AFCON’s real MVP refuses to let us look away from Patrice Emery Lumumba

Natural resources are the planet’s gift to human beings. What comes from the Earth is what allows us to live and thrive as a species, and ecosystem overall. For centuries, the exploitation of those assets, both human and ecological, have defined the continent of Africa as we know it.

Whether hidden in plain sight, coded into government policy or outright beaten in to submission through triangular slave trade or apartheid, the literal raping and pillaging of the planet has formed the globe’s social order for as long as most generations any of us have ever known have existed.

During the 2025-26 Africa Cup of Nations soccer tournament, a darling of an event for those who prefer intercontinental matches that still have some a semblance of true culture — unlike the wildly corporate, sanitized and fiscally outrageous FIFA World Cup — we’ve seen the residue of this history in full color.

In a time when violence rages within our own borders on a level that one might think would foment revolution, in Morocco, one man has captured the eyeballs of the world by honoring a true freedom fighter. No matter who wins next week’s final between the winner of Wednesday’s semifinals between Senegal and Egypt and Nigeria and Morocco, the tournament’s MVP can only go to one man: 49-year-old Michel Kuka Mboladinga, better known as “Lumumba Vea.”

Mboladinga’s unwaveringly stoic stance, the bright, sharp colors and his unflinching emotion and commitment to his cause are unforgettable. Beyond the physical marvel of his striking figure, his presence reminded everyone that beyond the field, the effects of divide and conquer colonialism still have ramifications that are ever present.

Who is he in real life? Mboladinga is a part of a group that works specifically to preserve the legacy of Patrice Emery Lumumba, who served briefly in 1960 as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country later known as Zaire under military dictatorship.

If you’re wondering why stuff like this isn’t just a relic of the past, one of Lumumba’s teeth, a gold-capped molar, turned up in 1999 in the hands of one of the Belgian policemen who were charged with disposing of the former prime minister’s body parts after he was assassinated by Belgian-backed forces in January 1961.

The tooth was returned to his family in 2022.

By the way, that method of disposing of Lumumba’s body? Dismemberment as dissolution in acid. All because the Belgians were afraid the Democratic Republic of Congo would become a place of pilgrimage.

Make no mistake, Lumumba was about that action. His colonizers were not. He paid the price for speaking on true independence with his life. Cliffs notes version is, Belgium didn’t really want to let go when political capital was waning on colonies and the fighting began from there.

Not to get off on a whole tangent about this, but basically the nation’s past was as brutal as it got as was Lumumba’s dastardly end. All this was on TV, too. Newsreels of guys stuffing his own speeches in his mouth like some wild African propaganda version of a Ted DiBiase, the Million Dollar Man from WWE bit. You can look up King Leopold on your own.

Separately, a movie was made about Lumumba in the year 2000. It’s a co-production of multiple European countries, but directed by Haitian Raoul Peck. In an incredible art-recreates-life moment, filming for the movie had to be set in neighboring countries because of civil war on the ground in Lumumba’s home nation.

Point being, if you have any remote frame of reference for who he was, to see a grown man who could have played him in said movie standing like a statue in full color in 2026, there is a z-axis double take inside one’s head that is intense.

At first, when the Democratic Republic of the Congo opened play against Benin on Dec. 23, 2025, when the camera would naturally cut to Mboladinga as Lumumba behind the goal, it was almost surreal. I’d only ever seen Lumumba on black and white grainy newsreels and photos. Every time the camera caught Mboladinga, it was like that eerie music that plays on TikTok came on inside your head. They won that game 1-0 with an early goal from Theo Bongonda.

By their second match, which they drew with the mighty Lions of Teranga from Senegal, Mboladinga was impossible to ignore — his suit colors even brighter than the last match. At this point, we all wanted them to advance to get more glimpses of him. So, when the Sébastien Desabre-led squad banged out Botswana 3-0 to get to the knockout stages, it felt like a celebration of a guy who had single-handedly — somewhat literally — reminded the globe that pan-Africanism is not a dead concept.

