Mud wrestling and tent pegging: Africa’s unusual sports

0:00Marcia Veiga:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Marcia Veiga:us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

0:51Kelvin Kimathi:Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

1:00Eshlin Vedan:Estás escuchando The Fifth Floor. The Fifth Floor, this is the fifth floor. This is The Fifth Floor,

1:14Kelvin Kimathi:at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all around the world. I'm your host, Farnak Amidi.

1:28Kelvin Kimathi:When we think about sports associated with the African continent, we might think of running and athletics, or maybe football teams like the Nigerian Super Eagles. But as well as these well-known offerings, the continent has many more rather unique sports. So today, three of my colleagues who have recently been covering some of these less known sports are with me to tell me more. Down the line in Nairobi, there is Kelvin Kitmani. Ishlin Vedan is joining us all the way from Johannesburg Bureau. And Marcia Vega is here in the studio with me. Welcome to you all. Hello.

2:10Eshlin Vedan:Hello. Hi. How are you? Hello.

2:12Kelvin Kimathi:Hello. So I'm very excited about our sporty chat, but I'm going to ask all of you, actually. Are you all sporty? What kind of sports do you do? Marcia, I'm going to start with you. Absolutely not. I thought you were going to say absolutely, yes. I'm not. I think the most you'll get out of me is probably a bit of yoga. What about you, Kelvin?

2:34Eshlin Vedan:What are you into? I play basketball and badminton. So I played basketball throughout high school. I actually went to school through a basketball scholarship, but I no longer play. Nowadays, I just talk about it.

2:48Kelvin Kimathi:And watch it.

2:49Nitin Sultane:Okay. And Eshlin, what about you? I'm into football, cricket, and also a bit of professional wrestling. I played a little bit of football and cricket in school, but I wasn't really good at it. So that's what drew me to journalism.

3:03Kelvin Kimathi:Okay. So, Kelvin, I'm going to come to you now. You recently traveled to Uganda to cover a sport called soft ground wrestling. It's not a sport I was familiar with, but I looked at some of the pictures. Quite interesting. Can you explain what it is?

3:22Eshlin Vedan:It's quite an interesting sport. So soft ground wrestling is a Ugandan independent professional wrestling promotion, sort of like the WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment. That's very popular. It's a promotion company in America that has one of the biggest names from John Cena, if you've ever come across such a name. The Undertaker. Giant Gonzalez. Exactly, yes. And Roman Reigns. So those are some of the superstars. So now we have our own African version of WWE. that is the soft ground wrestling in Uganda, where they, instead of having a canvas or, you know, fighting in a big arena with flashing lights and jumbo screen and all that, they fight in the mud.

4:12Eshlin Vedan:So they have bamboo sticks and two-faded yellow lines around the square area where they fight in sticky mud. And this is because there are big WWE fans, but they didn't have the appropriate resources to have a proper ring. So they started with what was available, which is putting together a bamboo post and just a mud ground. So it's choreographed as well? Yes, it's choreographed. And every wrestler must undergo eight months training before they're allowed to fight because it's quite risky. If you look at some of the visuals that are there, they're basically fighting in the mud. As much as it's choreographed, There's a lot of injuries.

4:57Eshlin Vedan:There's a lot of neck injuries. And, you know, it's a proper fight. And yeah, the conditions are harsh.

5:03Kelvin Kimathi:So when you went to cover this mud wrestling story, what kind of people did you meet? Who are the people who go for this kind of sport?

5:13Eshlin Vedan:Some entertaining and very promising young Ugandans. A majority of them are below the age of 25. Most of them orphans or raised by a single parent. And this is sort of their only hope in life. Most of them are dropout. For example, one of their leading stars, he's called Jordan Lovren. He's a school dropout. And he chose wrestling to sort of try and make a life out of it. So another leading mad wrestler, there was a lady called Zampi, a young girl from northern Uganda. She's also a school dropout. didn't get to finish school due to financial challenges back home. She was raised by her mother. And when she came across the advert on TikTok, she applied and joined this.

6:03Eshlin Vedan:And now she's become of the most popular faces of soft ground wrestling. And she's a girl and she also fights against men. Wow. So women can wrestle men? Yes, yes. They have mixed gender fights. Wow. That are normally organized. And most of the times you find that this young lady called Zampi, she's paired up against big or huge men that are really good. And she manages to win. She has quite some interesting styles, you know, and her own signature moves that are quite interesting. But she's strong as well and well trained.

