It is all more than a little surreal. As we approach Yaoundé’s Olembe stadium, we are blocked by armed police from entering via the western road and instead are told to walk towards the south side of the stadium. There, 10 metres behind a row of white tents, stands Gate 3.
Ten days previously, eight people were killed and 38 more injured on this spot. Reports suggest that the gate was incorrectly closed despite hundreds of people rushing towards it. When it was eventually reopened, it caused a surge of people. A child was among those trampled to death.
On Thursday, the stadium hosted a major semi-final and Cameroon returned to Olembe for the first time. The squad met survivors in the build-up to the match and agreed as one to donate any financial bonuses from the tournament to the victims of the disaster and their families. Each player will receive £63,000 for making it to the knockout stages. That will make a huge difference to those who now need it most.
We pass through the adjacent gate. It is several hours before kick-off and there is little obvious sign of what took place before Cameroon hosted Comoros.
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“There was a general feeling that the stadium would be full to the brim, which is something a lot of fans wanted to avoid,” says Cameroonian journalist Njie Enow.
“It rather produced the wrong effect, because we ended up with far fewer fans in the stadium than normal. But I also think the huge number of security agents spotted around the city prior to the fixture had an impact on the turnout.”
There will be those who condemn the semi-final and Sunday’s final being hosted in this stadium. You can see their point: the Olembe had its matches removed pending a report into the tragedy, then it was hastily published and the matches returned. It seems unthinkable that a stadium in the European Championship, if eight people had been killed, would host a game in the same tournament.
But it’s not quite that simple. The Olembe comfortably has the best facilities, best pitch and the most modern entrance-exit system of any stadium at this Afcon. Spend any time around and inside it and you quickly realise that the tragedy was caused not by a problem with the stadium; it was a spectacular failure of preparation, of stewarding and policing and of crowd management.
To process unspeakable tragedy, the mind uses tangible representations of remembrance. The flowers and messages of love; the minute’s silence; the black armbands; the laying of wreaths – they allow us to offer support emotionally to those who are suffering but they also permit our own minds to compartmentalise and reason.
The most striking element of Thursday evening is not what we saw, but what we didn’t. Were this in Europe, there would surely be a vast temporary memorial of bouquets and football scarves and shirts; there was nothing here.
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The official Afcon 2021 Twitter account tells its followers that “the stadium looks stunning ahead of tonight’s clash!” but shows only images from pitchside. The determination not to focus on What Must Not Be Named feels – to an outsider – a little oppressive.
Some of this is clearly a strategy of the Confederation of African Football. Their aim is to protect and increase the reputation of the continent’s football and that means washing their hands of a tragedy in their showpiece event as quickly as possible. Reflect too much on tragedy and it defines your tournament.
But there is something more bleak at play here, too: the omnipresence of tragedy in Cameroon. The night before the stadium crush, at least 16 people were killed in a fire in Bastos, an upmarket area of Yaoundé which is home to restaurants and embassy buildings.
Almost 7,000 deaths a year occur in traffic accidents alone, according to the World Health Organisation. Cameroon represents 3 per cent of all annual global deaths from malaria. There are currently two conflicts in the country.
Cameroon has the seventh lowest average life expectancy in the world. Life is hard: high levels of poverty and illiteracy, a high infant mortality rate, lack of palliative care. That can create a different attitude to death.
“It isn’t that people don’t care about death or that life is cheap,” says one supporter who attended the quarter-final win over Gambia. “But in Cameroon we are used to terrible things happening. There are so many reasons to be concerned, so many things to worry about. It means we treat death differently. Lots of people will have moved on because that is how we have to be.”
Ngwang Menang is a nurse who has spent years working in the south-west of Cameroon. He believes that the country’s culture creates an issue with unprocessed grief.
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“Grief, from the cultural viewpoint, is widely accepted but often handled poorly,” he wrote in a piece for the International Children’s Palliative Care Network.
“Typically, a grieving person from within the 250 ethnic groups making up Cameroon, experiences challenges such as being told to ‘be brave’, being persuaded to ‘stop weeping’ or to draw hope from others’ similar past experiences.”
None of this is to undermine the tragedy at Olembe. Given the facilities there, it is scandalous that any serious endangerment of safety was allowed to occur, least of all one that caused the loss of multiple lives. The manner in which local and national authorities laid the blame on supporters was disgusting. The “nothing to see here” attitude on matchday became deeply awkward.
But if it felt inappropriate for football to be back at the Olembe so soon, those are only the thoughts of a white, foreign journalist, an outsider. Within Cameroon, there was far less disagreement and even less shock.
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