Myth that Santos stopped war in Africa was contested after 50 years

On February 4, 1969, Santos played in Nigeria a friendly that would be responsible for giving life to a myth that resisted for more than 50 years until it began to be contested. The story portrayed by the club and hymned by the crowd reported that the team led by Pelé had been the reason for a ceasefire during a major conflict in the African country.

The narrative was fueled by testimonies of players who defended the Santos team in that duel, like Edu. The former left-winger still claims that he saw armed men around the hotel where the athletes stayed and that there was a climate of tension in the city of Benin, where the match against the Central West State team took place.

“The city lights were not turned on at night. Only the hotel and the houses were lit. I remember that I asked the manager why that was, and he said that it was to avoid enemy bombing,” he said. Sheet the scorer of one of the two goals in the Brazilian team’s 2-1 victory —Toninho also scored.

Indeed, Santos’ tour of Africa between January and February of that year took place at a time when Nigeria was in the grip of civil war. The trigger was a wave of violence between different ethnic groups, which culminated in the creation of the independent republic of Biafra, the richest region in oil deposits in Nigerian territory, in May 1967.

The scenario that would have been encountered by Santos, however, began to be demystified by José Paulo Florenzano, a researcher who claims that the city of Benin was no longer under the control of Biafra forces at the time of the friendly match.

The game held at Ogbe Stadium would actually be part of the Nigerian government’s war propaganda. It was a way to soften the criticism of world public opinion, which was against the violence of Nigerian troops in the conflict. The presence of Santos would indicate a controlled situation in the region.

“If you ask, from the Nigerian government’s point of view, what interest would it have in taking Santos to a city that it does not control, in which it would be necessary to negotiate a ceasefire? What kind of message would that send to society? Nigeria and the world? It would be a contradiction, an absurdity in terms of war propaganda,” Florenzano told Folha in 2019, when he launched a series of articles about the Santos tour to Africa, published on the academic website Ludopédio.

The passage through Nigeria was not in the plans of the delegation from Santos, which had previously played two friendlies in Congo and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. These countries were in the midst of a diplomatic crisis, something that required Santos to negotiate in order to be able to move from one place to another.

The mix of facts that occurred in the Congo with the conflicts in Nigeria also fueled the myth that the alvinegro team had stopped a war during the trip.

Historian Gabriel Pierin, from the Santos Memory Center, recognizes that there was no armed conflict precisely at the time the team passed through the Benin region. But he points out that the war that started in 1967 only officially ended in 1970.

“Santos went to play in the middle of an emblematic region. The club played in the period in which the war lasted [na Nigéria]. Evidently, people did not stop an exchange of fire for Santos to play. But it wasn’t the ideal place for you to take a team in the midst of the tension that was involved in that place”, said the historian. “The period that Santos played there was during the period in which the war lasted in that place. You can’t diminish the episode because of that, there was a war after all.”