Yeboah’s Witnesses

“We are ashamed for everybody who shouts against us,” Tony Yeboah wrote in 1993 in an open letter alongside fellow footballers Anthony Baffoe and Souleymane Sané, the father of Germany winger Leroy.

The trio were confronting those who hurled racist abuse and discriminated against them as black footballers in early nineties Germany. Ten years earlier, Baffoe became the first African player to sign for a German club, joining FC Köln at the age of eighteen. Opposing teams’ fans threw bananas at him and chanted slurs, an attitude that didn’t change when Sané moved from France to Freiburg two years later, nor when Yeboah joined FC Saarbrücken in 1988.

The 1993 letter, however, was not aimed solely at fans, but at the media and wider society also, i.e. those who sneered at football and its racist element within fan groups, yet also perpetuated the same stereotypes and prejudices against foreign people. Sané headbutted a journalist who made racially insensitive remarks about his wife and Yeboah was once asked: “You live in a terraced house with a wall unit and a front garden. Are you aware that you seem like a model German citizen?” To which he responded: “Should I light a campfire in the living room?”

⬢

To read the rest of this article, you need to join TSB+ — members get access to this plus extra podcast and video episodes, all podcasts advert-free, can read every issue of our magazine online and much more. You can join or log in below.