“Up, up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will”- Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940)

FOOTBALL
The Ghanaian team – Black Stars- returned home this week to a heroes welcome, according to international news reports.
Quite fitting, it must be said, following the sterling performance they put up during the World Cup Games in South Africa.
Played on African soil for the first time ever, the FIFA spectacular drew a record six African countries - Cameroun, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria all from West Africa, Algeria and the host South Africa. But as fate would have it, it was Ghana’s Black Stars that would hoist the African flag high, playing their hearts out and succumbing to Uruguay in a penalty shootout in the quarterfinals.
The Black Stars are aptly named after the sterling dream of the African
nationalist, Marcus Garvey- a native of St. Ann, Jamaica in the West Indies. For it was he who founded the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA) with the object to redeem the lost African peoples that found themselves across the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, serving white peoples.
And so he set up a steamship line, which he named ‘The Black Star Line’ ostensibly to repatriate the Africans in the Diaspora (Americas and the Caribbean) back to Motherland
Africa. With his rallying cry, ‘Africa for the Africans, Europe for the Europeans and Asia for the Asians,” Garvey was a pragmatic organiser with a gift for oratory.
The steamship line would not only ferry Africans back home as ‘The Mayflower and Jesus’ had done during the notorious slave trade, but would also promote trade among the African peoples.
Garvey’s dream was eventually crystallised into affirmative action years later after his demise by that son of the soil- Kwame Nkrumah- the first president of independent Ghana- former Gold Coast. With the newly independent nation, Nkrumah looked to the Ethiopian flag (red green and gold colours). Ethiopia was instructive for newly independent Ghana, as the peoples had successfully managed to resist colonisation, and later under the guidance of Ras Tafari Makonnen (Haile Selassie I) joined the community of independent states (The League of Nations, forerunner of the present day United Nations Oorganisation) to preserve her sovereignty.
Nkrumah therefore inserted the symbol of the Black Star in the flag of the newborn nation to reflect the dream of Marcus Garvey. Nkrumah had learnt about Garvey during his studies in the United States of America and became an immediate
convert.
Among his other converts are Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik Shabaaz) and his father (Mr. Earl Little) as well as the founders of the Organisation
of African Unity (OAU)- the forerunner of present day African Union (AU), itself a culmination of successive Pan African Congresses that were the brainchild of an African barrister, Henry Sylvester William and later popularised by William Edward Burghandt Du Bois and finally organised by the Africans at home.
So the trouncing of the US team and its Star Spangled Banner by the Ghanaian team, Black Star - was not only sweet victory in the sense of a football match, it was retribution in action, reparation, if you will! This explains why Nelson Mandela, the iconic pan Africanist had a message of encouragement for the team.