(rolling blackouts demand them!) of ngandas (sidewalk bars) to watch
the final of FIFA Club World Cup 2010 in Abu Dhabi between Inter Milan
and TP Mazembe of Lubumbashi (3-nil).
Though a historic first for an African team and therefore a matter of
national pride no matter the outcome of the match, Congolese fans
proved to be sore losers.
At the nganda in the Matonge neighborhood where I was watching the
match, the audience, mistaking the Japanese refereeing the match for a
Chinese, blamed the referee for being partial to Inter Milan and
started hurling abuse at him--and at all the Chinese!
In Lubumbashi where TP Mazembe hails from, this accidental
"japanization" of Chinese turned violent last night, as AFP reports:
«Congolese police have fired over the heads of residents in the city
of Lubumbashi after local football club TP Mazembe lost the final of
the Club World Cup to Italian giants Inter Milan in Abu Dhabi.
Mazembe were hoping to become the first African winners of the event
but Inter, the European champions, proved too strong as they cantered
to a 3-0 victory in Abu Dhabi.
The loss sparked sporadic looting in Lubumbashi as disappointed fans
took out their anger on Chinese-run stores, an AFP correspondent
reported.
Some fans who watched the game on television in the capital city of
Katanga smashed windows and began looting Chinese-owned mobile
telephone premises but police intervened and restored order and nobody
was reported injured.
During the game, some fans had criticised several decisions by the
Japanese referee and, mistaking the official's nationality, had
chanted 'Chinese go home.'
China has a substantial commercial presence in Lubumbashi and Katanga,
with Chinese firms involved in copper mining in the region.»
These football riots accompanied by looting are quite common in the
DRC where strangely West African businesses had on more than one
occasion taken the brunt of Kinois fans' anger for a loss suffered by
a Congolese team in the neighboring capital of Brazzaville! But TP
Mazembe players and fans are even more mercurial soreheads than the
rest of the Congolese football "nation." For instance, four players of
TP Mazembe--including the team skipper, striker Trésor Mputu--are
still banned for one year by FIFA for assaulting a referee in the
middle of a match in Kigali (Rwanda) last August.
The "japanization" of Chinese is indeed an interesting instance of
what I'd call "cross-ethnic misperception," for lack of the
appropriate term. In the US, some expert witnesses have even started
questioning the validity of identification by eyewitnesses of alleged
crime perpetrators belonging to different ethnic groups than their
own! In New York City (if my recollection is correct), a few years
back, African-American gang members attacked a group of young Japanese
tourists, mistaking them for members of a rival Korean-American gang
they had a beef with. And yet Americans live in a multiracial country.
Though the Chinese have been around since Mobutu's years, Congolese
are still hard put to tell them from Japanese or Koreans...
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