Image Text:

PROUD: Jason Roberts

YOU KNOW like how everybody says "fam" even though they're not, have never been and will never be in any way related to you? You know how that cheeses you off?

Well I found myself addressing  footballer Jason Roberts (the goal-scoring machine whose January transfer to Reading sealed promotion to the Premier League for the football team last season) as "fam", even though we're not, have never been and for all I knew will never be family.... or so I thought.

He and I had reasoned together a couple of times whenever he came over to my gaff up north on a Saturday night. And you know how when you see somebody or you're talking to them and you keep thinking, I know this guy really well. Well that was how it was.

Every time I spoke to him, it was like we had known each other for donkey's years, or like we were closely related. Well, I didn't realise why he was so familiar until I touched down at Maurice Bishop International Airport in Grenada last week.

The first thing you see when you enter the arrivals hall is a big poster of the said same Jason Roberts. It's celebrating his football foundation on the island. You see, for all the criticism that footballers get nowadays we should not forget that there are players who are prepared to do something positive with their vast wealth by using it to help people less advantaged than themselves. 

Liverpool striker Craig Bellamy, for example, has a football academy in Sierra Leone and Ghana which I have been to and played footie with the kids and for me is like going to Eton for kids whose parents can't afford it. If there were schools like that in my day and I was sent to one, I would have been the first one in school in the mornings and the last one to leave at going home time. And I wouldn't have gotten involved with a lot of the bad bwoyism that I got involved in.

I often think the same thing about my old school mate Winston Silcott. He was the best footballer at our school by leaps and bounds. In those old school yard fifty-a-side football matches he could dribble the entire playground full of kids and score with his left foot at the end of it. But there were no such opportunities for us who grew up in the 60s and early 70s.

Tottenham Hotspur didn't come to our school just a stone's throw away to scout the next Jimmy Greaves amongst the kids in the school. But back to Jason Roberts, that old familiar feeling came over me as I stared at his smiling face on the poster. That feeling that there was something extremely familiar about  him was even stronger now. What was it? 

Well, for one thing he is Grenadian. What's that got to do with anything, Adebayo, I hear you say? Jason Roberts is not the only famous Grenadian. Singer Billy Ocean is Grenadian too. And so is the veteran broadcaster Alex Pascall.

Not to talk of Lewis Hamilton, or at least Lewis Hamilton's dad. Next you'll be telling us that the pussycat doll who Lewis used to take to his ancestral home whenever he won a Grand Prix, is also familiar to you, will you Adebayo. I hear you say.

Steady on a minute, guys, I am not, have never been and (probably) will never be so familiar with a pussycat doll that I will be able to tell you all about it. But when I was talking to a former Grenadian beauty queen the other day and she mentioned that the teenage athletics sensation, sprinter Kirani James, might take a medal in the 200 and 300 metre finals at London 2012.

I jokingly said that I hope he does because that will be another medal for Nigeria, in the way that we Africans tend to do claiming everything that is Caribbean as ours.

That really winds Jamaicans up I know. That is why I love to say that a gold medal for Usain Bolt is a gold medal for Nigeria, or at the very least Ghana (but I know a Nigerian when I see one and I see 2 and a half million Nigerians in Jamaica).

Anyway, Miss Grenada turns round and, to my surprise, says "It's true, Grenadians are Nigerians... The research has shown that the enslaved Africans who are your modern day Grenadians have their roots in what is now known as Nigeria."

Well stone the flippin' crows, you could have knocked me over with a feather duster. Apparently, they've done all the research and taken DNA samples and apparently I am the last person on earth who didn't know the answer to that question 'Who do you think you are, Grenadians?'

So THAT is why Jason Roberts is so familiar. He and I must have been "fam' in a past life. Who knows, we still may be. And that explains why from a tiny island of only 100,000 people Grenada has produced so many world stars and successes in every field.

It's because they're Nigerians. It's got nothing to do with the fact that it is a beautiful island. It has nothing to do with the inspiration of Maurice Bishop's New Jewel movement that galvanised the youth on the island. It has nothing to do with the oil down, the American invasion or the ghosts of the extinct Carib peoples who committed mass suicide rather than concede to the invading colonialists. It is simply because they are Nigerians.

What a wonderful island this is. It feels like I'm home. Grenadians, I salute you. Even though I consider you to be the Isle of Wight of Nigeria.