Simba SC has a good tradition, others should follow

-Young Africans SC have been rather inconsistent in marking their founding day, while less popular clubs have scarcely thought coming up with annual gatherings. Still there are clubs that ought to be in their 60th year of their founding like Coastal Union FC, among others.

Simba SC was marking a far more respectable age than 60 or 70 years as the club famously came into being in 1936, where their alter egos are their arch rivals, posting a similar age. Their inception was at the time that stirrings of a nationalist sort were just starting, Africans recognizing themselves that way and their youth forming a sports group, and others emulated one of the leading clubs in England at that time, Sunderland FC. This name endured until well after independence, where around 1970 it shifted to Simba.

One reason why other clubs haven’t seen much importance in heralding their founding anniversaries is that the whole country is in a sense split in loyalties between the two city rivals from the populous quarter of the old city. While there are 16 to 20 premier league clubs annually in the country’s premier soccer competition, each participant there is either Simba or Yanga, and these affinities reach farther up to the legislature, and even top government levels. The founding Zanzibar president Sheikh Abeid Karume is the one who put up Yanga infrastructure on its feet, and the late parliamentary speaker, Samuel Sitta, once proudly told his fellow MPs that he wrote the Simba SC constitution – apparently in the mid-1970s.

In that case it will be a rather long journey for other clubs to build the sort of loyalties that the two city rivals have cultivated, but there is no shortage of fans to form such loyalties, only that organization is at times lacking for such initiatives. At the same time, depending on the cultural outlook of a country, a city can have one or two clubs or it can have many, all capable of getting loyal supporters and sponsorships. Perhaps it is in this regard that the situation here is still lacking, as soccer promotion doesn’t yield much.

All the same, were other clubs to start organizing the days/years in which they were founded, and then brought to attention former luminaries of those clubs, they could fill a glaring cultural gap in the country. We know a few things about past Yanga and Simba players because plenty is said about the two sides, especially when they infrequently meet and put the whole country on tenterhooks, as if the result thereof is the end of the world, or something distantly similar. It is getting to be familiar, but still mesmerizing.

Were it that our industrialization efforts would make greater headway, especially by facilitating foreign companies to purchase assets in the country, willing partners could form liaisons with local clubs, the way Nairobi city giants Gor Mahia etched a relationship with Everton FC and facilitated regional soccer excitement. In the past West Bromwich Albion, then an England premier league side, visited here for a series of matches, including an East Africa XI match. We can do the same.