The Legend of Bob
Robert Mensah revolutionized goalkeeping in Africa. It was sad it was only for a short time, writes Fiifi Anaman
A stadium is named after him.
There is a folk song sung in his honor.
He was the subject of one of the most famous criminal cases in Ghana’s legal history.
He was a hero, a household name held in high esteem, heralded as Africa’s finest goalkeeper at the peak of his powers.
He was Robert ‘Bob’ Mensah.
Nana Benyin, as he was affectionately known to family and friends, was an enigma with a lot of charisma. Blakk Rasta, the popular Ghanaian musician and media man, who made an almost two-hour documentary on Mensah, tagged him “the world’s most controversial sportsman.”
And, why not?
Mensah was electric as a sportsman and eccentric as a man.
Close associates say he was steeped in spiritism. His teammates confirm that he was a serial smoker of marijuana, which he hilariously called his “ammunition”, and which made him reach for the sky during matches. He always wore a trademark black and white cap, in the fashion of legendary Russian goalkeeper Lev Yashin, who was his hero. He was a prophet — he would regularly predict the result of matches he was involved in.
Above all, he was a crowd puller, a people person, a powerful and wonderful human being.
Beginnings
Robert Mensah was born in Cape Coast in June 1939, and began his football career as a defender. According to those who knew his story, during a game Mensah was involved in, the goalkeeper was sent off, and he offered to man the posts. He eventually excelled in goal, because he was made for the role.
He had it all. He was tall. He had long, strong arms that could disarm dangerous shots. He had athletic ability and acrobatic agility. He had character, an endearing x factor. He was gifted with presence and intelligence. He was simply goalkeeping excellence.
He started his career at Sekondi Independence, a club formed by an aid of Ghana’s first president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah.
After the 1966 military coup that deposed Nkrumah, Indece, as the team was popularly known, was disbanded, with some players, including Mensah, briefly put behind bars.
After that ordeal, Mensah later started life anew with his home town club, ‘Mysterious’ Ebusua Dwarfs.
That is where he became a superstar.
An Outlier
Ghana has produced a lot of great goalkeepers — the likes of T.G Wilberforce and Addoquaye Laryea from the 1950s, Dodoo Ankrah and John Naawu from the 1960s; Joseph Carr and Abdulai Sani from the 1970s and 1980s; Richard Kingson and Sammy Adjei from the 1990s and 2000s — but many experts argue, if not agree, that none could match Mensah’s level of talent, fame and influence.
“Mensah was my master, my coach,” says Joseph Carr, Ghana’s 1978 Africa Cup of Nations-winning goalkeeper. “He taught me to always watch the ball, not the man.”
Mensah was arguably the earliest African goalkeeper to become the star of his team; the marquee man, long before the likes of Cameroonian Thomas N’Kono, the 1979 and 1982 African Player of the Year. “Mensah was the greatest African goalkeeper I’ve ever seen,” says his club and country teammate, Osei ‘Wizard Dribbler’ Kofi.
Indeed, respected Ghanaian journalist Cameron Duodu believes that not only is Mensah Ghana’s greatest goalkeeper, but he might just be Ghana’s greatest player overall.
Maybe that is true, because Mensah was quite the athlete. He commanded his teams with audacious authority. He was a showman, weird and feared. Strikers would panic — if not deflate — at the mere sight of him, while wild shots would suddenly become tame against him.
As former Daily Graphic sport editor JK Addo Twum aptly and poetically wrote, Mensah “handled a football with the same contemptuous ease that Joe Louis treated the gloves.”
Addo Twum, who described Mensah as “a big man with big hands and a big heart”, continued: “He had a superb sense of anticipation, great physical fitness and the courage and confidence to go down to the feet of dangerous attackers. There will be many good goalkeepers but there will never be another ‘Yashin’ Mensah.”
Africa’s finest
At Dwarfs, Mensah once featured in a league game against champions Asante Kotoko in 1969, a match which Dwarfs shockingly won 5–0 in Cape Coast. Rather than the strange score line, the highlight of the match was the enduring image of Robert Mensah sitting in the goal post, casually reading a newspaper.
The return leg between Dwarfs and Kotoko ended 1–0 in favor of the latter. The Porcupine Warriors suffered to score against the magnificent Mensah. “He saved everything we shot at him,” says Osei Kofi, who was the captain of Kotoko, and who scored the lone goal that day. Mensah openly congratulated Kofi for being able to beat him.
Impressed, Kotoko immediately commenced the process of procuring Mensah from Dwarfs, and they did, luring him with a brand-new VW car. “He was given a car when most of us players at Kotoko didn’t even have bicycles,” Kofi laughs. “So, during his first match, our jealous defenders intentionally sabotaged him and he conceded three goals. He burst into tears and almost left the club.”
But Mensah stayed, and became a club legend in his short three-year stint at the club. For Kotoko, Mensah not only made stunning saves; he was their sole savior. He helped them win the 1970 edition of the Africa Cup of Champions Clubs (now known as the CAF Champions League).
