world-class intellectuals, like the economist Ludwig Van Mises and the ethicist Martin Buber.
Considering that Lviv had been founded as a
Ukrainian fortress, many Ukrainians found it strange that their people had achieved so little in the city’s era of greatness. They began to harbor deep resentments toward the presence of so many interlopers. During World War II, they seized opportunities to clean up this mess. Many local Ukrainians worked with the Germans to eliminate the Jews—who once accounted for about 30 percent of Lviv’s populace. Then, following the war, in a move sanctioned by Stalin, they deported the Polish half of town en masse. Finally, with the Poles and Jews purged, the Ukrainians could leave their villages and take up residence in Lviv’s vacant houses.
Upon arriving in Lviv, the Ukrainians compensated for years of self-pity by developing a new theory of their own superiority. They looked east toward the other big Ukrainian cities—Kiev, Odessa, Donetsk—and saw Russians mixing with Ukrainians. Without a fight, the easterners had exchanged the Ukrainian language for Russian, intermarried, and embraced the Soviet system. Quietly, in their homes, so as not to draw the attention of the Communist apparatus, they dismissed these other Ukrainians as cultural traitors.
In the atmosphere of nationalism and resentment, however, racism doesn’t really exist. Aside from the odd, crude paroxysm of hate, the situation isn’t nearly as nasty as in the West. At games, fans don’t make ape noises when Edward enters the field or touches the ball.
Even the racism of players can’t compare to the leagues in England and Italy. In the Karpaty locker room, the Ukrainians never have overtly racial confrontations with the Nigerians.
The di¤erence is this: Lviv has 830,000 residents and only fifty Africans. Except for Edward and Samson, most of them study at Lviv’s universities and will leave the Ukraine in a few years. There are simply not enough to generate friction or a political backlash or ideology. No fringe groups like the British National Party or politicians like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen stoke and politicize the hatred. Ukrainian feelings are too primitive to even warrant the suªx “ism.” They feel something closer to a naïf’s dislike of the unfamiliar, like an eight-year-old refusing to try dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant.
Trailing Edward through Lviv, this reaction becomes plain. Sitting with him at McDonald’s, I looked up and noticed a little blond girl with a yellow duck on her red shirt, staring slack-jawed at Edward. When she pointed out Edward to her brother, he entered the very same state of shock. They covered their mouths to contain their laughter. Their mother tried to turn them away, embarrassed by the rudeness. But she kept casting looks at Edward, too. When I pointed them out to Edward, he told me that they probably hadn’t seen a black man outside of the television set in their living room. “No problem.”
There’s another reason for the hostility toward the Nigerians at Karpaty. It has to do with the politics of postcommunism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukrainians began the project of cultural and national regeneration. You could see the push in their two most beloved institutions, their language and church. The HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS
remaining Jews and Russians of Lviv who didn’t speak Ukrainian were bullied and shamed into switching vernaculars. Across the city, old Ukrainian churches were reclaimed from Soviet ruin. The postcommunist government restored the Museum of Atheism to its
baroque greatness. Crosses went back into these buildings. In fact, crosses began appearing everywhere, on hilltops and in the squares. Celebrations of Easter, once prohibited, became cause for grand investment in traditional costumes and meals.
When Edward arrived, the national ego was particularly fragile. Ten years into postcommunism the joys of freedom had begun to feel commonplace; the project of Ukrainian regeneration seemed stalled. To many Ukrainians, their country still felt like a colony of Russia. Those who spoke of an alternative to this condition didn’t have a much more appealing solution. They proposed that the Ukraine become (more or less) a client state of the European Union and the United States.
This despair played out in soccer, too. Ukrainians imagined that they once were a great soccer nation.
Now they needed to import Nigerians to become great again. This fact couldn’t be read any other way: It was a humiliation. It was short-term thinking of the worst kind. If the oligarchs wanted the Ukraine to become a great soccer nation again, why not invest the money spent on Edward into the development of young
Ukrainian talent? Yuri, the captain, told me, “For the price of Edward we could have created ten Ukrainian players.” V.
Edward doesn’t like to admit that he has enemies or problems. In part, he is an a¤able guy. At practice, only Edward entertained the neighborhood kids hanging around their heroes. He recruited one to assist in his practice of headers. When he finished, he walked over to muss his little helper’s hair. But Edward also tries to bite his tongue, so that he doesn’t earn any ill will that could ultimately interfere with his dream of playing in Western Europe. I first became aware of his whitewash-ing on a visit to his apartment. He showed me photos that he’d just developed. A few of the snapshots documented team training sessions in February. I asked him if it was hard to play in the Ukrainian winter. “No problem. It’s not so bad,” he said.
His answer flew in the face of everything I’d heard about Ukrainian winters—precisely what you’d expect of the Carpathian foothills. Conditions become so arctic that the league takes nearly four months o¤ in the middle of the season. It is simply too cruel to play every week. When the club returned from its last winter break, an army unit spent seven days breaking through
