Whenever I tell people I was born and raised in Cameroon, the first thing they bring up is the football. The Indomitable Lions. Roger Milla dancing at the corner flag in 1990. Samuel Eto’o at Barcelona, scoring goals against teams whose names we learned to pronounce just for him. The 1990 World Cup quarter-final against England, which we lost in extra time and never stopped talking about. Senegal reached the same round in 2002. Ghana followed in 2010. Morocco went one further in 2022 and made the semi-final, the deepest run any African team has ever managed at a men’s World Cup. I did not love football as a child. I learned to. There is no real way to live in Cameroon during a major tournament without being absorbed into the national mood.
We did not watch tennis. Roland-Garros, when I was growing up, was a thing that happened on television in May and June, between cooking and other lives. It was not for us. Nobody I knew watched tennis. Except, as it turned out, my aunt.
I moved to the United States as a teenager and ended up living with her. She is a nurse. The television in her house was permanently on whatever channel was showing Serena Williams. There was a kind of devotion in it. She caught the matches between shifts, late at night, before her early shift the next day. Serena was Serena, and my aunt was completely undone every time she walked on a court. The fearlessness mostly. Also the scream. Mostly, I think, the fact of her. A Black woman moving through the most genteel sport in the world with the kind of ease that suggested she had not been told the sport was supposed to be genteel.