While many African football teams and their supporters are known for their joyful celebrations and culturally specific dances, North Africans are known to rock stadiums with the sheer power of their chants.
“If you think of West African football and music, it’s really dancy and aesthetically great. North Africa is scary, in a great way,” Andrew Awad, an Egyptian football fan who works at the intersection of art and education, tells OkayAfrica. “I've been to matches with ultras where you might be stepped on if you’re not chanting and jumping in sync.”
Rather than a carnival-like party, North African stadiums brim with anticipation, vibrating in a rhythm that gives power to the player, with ultras booing whenever the opposing team is in possession of the ball and chanting restlessly, sometimes for 15 minutes straight, until their team scores. Awad’s favorite club, Al Ahli FC, often scores at the very end of the game, because its ultras (Ultras Ahlawy) don’t give up chanting until the very last minute.
The unparalleled passion of ultras
Ultras are highly organized, zealous football supporters characterized by a lifelong dedication to one club, intense vocal backing and tifos, and spectacular visual displays inside stadiums.
Originating in 1960s Italy, they found great resonance across North Africa in the early 2000s. Taking the Italian organizational blueprint and infusing it with South America-inspired stadium acoustics like the Murga-style, North African ultras are widely considered the most intense, creative, and politically powerful fan culture in the modern world. From Morocco to Algeria to Egypt, they compose music and chants as a way to push their clubs, speak truth to power, and express solidarity.
“These chants show so much cultural creativity, using local slang, poetry, and melodies taken from pop songs,” says one football content creator from Egypt. “Later on, it became more about social and political expression and the significance of certain historical events.”
Awad remembers a moment after the revolution in 2012, when Hosni Mubarak had been ousted and the Egyptian people were anxious not to replace him with another dictator. “I remember the roar in the stadium as the Ultras Ahlawy demanded the military to give power to the civilians,” says Awad. “For me, that was a shaping moment of how a chant can have such a big impact, because after that was [the 2013 Port Said] massacre and then the stadiums were empty for ten years.”
Most ultras groups have been effectively banned in Egypt for the role they played in mobilizing protesters during the revolution. “I remember getting mobilized for certain chants that I did not even get the meaning of,” says the football content creator about being in the stadium around that time. “For these groups, mobilization is a very easy thing. Ultras Ahlawy created so many chants that even outsiders knew.”
Now, fans have to use a state-controlled electronic platform to get very limited tickets. This has impacted both the league and the national team as Egypt has not won AFCON since the ban, as opposed to winning it three times in a row in 2006, 2008 and 2010.
“Football is for fans, so the level of Egyptian football evidently deteriorated when ultras and fans were banned and the stadiums became silent,” says Awad. With the stadiums’ slow reopening, chants have returned and this season, people specifically went to matches to sing the latest compositions by Zamalek supporting Ultras White Knights.
Regional solidarity in local political resistance
Many North African countries have complicated political relations that extend to the realm of football. An Egyptian will not know a Tunisian or Moroccan national football anthem (except the actual Algerian national anthem which indirectly inspired an Al Ahli song), and since the last AFCON, no North African country is likely to cheer for Morocco in this World Cup.
At the club level, it’s a different story. Clubs across the region have friendships and rivalries, but they’re united in their political solidarity.
“Clubs like Wydad [in Morocco], Al Ahli [in Egypt], and some clubs in Algeria come from a resistance legacy and reflect this identity in the stands,” says the football content creator. During a match in Morocco, you might spot a sign in solidarity with the leader of the Ultras White Knights who is currently imprisoned, or commemorating the people that were killed in the Port Said massacre.
In turn, fans across the Arab World know “F'Bladi Delmouni" (In my country, I suffer injustice), one of Raja Casablanca’s most iconic songs. Beyond local politics, those who can unite in their support for a liberated Palestine.
Football music for national identity
In North Africa, football stadiums provide the space and music becomes the vehicle for national sentiment. “Football needs music and vice versa,” says Awad. Returning to the comparison between West and North Africa, he notes that the grinta, the grit and tension of Egyptian chanting and movement reflects shaabi (common) dance. “You go down and up with these tense facial expressions, like the character in the The Blaze’s ‘Territory’ music video,” he says.
While Egyptian ultras do not usually write patriotic anthems for the country, Algerian ultras groups like Torino Milano, Groupe Palermo or Groupe Milano have released several songs to be sung on the national level. “As a people, we show up for Algeria through football,” says British Algerian Brazilian pharmacy dispenser and content creator Soumia Ouaar.
When a decades-long football feud escalated between Egypt and Algeria in 2009, a musician from Soumia’s hometown of Biskra wrote the song “La Hummus wa la Ful,” singing about the controversies Algerians faced in an Egyptian accent. “How we express ourselves is always through music,” she says.
In Algeria, football music is its own genre characterized by the use of trumpets, drums, and qraqeb. When Algerian fans go to football stadiums, they bring these instruments with them.
According to Ouaar, Algerians don’t only celebrate their success, but give dedication to their losses too. Patriotic football songs may not always be about winning, but about Algerians being strong people that have historically overcome many obstacles and can bring this energy to the pitch.
“There’s no way you’ll go to an Algerian football match without seeing somebody play music,” she says. Similar to Awad’s description of Egyptian fans, Soumia says that even when Algerian fans are the minority in a stadium, their fervour and organization takes over.
Confined to the stands, North African fans send their energy to the pitch through music, becoming their teams’ 12th player by tapping into the transformative power of collective chanting.
“Even the Americans in Kansas are dancing with the Algerians and saying that they want to celebrate Algeria, because of how fierce the music is,” she says. “It brings a lot of emotion, so when you are moving people with music, it does make you feel more motivated to do well as a player. If you’re a player and see that your people are singing so much for you, it [ignites] that spirit and fierceness that you want to achieve.”
