I want to include at least one soccer goal in the weekly Weekend Special update: Nosa Igiebor, a member of Nigeria’s national team, the Super Eagles, has had an unhappy spell at his Spanish club, Real Betis. The club’s fans have been particularly horrible towards him. They had been abusing him all season. Spanish fans are notorious for their disdain of black players in La Liga, though it seems it had more to do with Nosa’s contribution to the team and his long absence from the club to go play in the African Cup of Nations in January in the middle of the season and then taking his time to get back to Spain. Which is how we got to this week. Betis and Sevilla are local rivals and Saturday’s match was a big local derby. At the end of regular time, Sevilla was 3-2 up when Betis got a corner. That’s when the ball reach Nosa and he scored a sublime goal to tie the game 3-3 in the 90th minute. Which is when Nosa ran to the back of the goal and raised both his index fingers in the direction of his own fans and shouted, “Fuck you!” Just watch the goal.

I am still trying to get my head around the recent coup in the Central African Republic which replaced one set of looters with another. We’ll promise to find some expertise to wade through unfolding events there. The reporting is sparse in English-speaking media as well as on blogs (last time we covered it was in relation to the documentary “The Ambassador”). One exception has been South Africa where local media rarely reports on matters elsewhere on the continent (everything outside South Africa is still “Africa” for most of its people, including some in its media). Then, advancing rebels murdered fourteen South African soldiers in the CAR to protect the now deposed president. Now CAR was unfortunately a story in South Africa. Most of the reporting in South Africa, fueled by anger over the deaths and the failure of South Africa’s president to convincingly explain why the soldiers were in the CAR, has been on the “local angle” and amounted to sensationalist, unproven, reporting about ruling party business interests in the CAR. That said, there’s been better reporting from The New York Times, on the motivations and politics of the rebels especially.

Staying with The New York Times, its story of a US government drug smuggling sting that snared a former admiral in Guinea Bissau’s army, included this strange reaction from the government in Bissau to journalists asking questions about the arrrests: “The arrest of the former admiral appears to have shocked the authorities in the capital, Bissau. Last week, they dismissed the country’s top intelligence official, apparently for failing to spot the American operation unfolding under their noses over months.”

Anthropologist Ben Magubane, one of a few black scholars in that still mostly white discipline when it comes to South Africa, died last week. Magubane was partly trained at what we now know as the University of Kwazulu-Natal and later at UCLA, where he got his Ph.D. In this hour-long interview with Magubane (by Cape Town historian Sean Field), he recalls his impoverished childhood in and around Durban, the racism of post-war South Africa, his initial university studies, scholarship to the United States (which also meant exile), his activism against Apartheid in the US (including taking part in a well publicized consumer boycott) and work and life at the University of Zambia (where he was close to ANC President O.R. Tambo and renowned academic Jack Simons). Magubane returned to South Africa in 1994. His research legacy includes his pioneering critique of the supposed radicalism of the “Manchester School” of anthropology (since reprised by James Ferguson), a book on race and class in Apartheid South Africa in 1979 (a critique of neo-Marxist interpretations of the South African “question” ), and the series of volumes he edited on “The Road to Democracy in South Africa.”

Finally, I watched the new “Venus and Serena” documentary on iTunes. The film, which ambles on in parts (and includes some odd sightings: Anna Wintour telling us obvious things), is quite good in exposing the racism among tennis “fans” and the journalists covering the sport, especially against the Williams sisters and their dad, for whom, despite his personal foibles, I still have lots of respect. Here’s the trailer.