First to abolish slavery, now gang wars disturb football, survival
6 min readJun 21, 2026 06:59 PM IST The Haitians were defeated, but they didn’t shed tears in the Philadelphia arena. They danced and sang their way to the aisles, chanting the most powerful phrase in their history, ‘Grenadye, Alaso’. Or march forward grenadiers, a tribute to their revolutionaries who drove out the French Army of Napoleon. “We lost, but we fought. We take pride in that, and that’s our tradition,” says Thomas Ehiogene an ardent fan in his 30s. “To just qualify in the tournament is a big feat, and it has united a nation,” he says. He is not resorting to the usual minnow-speak, but from his own harrowing personal experience. “Most of us here, the fans, and the team, have one thing in common. We don’t have a home,” he says, with a lump in his throat. Now football has brought them under one roof, families that left Haiti decades ago, all battle-scarred, now singing, dancing and praying for their team. He fled Haiti in 2021, when the president Jovenel Moïse was …
