The World Cup Match Between Colombia and Ghana Is About Fútbol but Can We Talk About the Racism Behind How Latin America Treats African Spiritual Practices?

Colombia and Ghana meet this Friday, July 3rd, at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City in what will be the first official FIFA encounter between the two nations, a Round of 16 match that carries the additional storyline of Colombia facing Carlos Queiroz, the Portuguese coach who led the Colombian national team between 2019 and 2020 before departing after losses to Uruguay and Ecuador in the Qatar 2022 qualifiers. Ghana advances as one of the best third-place teams from Group L, while Colombia arrives as the unbeaten leader of Group K. The winner advances to the Round of 8, where they will face the victor between Switzerland and Algeria.

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The match kicks off at 8:30 p.m. Colombia time and will be decided in 90 minutes, with extra time and penalties available if needed. The days leading up to the match have generated a conversation about African culture, spiritual practice and brujería that has exposed something uncomfortable about how Latin American audiences receive traditions that are, in many ways, closer to their own than they are willing to admit. The mockery that has circulated online around Ghana’s rituals and cultural expressions is rooted in a racism and xenophobia that conveniently forgets how deeply African spiritual tradition runs through Latin American culture itself, and that conversation deserves to be had honestly before Friday night in Kansas City.

What Is Actually Happening and What It Means

Stories about spiritual rituals, traditional priests and protective amulets have followed Ghana’s national team through this World Cup, as they have at previous tournaments. The most prominent figure in this narrative is Nana Kwaku Bonsam, a traditional priest who drew international attention during Brazil 2014 when he claimed to have performed rituals against Cristiano Ronaldo before Portugal’s match against Ghana. At this tournament, he resurfaced claiming to have spiritually intervened to prevent Harry Kane from scoring against Ghana, and after a goalless draw, announced he had lifted the supposed spell for Kane’s subsequent matches.

Nuhu Adams, a Ghanaian journalist who specializes in African sport, explained to El Tiempo that spiritual practices are genuinely part of Ghana’s cultural fabric, and that the country holds a wide range of beliefs that coexist alongside Christian and Muslim faith. He said that when people in Ghana want a specific outcome, they turn to these practices, and that the diversity of beliefs in the country runs deep. Ghana’s Football Federation has itself organized prayer sessions with Christian and Muslim leaders before international competitions, reflecting that the search for spiritual support is part of how the national team prepares, even if through a religious rather than supernatural lens.

In several countries across sub-Saharan Africa, traditional spiritual beliefs coexist alongside Christianity and Islam rather than replacing them. Ghana’s population is over 70 percent Christian and approximately 20 percent Muslim, and yet ancestral spiritual practices remain present within many communities. The white powder that certain supporters and practitioners use in pre-match rituals is a symbol associated in several West African traditions with protection, connection to ancestors and spiritual purification. Ghanaian sports journalists have noted that figures like Bonsam generate far more media attention than actual sporting influence, and that their presence is considered part of the folklore surrounding African fútbol rather than a serious tactical factor.

The Irony of Colombian Fans Mocking African Culture

During Colombia’s match against the Democratic Republic of Congo, a fan was filmed honoring Patrice Lumumba, the iconic leader of Congolese independence and one of the most important figures in the history of African anti-colonial resistance. Many people watching mocked the moment, treating it as evidence of superstition or spectacle. As journalist Edna Liliana Valencia Murillo wrote afterward, what people dismissed as witchcraft was actually an act of cultural memory rooted in history and carried out with the dignity that Lumumba’s legacy deserves. She argued that the deeper problem lies in the instinct to look at Africa through contempt and mockery, and called on people to learn to respect a culture before ridiculing it.

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The mockery is particularly difficult to justify when it comes from Colombians, a people whose own relationship with spiritual practice, ancestral tradition and brujería is far more intimate than many of them are comfortable admitting publicly. Visits to yerbateros, spiritual cleansings, protective rituals, consultations with people who read energy or communicate with the dead are part of daily life across every social class and every region of the country, passed down through families and integrated into lives that also include Sunday Mass and rosaries. Laughing at Ghanaian spiritual expression while burning incense, visiting a santero or quietly asking a deceased grandmother for protection during a penalty shootout is a position that deserves honest examination before Friday night in Kansas City.

Colombia’s Own African Roots and the Culture It Has Forgotten to Claim

Colombia is home to one of the largest Afro-descendant populations in all of Latin America, a fact that makes the mockery of African cultural expression particularly difficult to reconcile. That population is concentrated in regions like Chocó, Buenaventura, Cartagena and the Pacific coast, where West African spiritual traditions endured centuries of slavery and colonial suppression by adapting into something distinctly Colombian but unmistakably African in its origins.

The presence of brujería and ancestral spiritual practice in Colombian life has a clear origin. It traces directly to the country’s African and indigenous heritage, two cultural traditions that survived colonialism by blending with the Catholic framework imposed upon them rather than disappearing beneath it. Those origins show up everywhere in Colombian culture, often without acknowledgment. The cumbia, the currulao, the bullerengue and the champeta all carry African musical roots. The plant medicine traditions of Pacific coast communities, the ways in which certain Colombian families honor their dead, the syncretic blending of Catholic saints with older spiritual figures, all of it traces back to the West African traditions that enslaved people carried across the Atlantic and refused to let die.

Colombia has long had a complicated relationship with its own Blackness, one in which Afro-Colombian communities and their contributions to the country’s culture have been celebrated selectively and acknowledged inconsistently. The same country that exports cumbia and vallenato to the world sometimes struggles to extend basic respect to the African cultures those traditions came from. When a Ghanaian fan performs a ritual before a World Cup match, he is drawing from the same ancestral well that fed the cultural practices many Colombians absorb without examination and sometimes mock in others. Friday’s match against Ghana puts Colombia face to face with a culture whose spiritual traditions share the same ancestral roots as the ones many Colombians practice at home. For those who have been taught to see Africa as something distant and foreign, the gap between Bogotá and Accra is smaller than they have been led to believe.

The Black Stars and What Their Name Actually Means

Ghana’s national team is known as the Black Stars, a name that carries considerably more history than most of their opponents in this tournament are aware of. The Black Star is the symbol of the Pan-African movement promoted by Marcus Garvey and later adopted by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, as an emblem of independence, freedom and African continental unity. That star sits at the center of Ghana’s national flag, and the name of the fútbol team is a direct reference to that legacy of liberation and self-determination.

When Ghana fans perform rituals, honor their traditions or invoke the symbols of their culture before a World Cup match, they are doing something that every other footballing nation does in its own way, connecting a sporting contest to a broader sense of national and cultural identity. The difference is that Ghana’s expressions of identity have historically been received with mockery in contexts where European or South American cultural expressions are received with curiosity or admiration.

Colombia and Ghana play Friday. Both teams are there on merit, both have their own histories and both deserve to be met with the same standard of respect. For Colombian fans in particular, the conversation about African spiritual practices and cultural expression is one that begins much closer to home than many of them have been willing to acknowledge. The African roots of Colombian culture are not a footnote. They are a foundation, and learning to see them clearly is long overdue.