It was once said that “all roads lead to Rome”. Similarly, when it came to African footballers in the Premier League, it once seemed that all roads led to Didier Drogba. The Ivory Coast forward was not the first footballer from his continent to star in England, but he may well be the most iconic. His impact on the UK went far beyond the football field; his career was one of the first times, I think, that a black African man was truly idolised by the British public.

This may seem like a small point – an irrelevant one, almost. If you look at British culture today, then it’s clear that African pride is well and truly mainstream. You have Stormzy telling us he’s the big black Ghana man; you have J Hus and his perfectly-crafted dancefloor grooves; you have Julie Adenuga running her own show on Apple Beats 1. But ten years ago, the landscape was very different. Africans were still making moves in the UK; they just weren’t nearly so visible.

I think that, at some level, there is a slightly uneasy relationship between black Africans and the rest of the UK. There was a fairly brief yet striking example of this a few months ago, when Chip issued yet another diss track, “Michelle Riddim”, this time replying to Yungen. In the course of that track, he took great care to mock the accent of Tinie Tempah’s mother, who is Ghanaian. “Tenk you for bringing my son”, he said in a cod West African accent, to much merriment. The message was swift but clear: there is still something about the way Africans speak that is considered highly comic, even today. It’s not difficult to link this perception back to years of empire and colonisation, during which it was necessary to portray black people as slow and dim-witted in order to make their subjugation more acceptable.

“He had an accent as thick as any of my parents, aunts or uncles, and he embraced it.”

This is what made Drogba’s arrival on the scene so thrilling. He had an accent as thick as any of my parents, aunts or uncles, and he embraced it. He graced late night talk-shows, looking smart and sharp as a leading barrister. These might seem small achievements, but it is important to view them in context. This was a time when some black British rappers were still so ashamed of their own accents that they tried to sound American. Patois came a little further down the food chain, with a voice that implied your folks hailed from Lagos a distant last. And into all of that strutted Drogba. Like the pioneers of Afrobeats who would conquer British charts years later, he didn’t tone his blackness or his heritage down for anyone.

Whilst writing of pioneers, I should acknowledge those footballers who came before Drobga. Chelsea had the peerless George Weah, but by then he was at the very end of his career. Leeds had Tony Yeboah, Arsenal had Nwankwo Kanu, and Bolton had Jay-Jay Okocha; each of them were arguably more spectacular than Drogba, but none of them were fortunate enough to be the spearhead of one of the greatest teams English football has ever seen. Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea were as royally ruthless a team as the Portuguese maestro has produced, and Drogba – an unusual blend of grace and grit – was at the point of their attack.

He shattered stereotypes even here. With his hair, a glistening black waterfall, he was only one flared-collar shirt away from resembling an early-Eighties soul singer. Yet he played with the power and presence of a traditional English centre-forward. And just when he was about to be slid into the lazily racist categories of the big black striker who was all brawn and no brain, all hammer and no scalpel, he would produce a turn or a touch of balletic elegance.

#throwbackthursday Too much sauce💦💦 @fmalouda @salomonkalou during preseason 2007 with @chelseafc in Los Angeles. A post shared by didierdrogba (@didierdrogba) on May 25, 2017 at 4:54pm PDT

This all mattered far beyond the stands of Stamford Bridge. Black Africans had someone who they could consistently champion as their own, and the floodgates, nudged by Okocha, Kanu and Weah, were now irreversibly open. He was a part of a generation of African stars in the Premier League, joined at Chelsea by Nigeria’s John Obi Mikel and Ghana’s Michael Essien. There’s a video you can find on YouTube which serves as a touching milestone. There, on the dancefloor at a ball for Drogba’s charity foundation, you can see the Chelsea striker dancing the evening away with Akon, Arsenal’s Emmanuel Eboue and the Ivory Coast’s Magic System, whose hit single ‘Premier Gaou’ was the first time that country’s zouglou sound had broken into the mainstream.

Speaking of charity and public service, this was another area in which Drogba showed himself to be not so much a sportsman as a statesman. He raised almost £2million in donations towards building medical facilities in the Ivory Coast, and was a constant voice for peace when his country was beset by civil war. In that sense, he follows in the traditions of other great footballer-activists, such as Brazil’s Socrates and Holland’s Ruud Gullit, who were just as comfortable supporting a cause as they were trapping a ball.

Drogba and his friends reminded us – or told some of us for the first time – that it was cool to be African in Britain. That seems laughable in a world whose dancefloors have long ago been dominated by D’Banj and Fuse ODG, but it was the Ivory Coast striker who made much of this possible. It’s a far more subtle legacy than, say, his winning penalty in the 2012 UEFA Champions League Final, or the ten goals that he scored in ten major finals. But, a world away from the bigotry and negativity of Donald Trump, he helped to Make Africa Great Again in the eyes of many; for which a generation of young black people in the UK, and far beyond, will be forever grateful.

@Okwonga

Illustration by Pedro Demetriou.