Forgotten Nations by Chris Deeley

Author:Chris Deeley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Matabeleland did grab one goal in that game, though, late on to make the score 6-1, and treated striker Thabiso Ndlela’s strike like they’d just gone ahead in the final. The entire team ran over to a small, vocal group of local fans who had gathered behind one of the goals and celebrated with them, before going back over to them at full time to shake them all by the hand individually – before doing a complete lap of the pitch to thank every fan who had come to watch them play.

One of those fans behind the goal, decked out in his brand-new Matabeleland shirt, was Zimbabwe-born Londoner Thomas Perez. The son of Spanish missionaries who met in Matabeleland in the 1970s, Perez – or ‘Pez’, as he introduced himself, beaming, to anyone who approached him – has a complicated relationship with the country of his birth.

‘I moved to London when I was 14,’ he explained some months later, arriving at an east London pub on a scooter. ‘I didn’t really think when I left that I’d be away for so long. I found it very difficult to adapt to London, and I ended up having to make a decision that meant adapting, embracing all of these English cultural attitudes, and almost forgetting my past in Zimbabwe, putting it to one side and saying, “I have to learn to be English.”’

I bit back the urge to suggest that his mode of transport, hand in hand with the pearlescent bumbag permanently attached to his waist, suggested that he’d done a pretty good job of it. Sometimes things can go unsaid.

‘At 21, I went to SOAS University (School of Oriental and African Studies) to do an African Studies master’s, which really reconnected me with Zimbabwe. My thesis was on what would connect young Zimbabweans in London to their country in the future. That process alone got me interested in revisiting my heritage, but it wasn’t until November [2017] that I went back to Zimbabwe, back to Matabeleland.

‘When I started hearing about this Ndebele football team that was coming to London, it just felt right, I knew I had to be there – and I knew the team was going to struggle to make it to London, so a big part of my year in the lead up to the tournament was publicising the cause and doing what I could to get the team over.’

That work put in behind the scenes, especially with the local Zimbabwean community in London, went down well with the team. Already the most open setup of all the teams at the tournament, they bent over backwards to accommodate one of their own into their adventure, to the point that I turned up to watch the squad train on a rest day only to see Pez filling in at centre-back in an inter-team match to round off the session.

The inclusiveness offered by the Matabeleland squad, whose message was very much one of open arms to the footballing community, has

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