They might have literally destroyed Lumumba’s body so that his family never got to see him for a proper burial, his tooth aside. But to have the spirit of the leader of one of the most minerals and trauma-rich places on earth resurrected in full living color had a poetic bent that still kind of makes your soul shake.

The state of African soccer is as strong as it’s ever been. From a talent standpoint, the quality is there. Over decades, the issue was never how good can the best teams be. It was how bad are the worst squads.

Now, on balance, the tournament feels better to some degree, though one-time powers like South Africa’s Bafana Bafana have reached new lows. Even Gabon decided to fire everyone and start banning players after it went winless in Group F. And Cameroon was dealing with a weird power-vacuum situation that included Cameroonian Football Federation president Samuel Eto’o not including a player on the roster who could break his own career goals-scored record. Even journalists were getting after it with each other in the press area. Yet, I digress.

Morocco made a World Cup semifinal in the most recent tournament in Qatar in 2022. Egypt, the most decorated country in the history of the event, is always a problem. It doesn’t hurt that it has one of the world’s best players in Liverpool’s Mo Salah.

And you might recall Algeria from the 2010 World Cup, when Landon Donovan scored the goal of his life to send the U.S. Men’s National Team fans into a frenzy the likes of which they will probably never again see in their lives. That tournament was in South Africa.

The former two teams mentioned — Morocco and Egypt — are among the semifinalists in AFCON and could meet in the finals. But for Algeria, their exit from the tournament ended unceremoniously with a 2-0 loss to perennial power Nigeria (which missed the upcoming World Cup).

That game ended in an ugly scene, with Algerian players and federation members going after the referee postgame for an alleged missed handball call. The crowd tore things down, and it wasn’t a good look. Somewhat garden-variety AFCON shenanigans, but this team might have sealed its fate with the soccer gods in the last round when it messed with the spirit of The Leopards of Lumumba.

Late in their Round of 16 game on Jan. 6, Adil Boulbina netted a goal for Algeria that would knock DRC out of the tournament near the final whistle, just when the upstart soccer nation — which went undefeated in qualifiers — thought it might actually pull this thing out and continue the legend.

Instead, in a stunningly non-diplomatic move, Mohamed Amoura ran to the penalty box after the game and mimicked the very gesture that Mboladinga had been holding in front of him (standing like the statue of Lumumba), and then collapsing to the ground in a sleeping gesture, as if he’s mocking the toppling of a statue.

Personally, I was stunned by the audacity. The images of what Mboladinga actually did after the game, fall backwards emotionally and finally break character and literally cry in front of the world, was the kind of high drama you cannot script. Suddenly, for the darlings of the tournament to lose and be mocked on the way out of the tournament, felt wrong on a spiritual level. It was as if Lumumba had been martyred all over again.

It flat out caused an international incident. 

The player apologized almost instantly and sincerely. The Algerian national team then took things a step further, finding Mboladinga and sending a team representative to give him a team jersey with the name Lumumba on the nameplate. It was a touching moment on the global stage and frankly where this whole tournament took a turn.

Tons of people who thought this guy just kind of looked like someone they might have seen in the history books was at the forefront of the headlines, suddenly was a regular human walking around, making friends. Hell, all sorts of people were coming together.

As does most everything in this age of disinformation, suddenly people remembered Lumumba was an actual person, with an actual history and that this man as his avatar wasn’t just some cool Night At The Museum-type marketing stunt. The histories of how quite a few African leaders have been taken out for not having their political intent in line with the Western world were suddenly thrust into various timelines because of soccer.

If you weren’t familiar, Egyptians rioted when Lumumba was assassinated in 1961. Again, this was all on television. Plenty of places had unrest. Belgrade, London, New York. But in Cairo, where his family was smuggled, he had the utmost respect from dignitaries. Fun fact: The Belgian Consulate in Cairo is on a street named after Lumumba.

