There’s an aul saying that football isn’t life and death – it’s much more important than that. It’s a lazy cliché, but with the post-mortem of Africa’s first world cup, many will toot their horn, saying that football could be responsible for breathing new life into the continent.

In a bar on Friday night, a friend told me how he was amazed at the ubiquity of football when he was working in Ghana, where every flat patch of dust became a soccer pitch, and anything solid and spherical was used as a ball. Football was everywhere, a complete leveller.

The picture above is a genuine African life-and-death soccer situation. The flat patch was, at one stage, the bottom of a dam near the village of Kilema, a coffee & banana plantation area on the lower slopes of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro. The dam was drained after a tragic death where a young boy fell into the waters and drowned, and a separate, safer, area was set aside further uphill for storing water.

The dam floor had been flattened by sediment, and after drainage it became a grassy, level clearing. What was abandoned due to death came alive again as soon as a set of posts were set up, and every evening we were there, the old dam would fill with kids playing soccer until the light faded.  The ball was knackered, the leather worn to scrubby suede, and turning up with a puncture kit and a pump made a Californian friend of mine a local hero.

That’s all I got on this topic, I’m no soccer fan. But I am a fan of Jessica Hiltout’s marvellous video series created ahead of the World Cup. One is embedded here. Go find the rest.

Joy Is Round from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.