In the second leg of that competition’s final against TP Englebert of Zaire, Mensah was once again the headline act of a courageous Kotoko performance. He was Kotoko’s plan. He was the man.
Due to the unavailability of TV footage from that crucial game at the May 20 Stadium in Kinshasa, what happened on that day, January 24, 1971, would become a legendary Ghanaian football story, brought back by those who witnessed it, and carried on to subsequent generations via enthralling oral tradition.
The story goes:
Kotoko, who had drawn the first leg 1–1 days earlier back in Kumasi, were winning 2–1 in Kinshasa, in front of a hostile home crowd believed to have approached about 90,000 people.
Suddenly, the referee — rumoured to have been influenced by the infamous Mobutu Sese Seko-led Zairean government, who wanted Englebert to win at all costs for political reasons — whistled for a contestable penalty in the 90th minute.
Chaos erupted.
Incensed, Kotoko players and officials decided to walk off and forfeit the match, but Mensah single-handedly pacified them, convincing them to continue the match and allow the penalty, as he was sure he could save it.
The team heeded.
But there was another problem — one that would almost cause Mensah to change his mind and join his teammates in the boycott.
The match could not resume immediately because the paranoid Zairean players had a protest. It was a demand, if not command:
Mensah had to remove his trademark black and white cap.
Why?
They were suspicious. Superstitious. They believed it contained juju powers that would prevent their player from scoring the penalty.
Their panic and paranoia wasn’t far-fetched: indeed, it had been said that Mensah received the cap from his grandfather, a Cape Coast fetish priest, on his death bed many years before. Mensah revered the cap as talismanic, embodying his good luck charm, and never took it off in the midst of matches.
The referee kowtowed to pressure from the Englebert players, ordering Mensah to take off his cap before he blows the whistle for the penalty to be taken. He threatened to end the game in favour of Englebert if Mensah did not do so.
But Big Bob did not budge.
He walked out of the goalpost in defiance. There were numerous soldiers on the touchlines, armed with bayonets, who reportedly stormed the pitch to coerce Mensah, at this point infuriated by the intimidation, to remove the cap.
It took a Kotoko senior official to descend from the director’s box to speak to Mensah.
According to writer Papa Appiah, revisiting the account on a Kotoko forum in 2011, the Kotoko official said: “Robert, you know and I know, that we are being robbed here. But are we going to run away? No! Because that is not the Asante Kotoko way. If need be Robert, we should lose this cup fighting to the very last man…”
Mensah mellowed, deciding to finally give up the cap.
He threw it angrily unto the pitch and ran back into goal. One of the soldiers reportedly tore through the cap’s inner layer looking for the juju charm believed to be buried inside, and having found nothing, held it up with the tip of the bayonet like a trophy, an act which replaced the crowd’s fears with cheers.
It is believed that Mensah later retrieved the cap after the game.
Meanwhile, Mensah positioned himself in goal and stretched out his arms, looking straight into the penalty taker’s eyes, impishly inviting him to take his best shot.
In the end, the ball, as if hypnotized, didn’t dare go close to Mensah — it flew high into the sky.
It was the last kick of the game, and Kotoko had won the trophy which they believed Englebert had “stolen” from them under bizzare circumstances back in 1967.
“After giving glory to God,” Osei Kofi says, “the next person who made Kotoko win that cup was Robert.”
Mensah’s exploits during that African campaign, as well as his displays for Ghana as the Black Stars finished second at the 1970 Africa Cup of Nations in Sudan earlier that year, earned him cult following and the nickname “Goalkeeper Number One”. He had become Africa’s Alpha goalie, its safest pair of hands.
Mensah monumentally finished as runner-up in the African Player of the Year award in 1971. Ibrahim Sunday, who was Mensah’s Kotoko teammate and close friend, won the ultimate award. “There were times in training he would tell us ‘Nobody will score today’,” Sunday recalls. “And truly, no one would score until he got tired and allowed it.”
A Tragic End
Later in 1971, Kotoko were in the process of defending their Africa Cup title when tragedy struck.
The fatal chain of events began before an all-important, all-Ghanaian semi-final Kotoko were to play against Great Olympics. The controversial Mensah failed to report to camp, a decision that would prove costly.
Strangely, while his teammates were in camp in Kumasi preparing for the clash, Mensah was at a bar in Tema having a clash of his own with someone after a disagreement. “Mensah was great, but off the pitch, he was a problem,” veteran Ghanaian sportswriter Ken Bediako says. “He wasn’t disciplined.”
The brawl at the bar, named Credo, resulted in an intoxicated and aggressive Mensah being stabbed with a broken bottle by a friend named Isaac Melfah.
Mensah died at the age of 32 on November 2. His demise shook Ghana and Africa at large, inspiring massive mourning and ethereal eulogies.
Melfah, later imprisoned after a landmark court trial, went down in history as one of the most villainous Ghanaians to have ever lived.
He had robbed Ghana of Bob.
