The second time my phone blew up this summer, I couldn’t sleep at all. Instead, I stayed up until 5 a.m. watching the news. It’s not that I was scared — having grown up in the Congo, it takes a lot to scare me — but I was worried. It’s not every day that you’re in a country in the middle of a coup.
We had arrived in Turkey a day earlier, on Thursday, July 14. My friend, Samuel Eto’o — the striker for Antalyaspor and one of the greatest African soccer players ever — had organized a charity soccer game to be played in the city of Antalya on Saturday.