Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen
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Africa is blasting its way into the space race Disruptions to the space industry offer a rare opportunity to new entrants

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Disruptions to the space industry offer a rare opportunity to new entrants

In the hours after Hurricane Katrina slammed into America in 2005, destroying large parts of New Orleans, the people co-ordinating the disaster response urgently needed satellite pictures to show them what they were facing. The first images to come in were not from the constellations launched by nasa or the space agencies of other rich countries. They were beamed to Earth by a small Nigerian spacecraft that had been launched from Russia just two years earlier.

The small cube—Nigeria’s first satellite and only the second launched by a sub-Saharan African country—did not just watch a storm, it provoked one, too. British politicians and a taxpayers’ pressure group called for a halt in development aid, saying Nigeria did not need help if it could afford a space programme. Still, the sums being spent on space by African countries back then were tiny. South Africa’s sunsat, the region’s first satellite, was built by students at Stellenbosch University and hitched a free ride on a nasa rocket. Nigeria’s spacecraft cost just $13m.

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