The Africa Cup of Nations is profoundly confusing. Take, for instance, the star-studded Ivory Coast team: it entered 
the last few ACONs as the heavy favorite, only to lose dramatically to feel-good teams like Zambia, which won the 2012 ACON in Gabon, the country where several of Zambia’s greatest players died in a tragic early-‘90s airplane “accident” that may or may not have been orchestrated by the Gabonese military.
Typically, football fans refer to the ACON – which used to be held during World Cup and European Championship years, but which is adjusting its rotation in an almost certainly futile effort to garner more prestige/viewers/Jonathan Wilson columns – as a “festival of football,” a term that’s rooted in the utterly erroneous, semi-racist perception of Africa as a place where tribe members chant exotic chants and bang exotic drums and just generally have a good time. (For reasons that don’t make very much sense, the whole concept of this, like, giant football party! gained popularity during the South African World Cup.) Of course, African football is nothing like that. After the first wave of Cameroon-got-to-the-quarters-and-Pele-thinks-Africa-will-win-a-World-Cup hysteria passed, Africans spent more than a decade dealing with corruption and white elephant stadiums and teenage stars whose “burgeoning talents” (or whatever) turned out to be figments of some gossip website’s imagination.
In For The Hat Trick 