Map West Africa

Your Guides I’m Olayinka and this is my best friend Baboo. We’re going to show you around our home, West Africa!

Most of my friends in West Africa are crazy about these two games. If you ever visit West Africa in person, join us for a match and we’ll teach you some amazing new moves to bring back home to your friends.

Soccer

My cousin Dia is crazy about this game, so I’ll let him tell you about how we play it in West Africa.

Soccer is West Africa’s most popular sport.

Dia: I play soccer with my friends every day after school. Here in West Africa, we call it “football.” We can’t afford a proper ball, but we find all kinds of stuff lying around to use instead, like yesterday, when we played with an empty plastic bottle. I know it sounds different than what you’re probably used to, but we still manage to have a lot of fun playing. My dream is to one day try out for Sierra Leone’s national soccer team, the Leone Stars, but I’ve got a lot of practicing to do first!

Oware

I love this game almost as much as Dia loves soccer! It’s a two-player board game that is so exciting that crowds of people gather in my village to watch every time a match is played. Oware (pronounced oh-wah-rah) was once known in Ghana as the game of kings. Some experts think it might be the world’s oldest board game that’s still played today.