Three
years ago an orphaned teenager landed in Argentina, travelling from Ghana as a
stowaway. Now he has signed for Boca Juniors. He tells Harriet Alexander his
remarkable story.
As
he sneaked into a cargo container under cover of darkness, 15-year-old Ghanaian
orphan Bayan Mahmud had no idea what lay ahead of him. All he wanted was to
escape the country where savage tribal violence had claimed the lives of both
his parents and start a new life somewhere else.
Three
years later the story of what happened next is being celebrated in Argentina,
the football-crazy country where he arrived as an illegal immigrant after three
weeks stowed away at sea.
Not
only has Bayan, now 18, just signed a contract with Boca Juniors football club
– the first foot on the ladder to potentially huge success – but he has also
secured a sponsorship deal with Nike.
“My
parents would have been very proud of me,” he said, speaking to The Telegraph
from the youth squad’s Buenos Aires apartment. The club, one of Argentina’s
largest, has fielded such stars as Diego Maradona and Carlos Tévez.
“I’m
very happy here,” he said. It’s a good place to be.”
That
Bayan survived at all is astonishing. His father, a professional footballer,
played in Kumasi, Ghana‘s second city, but on his retirement moved north with
his family to the town of Bawku and retrained as a herbal doctor.
“Life
was good then,” Bayan recalled. “I played a lot of football, without shoes or
goalposts, just in the street with my brother and friends. But then the
fighting started.”
In
2005, aged 10, the boy returned home one day with his older brother to find his
parents’ bodies – both brutally killed in a tribal attack.
“Their
death was a disaster for us,” he said. “We went to live in an orphanage, but
five years later the gunmen came back. Lots of people died. I thought I would
be killed, so my brother and I ran – but I lost him.”
With
a few coins in his pocket, the 15-year-old made his way to the port town of
Cape Coast, where he befriended local boys who earned money working as porters
for the huge ships that docked there. He wanted to get to Europe, and one of
the boys suggested he hide inside a container.
“I
was very scared,” he said, “but I had seen horrible things in Ghana too. I was
leaving behind a lot of sadness.”
All
he had with him was a little “gari” – cassava flour – and some water, but when
hunger drove him from the container he was befriended by an African sailor who
hid him and brought him food. “If the ship’s officers knew about me I would
have been sent straight back to Ghana,” he said.
When
the ship arrived not in Europe but in Argentina, a country of which he had
never heard, he set off on foot for the capital where fellow Africans helped
him find a place in a home for refugees. One day a group of Argentine youths
asked him to join their kickabout game of football – and then asked the
fleet-footed youngster back every Saturday. “I loved it,” he said.
Spotted
by a Boca Juniors scout, he was taken to trials and offered him a contract with
the youth squad, a coveted position that earns him a total of £200 a month. His
contract with Nike is worth a further £2,700 a year – giving a combined income
unthinkable back in Boku.
The
vast majority of the country’s footballers are white but Argentinans have taken
“the Ghanaian Maradona” to heart. He has almost 10,000 followers on Twitter,
and dozens of Facebook fan pages, while the country’s newspapers have delighted
in his story, with headlines stating “I want to be the first black man to play
for Argentina.”
Now
Bayan hopes soon to receive his Argentine nationality, to complement his
heavily-accented Argentine Spanish. He has become a fan of local asados –
barbeques – but still prefers Ghanaian “high life” pop music to the tango.
And,
he added, “I would love to go back, and to see my brother. I miss him very much
– we were like twins.”
Credit:
Telegraph.co.uk
1 comment:
Truly inspiring. All the best Bayan.
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