The sister who made Belgium’s Amadou Onana fearless before Senegal
Amadou Onana’s first memory of Belgium is an inflatable mattress, he wrote in the Players’ Tribune. His mother had brought him and his three-year-old sister from Senegal to Brussels on a Belgian passport inherited through his father, to an apartment with no furniture and no heat, and for the first weeks she slept on a small couch so the two children could have the mattress to themselves. Onana was eleven. Before any of that, in Dakar, Senegal, there was a grandfather. A big brown chair nobody else was allowed to sit in. A terrace room where the old man went to read the Quran or the newspaper, and where Onana, uniquely, was always welcome. Wolof was the first language Onana ever spoke, ahead of French. Senegal never once called him up, not even at youth level. Belgium is the only country that ever asked. Tonight, in Seattle, confirmed in the starting midfield, he plays Senegal for the first time in his career. ALSO READ | Mexico’s Quiñones: Faced racism, nearly joined guerrillas but now national …
