Fading echoes of clubhouse games: Tanzania’s forgotten sporting past

DAR ES SALAAM: THERE was a time when a weekend in Dar es Salaam, Arusha or Moshi felt like an eccentric colonial radio broadcast drifting into real life.

You’d hear the muezzin calling the faithful, church bells giving their Sunday best, and then, floating from behind a hedge or bougainvillea wall, the unmistakable thwack of leather on willow.

A tennis ball sliced through coastal humidity, the polite applause of well-behaved spectators ringing out like they’d each been issued a handbook on courtesy.

Somewhere, a snooker cue clicked with the precision of a man who had trained for twenty years purely to look nonchalant.

If you listened carefully, you might even catch the faint ping of a golf ball being chased across the kind of manicured grass that required the sort of upkeep only possible with passion.

And afterwards, of course, there would be the veranda—always the veranda—and something cold, sweating into its glass.

Those were club days. Blazer days. Days when golf, hockey, lawn tennis, table tennis, cricket, badminton and snooker weren’t just pastimes—they were social passports. To swing a racket or hold a putter was to declare, in a very gentle and polite way, that you had arrived.

Or at least that you were desperately attempting to arrive, tie slightly too tight, shoes borrowed, posture earnest.

And for a while, these sports thrived. Truly thrived.

By the late 1960s, you could find cricket in schoolyards in Tanga and Arusha, hockey on fields that somehow survived both rain and bureaucracy, and snooker tables so consistently occupied that men began to argue about whose turn it was purely on principle.

Then came 1980—Tanzania’s moment of sporting surrealism. The country sent a hockey team to the Moscow Olympics.

Yes, Tanzania. In Moscow. On an actual Olympic hockey pitch. Imagine that!

The boys trained as if the world depended on their sticks, scraped through qualifiers and marched into Lenin Stadium looking like the most determined men alive.

They didn’t bring medals, but they brought history—a small, shining, beautifully improbable slice of it.

For once, hockey wasn’t just the preserve of moustache-wearing men at Gymkhana; it was Tanzania on a global stage.

But as with all good stories, something drifted.

Like a badly hit golf ball slicing in the wrong direction, the momentum faded.

By the mid-1980s, golf courses and clay courts slipped far down the list.

Clubs that had once maintained impeccable standards with membership fees and a faint perfume of expatriate efficiency began looking, well, tired.

Cricket pitches became football grounds. Tennis nets sagged with the melancholy of laundry lines on a rainy day. Hockey players became a sort of endangered species, sighted only at Gymkhana and Lugalo barracks like peculiar, stick-wielding antelopes.

The then Benjamin Mkapa Stadium of hockey—the beloved Gymkhana ground—was shelved and replaced by a golf tee box.

One of the last nails in one of Dar’s few hockey fields’ coffins was hammered home.

Football, meanwhile, burst through the door like a lion that had spotted an unattended goat.

It roared into the national imagination, devouring every spare inch of attention.

Simba vs Yanga became not just sport but theatre, politics, identity, folklore—you name it.

Athletics gave us legends—Filbert Bayi with his record-breaking strides, Juma Ikangaa pounding roads like they had offended him personally.

And then basketball swaggered in wearing baggy shorts, humming hip-hop, asking why nobody had invited it earlier.

By the 1990s, aspiration had changed shape.

No one dreamed of a crisp gin and tonic on a veranda after 18 holes.

The new dream was a football contract in South Africa, Belgium, anywhere with stadium lights and scouts.

Cricket began to feel quaint.

Snooker felt like archaeology.

And if you told a teenager you once played hockey for Tanzania, they would assume you meant the PlayStation version.

Or worse, that you were making it up for dramatic effect.

Understandably, part of the decline was economic. Cricket pads, golf sets, tennis rackets—small fortunes.

Football, on the other hand, required a single ball or, in its most democratic form, a tightly wound bundle of plastic bags and ambition.

Accessibility breeds popularity, and nothing is more accessible than football.

Then there was the air of exclusivity. The colonial residue.

Cricket and golf were seen as sports played behind fences by people who used “membership” as a verb.

Why join the few behind the gates when the many were on the pitch outside?

Even journalism reflected this shift.

Once upon a time, club sports had chroniclers—scribes who could describe a cover drive with the same romance as a love letter and differentiate between topspin, backspin and the spin a player used to explain why they’d lost.

Today, that species is nearly extinct. Nearly, because only one I know of remains: Ms Mbonile Burton of the Daily News.

Mbonile stands as the last living encyclopaedia of Tanzania’s forgotten sports.

Golf? She’ll tell you who’s handicapped by what. Table tennis? She can recount a rally point by point. Cricket? Mbonile writes it as if she invented the game.

Hockey? She knows both the score and the gossip.

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The lady holds bragging rights over an entire nation because she is the one journalist left who can report these sports accurately, fluently and with the earnestness of a monk guarding a sacred scroll.

But saying these sports vanished entirely would be unfair. Golf still breathes—quietly, gently—at Gymkhana, Lugalo and Moshi.

Cricket survives thanks to Tanzania’s Asian community, which nurtures it through schools, weekend leagues and the occasional burst of national pride.

Table tennis appears and disappears with the irregularity of comet sightings. Badminton exists in schools with reasonable budgets and teachers who refuse to let it die.

And snooker? Snooker reincarnated as pool—the scrappy, cheerful version that now sits in every neighbourhood bar.

The Gymkhana tables may gather dust, but the spirit of potting a ball lives on, albeit in flip-flops, with warm beer nearby and someone shouting, “Last game, winner stays!”

What’s truly lost is variety.

These so-called elitist sports were never just aristocratic distractions. They taught discipline.

Cricket built patience—hours of it. Hockey forged teamwork. Golf demanded precision bordering on madness.

Table tennis sharpened reflexes to goalkeeper levels. Badminton built stamina. Snooker trained focus so intense you could hear a thought drop.

Without them, Tanzania’s sporting ecosystem shrank—narrower, less experimental.

Can they be revived? Possibly. But they need reimagining.

Schools are the obvious seedbeds. You don’t need Wimbledon grass to play tennis; a rectangle of chalk will do.

You don’t need a professional cricket set; you can fashion a bat from planks (as our friends in the Indian subcontinent have perfected).

Hockey sticks can be adapted. Table tennis requires a flat surface and imagination.

But for revival, the stories must return.

We need a documentary on the 1980 hockey team, grainy Moscow footage intercut with present-day kids swinging improvised sticks in Ilala.

A bank could sponsor a national table tennis league. A minister could declare golf not elitist but “exercise with scenic interruptions.”

Will these sports regain their good old glory? Unlikely.

The era of moustached men in starched whites dominating weekends is gone, and perhaps we should be glad.

But vanish entirely? No—and they shouldn’t.

Football may be king, but even kings need a court: the quiet tension of a snooker table, the patient hum of a cricket afternoon, the small absurdity of chasing a tiny white ball across green acres.

Today these sports live mostly in memories, in faded trophies on dusty shelves, in yellowing photos from Gymkhana tournaments.

Or in the warm laughter of ageing men remembering a century scored in Tanga or a perfect putt sunk at sunset.

And in every neighbourhood bar, when the pool balls clack and young men in sandals celebrate a lucky shot with dramatic flair, echoes of Tanzania’s forgotten sporting past stir again—just waiting, patiently, for someone to fall in love with them once more.

The quintessential question is: by who, and when?