of geography, that ignores the cardinal East, West, North and South; Morocco is not Middle East.

To my chagrin, in 1987, the very same year that CARICOM’s Federation model was being ramped up to become the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), a template that the European Economic Community (EEC) ran with to create the European Union (EU), Morocco spat in the face of Africa, applying for membership, just months before the CARICOM meeting in St Lucia. Prior to that, it had renounced its membership in the African Union (AU), because of a border dispute with Mauritania and Algeria over the status of Western Sahara. The AU recognised this territory as a member in its own right, causing the pull-out of Morocco.

Thankfully, it lowered its tail, sang a Sankey and found its way back home in 2017, at the AU meeting in Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, Jah Jah’s land. Ethiopia is significant, not only because it represents the origin of human civilisation, but importantly, because Marcus Garvey and His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie both saw African unity as critical for the advancement not only of people of colour but for global peace and thus the welfare of humanity.

ENIGMA

Morocco is an enigma, with a main city, Casablanca, meaning ‘white house’ in Spanish. Yet, French is a popular choice of business. It occupied the Iberian Peninsula and ruled over Spain for more than 800 years, before its people were expelled Just before Columbus got his commission from Fernando and Isabel. Much of Spanish and indeed European culture, including architecture, mathematics and the language itself, have Moorish fingerprints all over. And for the record, the original Moors looked more like the ancient Egyptians/Ethiopians. Importantly, the first apostle of Islam was the Ethiopian Bilal, who brought the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed to the Arab world. Bilal is the equivalent of both Paul and Peter in Christendom.

In all of this, we Jamaicans should not have to look that far for a proxy team to cheer for at the World Cup. Deep in our psyche is this strange contradiction as Jamaicans that we are simply not good enough and lesser than other countries.

One wouldn’t understand how painful it is for me as a patriot to hear Jamaicans running around with other nations’ flags, using terms like “we” to describe these nations, some of which have such awful histories as regards the treatment of people of colour and humans from different ethnicities. Moreover, many of them have never acknowledged their sins, much less made attempts to even apologise.

But, beyond this personal repugnance that soaks me like ram goat testosterone in curry, is a simple question. “Why aren’t the Reggae Boyz there?

In 1997, when the Jamaican national football team qualified, albeit under the guidance of a Brazilian coach, Rene Simoes, we started to believe. Theodore Whitmore not only kicked a fatal goal against fellow finals débutante Japan, but he also kicked them to ask questions, which they answered later.

SMALL SET OF BELIEVERS

It might have escaped us but it was around the same time that a small set of believers, who grew up seeing the best of Santos, Boys’ Town, Reno, Wadadah, Cavalier, and countless other local clubs, made a critical decision. Anyone who has seen Derrick Denniser, Lascelles Shaw, Billy Perkins, the Bell Brothers, Carl Brown, the brothers Blair, Black Patch and countless other 1970s ballers play, knew we had the talent.

Ask the generation comprising Lenny Hyde, Denden Hutchinson, Thomas McLean and Andrew ‘Big Head’ Sinclair what they would have done with the resources and opportunities available to the current cadre of local footballers as well as the present leadership of the Jamaica football fraternity.

True, we have long treated Brazil as a proxy because of Pele and the creative style of football they play. But we are not Brazilians and the time to be in awe of them has long past us.

Knowing that we had Alcan, producing locally trained Beverly Grant and my namesake Orville Taylor, in the 1990s, and that Olympian Dennis Johnson in the late 1980s had trained the CAST (UTech)-based Bolts of Lightning, the first domestically prepared quartet to run sub-40 seconds for the 4x100, former athletes Bruce James and legendary Stephen Francis, took the leap of faith and started MVP Track Club. The rest is ... sociology.

Of course, the lesser of the two evils in today’s finals is the African-populated French team. However, if the Reggae Boyz are not at the next World Cup, we must wipe our slate clean, inject new blood from top to bottom and start afresh.

We don’t have 800 years like the Moors or Spanish.

- Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.