CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES

There is one major difference between the spiritual adviser and the coach. Whereas the coach is hired officially and put on the club’s salary list, the spiritual adviser is hired unofficially and kept off the list. Kalla says the spiritual adviser is not on the payroll. In other words, the coach is always known by the public but the spiritual adviser is usually kept incognito. I can think of at least two reasons for keeping the name of the spiritual adviser a secret. First, the ‘game within the game’ demands the search for the anti. If the other team already knows the name of the spiritual adviser of its opponents, they will probably also know what kind of magic he is likely to employ. In this case, the search will be over before it has even started.

Second, if everybody knows the spiritual adviser, they can also try to stop him. One way of stopping the spiritual adviser is by ‘neutralizing’ his role in match preparation. On many occasions, Zé had to endure harassment from the sup- porters of the opposing team. ‘When you are a well-known spiritualist like my- self, you cannot come to a match without people looking at you, suspicious of what you are doing. They will always think you have done something with the match. So people came up to me and started smearing pork all over my face and hands. Sometimes they rubbed me with salt, sometimes they sprinkled seawater all over my body.’ Why seawater? ‘In their mind, anything that contains salt will spoil everything abnormal. That’s why witchcraft doesn’t make it to the kitchen because there’s salt there. That’s why some people who go to sleep take salt and put it around their beds. The sea is salty water.’

Salt is also used by Buea Boys when they play a match. The team manager will give the players a plastic bag of salt. Just before the start of the match, the players will throw the salt onto the field to destroy all possible magic. In the

literature on football magic, I read that it is not uncommon to see that ‘players urinated all over the field to neutralize the objects which they thought might have been buried by the host team’ (Royer 2002: 475). Urinating on the field appears to have the same effect as throwing salt but I have never witnessed players in- volving themselves in the former activity.

But why the pork? ‘They know that I am a Muslim,’ Zé says. ‘They know I don’t like pigs. It’s terrible when that happens but I don’t resist it. It’s their belief.’ He gives me another example of being ‘attacked’ because of his pro- fession. ‘There was a time when I was working for Olympique de Buea. We had to play against Opopo. I slept the night in Limbe and woke up in the morning. Some people had cut pieces of fresh pork and had thrown them around my house. It was my wife who first saw them. I said: “Forget about it.” I swept it away, gave it to the dogs and they ate it. In the afternoon we went to the field and we beat Opopo.’ Apparently the supporters thought that they could spoil his magic with the pork. ‘It was a medicine man who gave them that,’ Zé explains. ‘It was their anti. Afterwards they started following the medicine man, saying that he was a thief. They said: “You make us to buy pork just because you want to eat a pig.”’

The other way of stopping the spiritual adviser is through bribery. Zé has the following story to tell. ‘When people know you are the spiritual adviser of some team, they sometimes buy you. They will come to you and ask: “How much have these people paid you for this particular match?” You say FCFA 100,000 or FCFA 200,000 (€ 152 to € 304). They say: “We will double the price and you let it go.” Your employer will think that you have worked but he doesn’t know that other people have paid you not to work. He doesn’t know that you have played a double game.’

Zé says that teams have to keep his employment a total secret. ‘One time the club president at Elec Sport called me and said that he had talked to some people and that they had directed him to me. He said: “I want you to work for me.” I told him: “That’s not the way. You have already told somebody that you are coming to see me. That’s wrong. It has to be between you and me and nobody else.”’

This last sentence explains how the executives of the club can avoid their spiritual adviser being bribed. In fact, Zé only likes to deal with club presidents in person and no one else. For instance, he has worked for the first-division teams Coton Sport de Garoua, Sable de Batie, Fovu de Baham, Victoria United and Olympique de Buea. It was only with the last club that he had contact with executives other than the club president. It is here that corruption comes in to spoil the relationship between the spiritual adviser and the club. ‘There was a time when Olympique de Buea stopped appreciating my services,’ he explains.

‘The problem is that when money starts being passed between people, corruption creeps in. For instance, the club president may send me money through some- body. Maybe he’ll send FCFA 50,000 but only FCFA 10,000 will reach me. This sort of thing is due to the absence of direct contact between the president and myself.’

This is the moment when a spiritual adviser will stop working for the club. For instance, it is said that PWD Bamenda’s spiritual adviser stopped working after winning six matches in a row with the team because PWD did not pay him the money promised beforehand.