The high waves recede a little in the afternoon, leaving the beach a few additional meters of surface area. It’s not much, but it’s enough for an improvised soccer field for Muctar Bassie and his teammate Alie Kamara. The golden brown sand of Tokeh Beach, about ten kilometers south of the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown, is still a little damp in some places, but firm enough to step on and soft enough not to worry about falling. The heavy clouds have also cleared. Nothing stands in the way of the training session between the ocean and palm trees.
A high pass catapults the tattered ball into the air. Bassie calculates the trajectory, rushes forward with all his might, then rams his left crutch into the sand and uses his good leg to shoot. Kamara, who is the goalkeeper between two sandals in the sand, jumps to the side and can just prevent the goal with the stump of his arm. Roll it off briefly, shake off the sand, and you’re on your way. As long as the weather permits and as long as the two of them aren’t scared away by the neighboring villagers. Bassie and Kamara enjoy the moment while they can.
For the two national players of the Sierra Leone para-football team, sport means much more than just a leisure activity, it is a freedom that they have to fight hard for every day – not only in view of their disabilities, but because of the environment in which they live. In Sierra Leonean society, the value of an individual is often measured by their healthy body. For Bassie, with his limited mobility, this means exclusion and stigmatization.
“They will whisper about me and discriminate against me”
Bassie has been playing football since he was a child and joined the national team six years ago. A friend encouraged him to try it out there. “I started playing football to show society that although I am disabled, I am capable of anything,” says Bassie. He wants to counter the prejudices that exist against people like him.
His position: full-back. His great role model: Calvin Bassey. The Nigerian footballer is currently under contract with Fulham FC. “It’s not just the name that sounds so similar, but also his technique, his light-footedness that I like so much,” says Bassie. He balances the ball between his foot and crutch, past a hollow in the sand.
Whenever he talks about football, the young man with his hair in short braids and an energetic smile goes into raptures. “The time when I can play football creates my best memories,” says Bassie: “Because this is exactly where I can forget my disability.” The para-athlete dedicates what little he has to the sport he loves. It is one of the few things that, as he says, distracts him from the daily struggle for survival.
“In my homeland there are many injustices against people with disabilities,” he says. “Whenever I appear somewhere in public, I know they will stare at me, they will whisper about me and they will discriminate against me because I am different. It is more difficult for me to find a job that I can make a living from.” Bassie is still studying business administration in the hope of landing one of the few office jobs in the capital. What if that doesn’t work? We’ll just have to come up with something, says Bassie.
A vaccination could have prevented all of this
He has stopped the ball so that it doesn’t roll into the ocean and is now using the walker to support his deformed right leg – the result of a polio infection as a child. The virus, which can lead to muscle loss among other things, has only been considered eradicated in Africa in its so-called wild form since 2020. This development came too late for the twenty-seven-year-old Bassie. He has always had to deal with the physical and mental consequences alone.
“Many of my classmates avoided me or made fun of me,” he says. Rumors spread that Bassie was cursed – a superstition that also persisted among adults. Bassie says it makes him sad that a vaccination could have prevented all of this for him. At least Bassie has support from friends and family. However, he knows people with disabilities who do not have them and often beg for alms and food at the market.
Worsened situation after cuts in foreign aid
“Care for people with disabilities is very difficult because the overall medical care here is poor,” says Unisa Kanu, a pediatrician at Magbenteh Community Hospital in Makeni. “Even if polio has been defeated, for example, there are other diseases that, if complicated, have serious consequences – especially in children. These include, above all, malaria, which can also lead to blindness.”
Many cases are preventable, even in Sierra Leone, but parents often arrive at the hospitals too late because they either have no money or distrust Western medicine. The health consequences, says Kanu, are often left with the children for the rest of their lives.
This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
“Most of them become an economic burden in their childhood,” says the doctor: “I have experienced that they are bullied or neglected by their relatives who do not take good care of them, so that the children are often malnourished when they come to the hospital.”
This doesn’t just apply to children who were born with a disability or who suffered from an illness, like Bassie. His teammate Kamara lost his left arm in a car accident as a teenager and has been struggling with odd jobs ever since. In addition to car accidents, falls in Sierra Leone often lead to amputations because medical treatment for the injury cannot be guaranteed in a timely manner or those affected have no money for treatment.
The same applies to rehabilitative measures. Bassie recently injured his shoulder when he fell onto the stone floor. He doesn’t know how bad because he allowed the injury to heal without medical care. This time it went well, he says.
Many projects that promote better nutrition and medical care lack money. The situation in the country has worsened since the USA drastically cut foreign aid to Sierra Leone – from around 106 million US dollars (around 91.3 million euros) in 2024 to around 29 million (25 million euros) for the following year, according to the non-governmental organization USA Facts.
In a society suffering from poverty, Bassie senses how the pressure of suffering is increasing, for example when the prices of basic foodstuffs rise. For the current month, his family was able to collect 350 Sierra Leonean Leones (around 11.50 euros) for a 25 kilogram bag of rice at the market. He doesn’t know what will happen next.
“Then I’ll just play barefoot if necessary.”
After training with the national team, Bassie occasionally gets a warm meal and some travel money. But it makes little difference to the wear and tear on the equipment he needs for daily training and competitions. He has been playing on unfamiliar crutches for months after the old ones broke in the middle of the game. The replacement supports would chafe a lot, says Bassie and shows his scarred forearms.
But he would rather accept the pain than not be able to play. Things don’t look any better with the shoe that he bought used months ago: the sole is coming off, the fabric on the side is rubbed clean. A replacement costs around 700 Sierra Leonean Leones on the market – the equivalent of 25 euros. Money that Bassie doesn’t have at the moment: “Then I’ll just play barefoot if necessary,” he says with a smile.
He can at least watch football games in the stadium in his home country for free – this is stipulated by law for people with disabilities. “But in reality it looks different,” says Bassie. “The last time I wanted to go to the stadium, a guard tried to take the entrance fee from me. When I refused, he threatened me with his stick.” Only when other spectators intervened did the man at the entrance give in, says Bassie. It is a small victory in a daily battle against numerous odds.
“In Sierra Leone, football serves as a unifying force that overcomes social, cultural and ethnic boundaries,” wrote the prominent Sierra Leonean lawyer and Director General of the National Sports Authority Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai on social media in 2024 – against the background that the West African state has survived not only a brutal civil war but also several deadly pandemics over the past 25 years.
Football has excelled in overcoming these crises as more than just a sport. Bassie also hopes to make progress with his sporting career one day. No one bothered him on the beach that day, so he and Kamara were able to successfully finish the training session before the storm started. It’s another small victory.
