Original Story Published by: Charles Onyango-Obbo for Daily Nation
Photography by: AFP Karim Jaafar/AFP Karim
(Above) Egypt's players attend a training session at the Akhmat Arena stadium in Grozny on June 12, 2018, ahead of the Russia 2018 Fifa World Cup.
The 2018 football World Cup is upon us. If you are a hostile alien, the World Cup is, perhaps, the best time to invade Earth.
In 2014, when the tournament was held in Brazil, it’s estimated that 3.5 billion people — nearly half of humans on the planet at that time—watched it.
This year, there will be five African countries in the World Cup: Senegal, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and Tunisia.
We have come a long way from 1934, when Egypt became the first African country to participate in the World Cup. And 1934 is, therefore, a good date to try and explore how Africa has changed through the World Cup.
That was the time before live broadcast, of course. However, although there are people who are alive in Africa today when the World Cup was played that year, there was absolutely no chance they would have got to watch even a story about it months later.
Economic Liberalization
That’s because there wasn’t a single TV station in Africa then. The first television service was to be introduced in Morocco 20 years later, in 1954. And Egypt itself had to wait until 1960.
The most interesting World Cup stuff in Africa started happening after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the end of the Cold War a year later.
Africa entered a new wave of political and economic liberalization that led to the freeing of the airwaves.
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