As we reminiscence on the closure of the 2022 World Cup spectacle held in Qatar, with Argentina winning the tournament and ushering Lionel Messi as the new Greatest of All Times in his generation, we are punctuated in our excitement by news of the passing on of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known mononymously as Pele. No death is timely, yet legacies that give space for a new one can look timely and engineered. Arguably the greatest of Brazilian sons, the most noticeable of many sports icons and personalities, his transition to the beyond-death life marks the beginning of a new era; only those that follow him will dictate the punctuation mark we should put at the end of his great obituary.
Pele was to global football a better person, and the world has learnt to believe that he will also be a lovely corpse. The universal truthfulness of death has once again taken from our living space a great soul. As Pele closed his eyes on 29th December 2022 in a way that gives comfort to the apparel of the dead, as the living, we are reminded of a Shakespearean line that "to weep is to make less the depth of grief" ... and that with all our intelligence, including technological innovation, and might "we cannot hold mortality's strong hand".
As his long-held records were rewritten by Christiano Ronaldo, Neymar da Silva Santos, Killian Mbappe, and Lionel Messi, his life chose to announce to the world that the new has been born, and he as the old will be seen through their image. He remains the epitome of global athleticism, the definition of sports ambassadorship and the iconization of triumph of talent wrapped in a human spirit.
Pele joins sports greats such as John Taylor, the Pennsylvanian 400-meter athlete, and Jesse Owen, who crashed Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy, won four Olympic Gold medals and set three new world records in 1936. He is defined in the hall of athletic greats such as; Mohammed Ali, the greatest boxer of our times with an Olympic Gold medal from the Rome Games of 1960; Alice Coachman, the jumper at the 1948 Olympic Games in Great Britain; Carl Lewis, who won a staggering ten Olympic Medals; Serena Williams who crowned herself the queen of the tennis court; Usain Bolt who defined himself the fastest human ever; Lewis Hamilton, the most excellent Formula One driver of his generation and yet to be dethroned; Zidane Zidane the French African from Algeria who conquered the UEFA champions league; Pitso Mosimane who won the African Continental Championship three times with two different teams,
In the ilk of Boutros Boutros Ghali, Kofi Annan, Salim Salim, Mwalimu Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda, Samora Machel, Oliver Tambo, Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and Barack Obama, he, like them, remains an institution of leadership we continue to learn from as enrollees in the open University called Africa.
Born to a humble black South American family in Brazil, Pele became a global icon of note. His selflessness, closely modelled by Sadio Mane and N'Golo Kante, as demonstrated by his ability to be available for soccer and what it represents, distinguishes him as having belonged to a necessary cohort of leaders to point to as accurate role models. His ability to have what he did as a standing monument for generations beyond him to benefit, makes Pele a benchmark of athletic leadership that instructs all of us the following dictum: when talent gives you a stage or platform, history will judge you on how you fared with the fame.
As Pele ascended the podiums that required his institution as a person, he brought to being a global (sports) icon and other podiums himself in a manner that makes us who enjoyed his talents and service more significant than himself.
As we mourn Pele, we should understand that every tear shed waters the tree of the type of global iconism and human-based institutional leadership we expect from those the future is awaiting to fill the large shoes of the Pele-types. As Pele was able to hang his boots, exited magnanimously from the athletic stage, and became the most extraordinary ambassador of the power of talent to transcend human constructs of chauvinism, those with talent must just shift when we have served to allow the new to emerge.
Paraphrasing Cornel West, "Pele had to sit at the throne of Global Football for African athletic and institutional leadership excellence to stand up in the world'. Like the ancient Pharaos of Egypt that shaped the civilizations of the Mediterranean, Pele towered for Blackness a football ambassadorship that entrenched ubuNtu, through tiki-taka, as a global excellence paradigm for posterity's sake.
"When a star dies, it does not vanish from the firmament. Its light keeps streaming across the fields of time and space so that centuries later, we may be touched by a vision of the fire and brilliance of its former life. The lives of truly great men are just like that".
An icon like Pele, to conclude, became a global asset when it liberated itself from its origins and opened itself out to far places, societies and times. That is why his global greatness can only be context-transcending, and dare I say, universal in the way that posterity processes it. Like a flag, Pele's athletic leadership is a polyvalent symbol of its various meanings. He represents the many facets of being who he originated.
Rest in peace, Pele. Thanks for your life.
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