6:41Kelvin Kimathi:And this man who set up this soft ground wrestling academy, who is he? He was quite famous before he started this academy as well.

6:52Eshlin Vedan:Yeah, so Daniel Bumbash is a quantity surveyor turned to a wrestling commentator. So his work was really translating WWE clips to local dialects like Luganda and the other languages in Uganda. And he was hired by a local television to do that. So he became quite popular, obviously, due to the popularity of WWE and its big fan base in Uganda. and realized he had a lot of fun. So he started now doing these commentaries outside. You'd go to a certain outside location and start broadcasting from there, commentating from there, and he'd have a lot of people surrounding and coming in to watch him. And then he took it a notch higher and started charging people to just watch him translate these WWE clips to their local dialect, and people started paying.

7:45Eshlin Vedan:So he asked himself, if they can pay to just watch me commentate, what if we started our own type of wrestling right here in Uganda? And that's how the idea of forming soft ground wrestling really came to mind. And then Bumbash, you know, hired Lund and started advertising on his show, asking young Ugandans who would love to do wrestling to join in. And now they've grown to over 180 wrestlers that are all housed together by Bumbashi.

8:16Kelvin Kimathi:And Calvin, when you went to watch the wrestling, was it fun? Oh, it was fun.

8:22Eshlin Vedan:It was awesome. Out of this world. I had so much fun. I didn't think I would have so much fun when I was filming. And I was mad, yeah? Everything was all mad and stuff. We found ourselves at times cheering. Yeah, go, go, go. It was so much fun. such that our videographers and the other producers we were with, sometimes they would lose themselves watching the matches. Because remember, these guys are having around 5 ,000 people on Fridays showing up to watch the matches live. There's a lot of energy. They have their own, you know, favorite wrestlers, and these wrestlers have their own signature tunes that they're making entrances with, the dances.

9:04Eshlin Vedan:It's much theater. It's a lot of theater. it's choreographed but it's very entertaining and so much fun.

9:13Kelvin Kimathi:Okay so Marcia now to you. You live in London but you're from Angola originally. You recently covered a sport called Capoeira Angola. What's the story behind this? How did you come across it? Yeah of course I was born in Angola in Luanda but when I was four I migrated to London and I've been here since so I would say I'm an Angolan diasporan yeah and I covered this story in 2021 it was the pandemic I think we're all a bit frustrated we're all a bit cooped up and I was on this kind of self-identity journey when I was asking myself like how do I I guess resonate with my African-ness like I obviously feel it I know I am I still practice you know the language for instance i speak portuguese but i just wanted to know what was actually angolan's contribution to the world and obviously i found a ton of stuff but the thing that stood out the most was gaboeda angola because there was a school in east london close to where i live that was teaching it and i'd never heard about it gaboeda is a martial arts practice it involves moving your body and rhythmically if you think about a combination of salsa and break dancing you know it's in the hips it's in the arms it's in the legs it's in the feet so I never knew that there was like a version of it that was from home yeah that's interesting because we we usually associated with Brazil yes capoeira so tell me about this style of capoeira the Angolan style what's it like how is it done yes so the reason why it's even called gabuela angola is because it kind of originated in angola and it kind of goes back to obviously the transatlantic slave trade at the time i believe the area the region that they were practicing there was actually a martial arts sport called the dance of angola so it was like the dance of angola so it kind of inspired gabuela within itself angola was kind of like the port that was used to move people to the afro-brazilians to brazil during slavery time with all that mixture of different cultures different languages even though it's quite a tragedy they probably blended and shared a lot of their practices right um and that's where they started practicing what is now known as gaboeda and then it obviously moved over to Brazil.

11:46Kelvin Kimathi:So the biggest difference between Capoeira Regional and Capoeira Angola is that one is slower than the other. And it's slower in pace that impacts, you know, the movement, the techniques. So regional is a bit faster, whereas Capoeira Angola is a bit more slower, it's a bit more spiritual, they say. For the story that you worked on, you spoke to a man who practices capoeira angola um what's his story what's his name and why is it so important for him to preserve this practice yeah so his name is lucillo in guindul and at the time when i'd interviewed him he had been practicing capoeira angola for seven years but he had been practicing capoeira in general for 20 years he spent majority of his time doing regional because that's what was introduced to him yeah but the moment he discovered that there was something that was like close to his home and what he knows he was like why would I do anything else but he did actually say something interesting was that for him it was a big shift having to slow yourself down because you're used to being I guess quite fast and you're moving with the music a match as well when it's regional it's two minutes but when it's Gaboela Angola it can go up to 10 minutes and you also spoke to one of his students what did he tell you about this sport and why he enjoyed it.