Ultimately, in true end stage capitalism form, Mboladinga was offered money to hang around as an ambassador. Presumably, he would be doing his bit at games that don’t feature his country, which would have been an absurd look. He declined, standing on business — as he had literally done all tournament — reminding folks that he wasn’t there to build a personal brand.

He was there to inspire his nation and remind folks of the atrocities that had been committed against his people.

Beyond its earthly resources and the labor capability of the Black body, one of the pivotal pillars of exploitation is perhaps most obvious: imagery. The depiction of Africans as primitive and foolish in nature is a long-standing practice, even in so-called family friendly art like comic books. In the book “Tintin in the Congo,” — the second in Hergé’s classic series about the loveable swashbuckling journalist and his dog, Snowy (aka Milou) — the depictions of the native Congolese are every bit as horrific as you’d expect (Hergé is Belgian, for what it’s worth).

In the 1980 film “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” the entire storyline is based on a tribe that finds a Coca-Cola bottle in the desert that’s been tossed from a plane and lands near their village. It has all the ridiculous trappings of a madcap adventure with the “savages” who are too stupid and primitive to understand that a bottle is just a bottle, not a gift from the heavens. They try to use it for everything they do in their traditional lives, and the trope of modern technology being beyond their limited understanding of the game is literally the entire plot.

It’s worth noting that this movie was the most successful South African film ever made at the time, clocking in at a $200 million box office hit in the ’80s.

Even in soccer, this practice is old hat. In 1949, Nigeria’s first national team did a promotional tour in the United Kingdom. The team traveled by sea, landing in Liverpool, England, for a nine-match tour. A lot of guys played barefoot, to the shock and wonder of the white folks in the crowds. They stopped in Sierra Leone on the way back and a progam was born. But again, you can watch all this yourself, if you so choose. It’s not just the lore of newspaper accounts gone by.

While that was a so-called Goodwill effort, a year later, in 1950, African nations were still denied entry into the World Cup. Seven years later, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) was created. So they started their own tournament, then a four-team set, that has grown to what we now know as AFCON.

These days, with meme culture and ragebait being what basically drives social media, the inherent disrespect can be a little less obvious, but rooted in the same notions.

“First Meme Of AFCON” is a social media post you’ll see a lot. And it doesn’t help when during a game between Benin and, ahem, DRC, the Video Assistant Replay (VAR) system just…stopped working.

Are there hilarious aspects about the tournament that are seemingly singular problems on that continent? Perhaps. But the quality of the game is far above what it once was, and the tournament that was built out of rebellion should not bow to the scheduling demands of FIFA, the international soccer governing body. And clubs who don’t want their teams playing for their home countries ought to be ashamed of themselves. It’s literally vital to the growth of the game.

The whole nature of the game is so global. Ever since FIFA allowed grandparents to be considered part of your heritage claim to national team status, the game has exploded with teams that can field better squads for the good of everyone. Cameroonian defender Oumar Gonzalez, who spent most of his career playing in France but now plays in Saudi Arabia, is actually Mexican, by adoption. That’s the world we live in these days.

Hell, there are 45 players from the French region of Ile-de-France alone in the tournament. It’s the most by a mile for any place on earth, which includes Paris and its environs. By comparison, there is only one from the U.S. It tells you a lot about how well the U.S. is developing the game, but that’s another story. So as Akor Adams showed humility as a Nigerian, paying respects to Lumumba after scoring the nail-in-the-coffin goal to beat the aforementioned Algerians in the quarterfinals, we were also reminded that the Super Eagles couldn’t even get it together to qualify for this year’s World Cup, which will be held across Canada, Mexico and the United States.

And it’s a little cringy when people start taking memes into their own hands and doing it themselves in random places. It’s very weird to hear influencers talking about how they bought a fifth-division club in Kenya, just to report the profit margins like it’s some kind of old laundromat restoration project.

If you want to look back, AFCON provides the historical context that is unparalleled. If you want to look forward, you wouldn’t be out of pocket to say an African nation could win the 2026 World Cup. The proverbial playing field with the rest of the world may not be level. But now more than ever, it feels like the competition on the actual pitch truly is.

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