Didier had seen the world in his quest for footballing stardom: Qatar, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Malta, Corsica and Paris. ‘Football comes first,’ he said. ‘And then adventure.’ He left his home, Yaoundé in Cameroon, at the age of 13. He was now 21. In those eight years he had been a slave, had been robbed, beaten, racially abused and homeless. An agent asked his mother to fake a death certificate for herself and his father so a club could sign him. When he was 17 he was woken on the floor of a bank ATM kiosk in Madrid by his mother calling to say his dad was dead. Misadventure sounded more appropriate.
‘I was always excited to travel,’ he said. ‘Some things happened along the way which were not so good but they made me a man. I am a fighter because of those things and I will keep on with the fight until I get my chance to play.’
His journey had begun in the first year of his teens when he was one of hundreds of boys selected by the ‘screening’ process for talent run by the Aspire Dreams programme, at the Qatari academy in Doha. ‘I was only there two weeks,’ he said. ‘It was luxurious but there were lots of cliques and if the trainers didn’t like you, you didn’t play. I came home.’
Within 12 months he was in Brazil, training at Cruzeiro, who were one of the biggest clubs in the country. ‘It was just a training centre,’ he said. ‘They looked after me very well. They gave me a place to live, fed me, gave me pocket money, but in the end I had to come home. I was a minor and they couldn’t sign me. I had the Brazilian rhythm, the Brazilian style. Yes, they liked me.’
These were mere blips compared to what would follow for Didier, a striker who was no more than 5 feet 9 inches. ‘I came home and I heard that there were some trials for boys to go to Argentina. A white man was coming to see the trials and when you know a white man is involved lots of players come.’
Didier impressed. The agent – the white man – said he wanted to take him and four others. But first his parents would have to give consent. ‘He was very charming when he spoke to my parents,’ Didier said. ‘They signed papers saying that he was in charge of me. Like he was my guardian. He had rights over me. He could do whatever he wanted with me concerning football, he made the decisions.’ That was Didier’s first mistake. The second was his family giving the agent $2,500 for ‘visas and papers and things’. They had paid the airfare themselves, too.
Didier sighed. ‘I will tell you what happened.’ And then he began. ‘I left Cameroon on the 24 December 2008. I was 15. When I got to Argentina my mother had given me some money, about €1,600, and he took all of that. He took my passport, my birth certificate and the return plane ticket. He took me to stay in a pension. I arrived at 3 a.m. and I tried to sleep. I couldn’t. At 8 a.m. I had trials at Boca Juniors. My eyes were red. I was sleepy. So I didn’t play well.
‘I had a trial at Tigre FC and I was supposed to trial for one month. But they wanted me after three days. I succeeded in three days! I was so happy that I wanted to call my mother. But the agent, he refused. I wasn’t allowed to talk to her. I went to live with the agent and his wife and children.’
Didier was used as a slave by the family. When he wasn’t at football training he had to look after the couple’s three children – aged eight months, two and four – for hours on end and was fed only ‘chicken lungs and rice’. If he did something wrong he was punched or kicked. The agent would give him the equivalent of €1 pocket money and a return metro ticket on the weekend.
‘I was very, very badly treated,’ he said. ‘I, uh, went through a very bad moment in my life.’ He wiped tears from his eyes. ‘I think I have never suffered so much. I couldn’t tell my mother. When I called her he made me put it on speakerphone and he stayed in the room. His wife was a racist. I would be beaten. I was not allowed to eat with the family. I was not allowed to sit on the same chairs as them.’
Tigre FC wanted to sign Didier permanently but they couldn’t because he was under 18 and his parents lived in Cameroon. ‘If they moved to Argentina, it would be possible but they couldn’t, so the agent had an idea.’ The idea was for Didier’s mother to provide false documents stating she and his father had passed away so the agent could claim he had adopted him. In short, to fake their own death.
‘My mother said to me on the phone, “Are you crazy?” I told her to do it because he was listening and then, very quickly, in our language I told her not to.’ When the agent’s scheme failed, he was furious and told Didier that if he didn’t tell the club that he had paid for his airfare he would not return his passport. ‘The club reimbursed airfares so he got the money. But my mother had paid for that ticket. She had to pay again for me to fly home.’
After one year in Argentina, Didier returned to Cameroon. He said he was ‘psychologically beaten’ and gave up the game: ‘I wanted to leave football because in Africa we say that if you go with the white people and you play well, you will stay. But I went to the white people and I showed them that I play well, and I was disappointed. I thought maybe I will just end up as a tramp or something. My father told me, “You’re still young, there are still opportunities, you’re going to continue, you’re going to travel.”’
Didier did travel. Tenerife FC wanted to sign him but, because he had ‘signed away his rights’ to the Argentinian agent, they ‘didn’t want any hassle’. With little money he survived on ‘biscuits and juice’ for €3 a day and slept on the streets. It was when he was resting his head on his suitcase by a cashpoint that his mother telephoned to tell him his father had died. ‘I did not go to the funeral,’ he said. ‘My mother said I should keep looking, that after what happened in Argentina I was already a man. So I missed my father’s funeral.’
He failed a trials at Atlético Madrid and at clubs in Malta and Corsica. Didier went home. But he came back, first to Madrid and then Paris. ‘A friend told me about Jean-Claude, so I contacted him,’ he said. ‘He told me to come. I’ve been here one month. I am staying with my cousin. She said I should try in France because in Spain, the blacks don’t have as much opportunity as in France.’