13:09Kelvin Kimathi:Yeah, so I ended up speaking to three of his students. And for Lucille, the reason why he stood out the most is because he had created the first ever Caboera Angola kind of school within Angola. So for many of his students, they'd never heard about it as well. It was kind of like a new thing. They found it challenging, insightful. It was a way for all of them to reconnect with their history, really, because they didn't know all these things. and at the time they had recorded their first ever like capoeira angola album that was only sang in quimbundo which is one of the tribal languages as opposed to in portuguese so for one of his students he was like i feel like i'm only just learning who i am and where i've come from and i found that quite interesting because i was like okay well i guess it's not just me then that kind of feels like i don't know everything there is to know about my country all of you are basically looking for something to go back to your identities that's very interesting yeah and how sports can do that it's fascinating exactly they say gaboeda isn't something that you practice with your body you do it with your soul it's a dance of the soul so it's of the soul oh i love that thank you marcia and ishlin now you cover the sport which i had absolutely no idea it existed.

14:33Kelvin Kimathi:It's called tent pegging. What is it?

14:37Nitin Sultane:Tent pegging is an ancient and very niche form of equestrian with origins in the subcontinent, which would be modern day India and Pakistan. It's believed to have come into South Africa during the Anglo-Wooa between 1899 and 1902. This is a sport which most South Africans have never heard of, given how niche it is. And it's very fast paced. It involves a rider racing along a course, which is about 100 meters, and collecting a target which can be pegs made up of cardboard or rings along the way, or also gallows. It's extremely fast-paced and riders are tested according to their precision in terms of collecting the target.

15:28Kelvin Kimathi:And what do they collect it with?

15:30Nitin Sultane:They use a sword. So it can be very dangerous for either the rider or the horse.

15:38Kelvin Kimathi:And apparently one of the stars of this sport is a teenager, I think, who you spoke with. How did she get into it?

15:46Nitin Sultane:Yes. For our story, we interviewed 19-year-old Korsi Dlomo, who is the only black participant in tent pegging in South Africa and also currently the only black female participant in sub-Saharan Africa. She got into tent pegging purely by chance when she was six years old and attending the birthday party of one of her friends. This birthday party had a horse riding team and it was held at the field of her coach, Dailene Baksa. After this, Korsi asked her mother if she could take up horse racing. And then they spoke to Deileen, who helped her to get involved. And eventually her journey into tent pegging started.

16:36Kelvin Kimathi:Would you say that tent pegging or equestrian sports are popular in South Africa?

16:44Nitin Sultane:It's very difficult for most South Africans to get involved in tent pegging and equestrian, given the high costs involved in competing, South Africa still remains one of the most unequal societies in the world along class lines. During the story, we discovered via one of the sources that we interviewed that maintaining a horse can cost around 200 ,000 rand per year, which is 8 ,000 pounds per year, excluding other fees. This is just the costs involved in caring for the horse and ensuring that it's well maintained. And this cost will unfortunately make it virtually impossible for the average South African to compete in tent pegging or in equestrian.

17:33Nitin Sultane:Korsi is the only black female in sub-Saharan Africa and the only black participant in South Africa in the sport, which is generally dominated by white Afrikaner middle class people.

17:45Kelvin Kimathi:And Eshlen, before you reported on the sport, were you familiar with that?

17:51Nitin Sultane:Actually, no. I came across the sport because one of my colleagues had sent me the press release of Corsi's journey to compete in the World Tent Pegging Championship, which was held in Jordan last December. So this story required a lot of research, given I didn't really know much about 10 pegging before we did the interview. It was a very enjoyable interview because it was something that I've never done before. But how is it to report on such niche sports? It's always an enjoyable experience reporting on niche sports. It takes you out of your comfort zone because you have to do deep research and try to ask different types of questions and plan different types of shots in order to try and make the story look very good for public consumption.

18:46Nitin Sultane:At the same time, they are also very good growth opportunities because by exploring different strategies that you've never learned before, you learn to become a more versatile journalist in the long run. And then you learn how to use different techniques in future stories and find out about different ways of asking questions that you may have not used before.

19:08Kelvin Kimathi:Kelvin, does that resonate with you?