The first time Bryan Idowu heard monkey chants aimed his way inside a Russian stadium, he faced the offenders head on and gestured for them to turn up the volume. “After that they stopped, because they knew,” he says. “For me it’s no problem, it’s just noise and doesn’t bother me. I’ve never taken it personally.”
That was one of two such occurrences – a tiny fraction, he stresses, of the 120 or so league games he has played – in his career and if his stance seems surprisingly relaxed in this case it is, at least, worth listening to what the Amkar Perm defender has to say. Idowu will represent Nigeria at the World Cup but was born and raised in St Petersburg, spending all bar a few early years of his life in Russia. It gives him a perspective available to very few; he has experienced some of the less pleasant aspects of life as a young black man in a society struggling to adapt to the post-Soviet space but knows the other side of things, too. He believes the country has changed significantly since the days in the early 2000s when his parents would warn him not to stray far beyond their neighbourhood, fearful of the skinheads notorious for carrying out racist attacks.
One story of many recounted over the course of an hour by the engaging and articulate Idowu speaks of how things were and how he perceives them to be now. “My mum and dad were afraid for my life at that time and I was scared, too,” he says. “Two times my friends pushed me – like ‘Run!’ – into the underground station, and I ran away before [the skinheads] could reach me. They started running after me but I’d already entered the subway and left. The second time there were about seven of them but they passed by and didn’t see me. I’d heard stories they had beaten up other black people, or people from places like Uzbekistan, Georgia and Armenia, and seen some videos on the internet too, so I didn’t want to meet them.
“Then, at some point around 2004 or 2005, they were gone” – he clicks his fingers – “and I started walking around freely, became more involved with my teammates after practice, all that kind of stuff.”
His experience suggests efforts to counteract ultranationalism in his home city – which, to give one example, manifested itself horrifically when an African student was stabbed to death in 2005 – bore some fruit. At that point Idowu was in his early teens, taking his nascent steps in Zenit St Petersburg’s Smena academy. It was, he emphasises repeatedly, a happy childhood despite the restrictions that for a time became ingrained.
“I was surrounded by good, positive people all the time: a good group of guys at school, the neighbours who I played football with on the streets, great people. I just felt like I fitted in. Of course I was black and Russian, so sometimes I’d see people looking at me as I walked past because back then it was something different for them. But I have always felt at home in Russia; everyone has been very welcoming to me.”
The football pitch was an especially secure place for Idowu but so was school; he was a straight-A student and remembers huffily muttering: “What the hell? I used to be the only one!” to himself when a similarly able boy joined his class. “We had a bit of a feud, I was competitive about it,” he continues. “I did all my assignments and was very good at reading … how do you call them in English? … stikhi.” The word he is looking for is “poems” and the stumble, in such a fluent speaker, comes out of the blue; it is a reminder of the different cultures he sits astride and as a youngster the differences were even more pronounced. Idowu was born to a Nigerian father and half-Russian, half-Nigerian mother, who met at university in St Petersburg. They relocated to Owerri state, in Nigeria, when he was three and upon moving back to St Petersburg at the age of six it took time to acclimatise. He needed a translator in his school lessons at first, English and Ibo having filled his ears during that time away, but six months later he “knew Russian like I’d been speaking it all my life”.
It was around then that he started training at Smena, working his way up as far as the Zenit Under-18s via stints as a ballboy for the Andrey Arshavin-inspired senior team that would win the 2008 Uefa Cup. Taking notes from those players was “a crazy experience” but Idowu was never given a chance to follow them. Here the race issue rears up again. “Originally people would say to me: ‘Oh, you’re going to be the first black guy to play for Zenit,’” he says. “But when I got to the age of about 15, some people started telling me it would be hard to get into the first team because of my race.”
Idowu, who was 26 last month, emphasises that he will probably never know why, in his words, “I didn’t make it but didn’t get rejected either” at Zenit, seeing most of his friends progress from the youth setup to the second team while nobody in the coaching staff offered any explanation for his stasis. Perhaps he was simply not good enough at the time but he has fears it might have been difficult to pick him in defiance of the far-right views of Zenit ultras group Landscrona – who coined the phrase “There is no black in Zenit’s colours” and famously wrote a letter asking them not to sign black and gay players in December 2012, two years after Idowu had departed – and have been such a long-standing, unpleasant presence around the club.
“I think that’s part of it for sure,” he says. “But the people who work there don’t say anything so we won’t know whether they listen to the fans or not. They shouldn’t pick black players just to show they aren’t racist or something, but they should select whoever will perform well for the team and help them win trophies. If it’s a black person then no problem.”
Instead he moved to Perm, on the fringes of the Urals, joining a traditionally mid-ranking Amkar team in which he has become a fixture. This season he has shone in a relegation battle and the expectation is that, after the World Cup, he will move back up the ladder, especially as Amkar’s future is up in the air because of financial difficulties.
A number of bigger clubs in Russia and Turkey have been watching closely and perhaps heads will be turned elsewhere if he starts at left-back for the Super Eagles this month. A call from Russia – and his old manager at Amkar, Stanislav Cherchesov – never came and he committed to Nigeria last year, having originally stalled after consultation with his club, who were reluctant to give up his domestic-player status.
His Nigeria debut came against Argentina last November in the Russian city of Krasnodar. He scored nine minutes after coming on as a half-time substitute and describes the “whole rollercoaster of emotions” that consumed him, which gave way to genuine gratification afterwards when he discovered that the reaction in Russia to his achievement was overwhelmingly positive.
Now he hopes for similarly affirmative vibes throughout a tournament whose buildup has not exactly been a byword for hope and inclusion. Russia’s rap sheet for racism and hooliganism has, for good reason, informed people’s perceptions but he believes the kind of idiotic behaviour he was twice subjected to from those terraces is far from the norm and generally a question of education.
“Russia has some stupid people, that’s for sure,” he says. “But some of them don’t even define themselves as racist, and don’t think they can be because they were never part of things that happened in other countries’ cultural history, like the slavery of black people. So for them it’s different: they will say something as a joke and won’t understand it is racist. They won’t realise what they are doing at the time. You can find good and bad people everywhere: you can’t say from a few people’s actions that a whole country is racist. You’ll mainly find people who agree it is not right and are welcoming, positive and fun.
“I think the World Cup will help the friendships between Russia and other countries. It will be an opportunity to be closer and come together. Not many Russians get to travel widely but many of them are very open-minded and love Europe. It’s going to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for them, a very positive thing to welcome all those nations, and I think the country will grow afterwards.”
Idowu is not denying anyone else’s experience; he is simply recounting his own. On 26 June Nigeria will face Argentina again, this time in the city of his birth and for higher stakes. It will be another emotive step in a career he had hardly envisaged turning out like this and perhaps, given the obstacles he has made light of, one tinged with a little vindication too.