Edna Imade: “I wouldn’t change my skin color for anything”

As a child, the Sevillian footballer Edna Imade (24 years old) wondered why everyone around her was white and sometimes wanted to be her too. “Too black to be Spanish and too Spanish to be from Nigeria,” says Actress and Comics Asaari Bibang, who also knows what it is like to feel like that, in a minority. In this new VideoPódcast of LaLiga vs, shot at the Granada CF stadium, both star in a talk that goes beyond the common places and “the typical questions”, as Bibang calls it, to talk both with depth and honesty of how their way to deal with racism and machismo they have suffered and still suffer. For Imeade, football, in addition to their passion since he had six or seven years, is the way to save his family from precariousness and the sufferings that he has seen them endure; For Bibang, comedy has been the ideal speaker from which to denounce the thousands of racist behaviors or gestures that he still observes in society. And, if something is clear after listening to them, it is that sport and art have a fundamental power to raise awareness among citizens and cause that same society to improve.

When she was pregnant with twins, Floren, Imade’s mother, decided to cross the Sahara from Nigeria to give them a better future. He played life and almost loses it. Edna was born during the journey, in Morocco, and with months he arrived in Spain. “I owe everything,” says imade with devotion. So much that his mother and brother are his main motivation to succeed in a career as demanding as that of a footballer.

Imade says that the best part of a year as brilliant as the one who is going through this season, in which it is the second top scorer of the competition and the star that is resulting in revelation team, the Granada CF, is above all to make the members of their family happy. And also to his companions, who are for Imade “like another family”; “If one loses the ball, I run to defend by his side; I love noting to laugh or lift their mood with a joke, we have a real union in the costumes. ”

Sorority, Bibang calls him, who argues that the women in his surroundings “saved his life.” As an actress, the only roles they offered him were of illegal immigrant who barely knew how to speak Spanish or as a prostitute, and the root of that discriminatory experience wrote a monologue and after his success he could make his way.

An exciting conversation that appeals to us all: we have to hear your message to change the present and build a better future.

LaLiga, in the fight against racism

It is not possible in a stadium who does not know how to behave in him, says Imade, who also defends the role of institutions such as LaLiga or League F when eradicating racism not only in the fields: they have won pioneer judicial sentences for hate crimes against those who have poured racist insults from the stands; The sanctions are a deterrence so that no one is deceived: “racism cannot leave for free,” both say.

The other field of action has to do, they believe, with education: children are not born racist, emulate the elderly, mimic what they see, and that is why it is as important that initiatives such as LaLiga vs address the problem from an integral approach. The change is possible and, as Bibang points out, there is evidence that we walk in the appropriate direction: “It is wonderful that my son, when he plays EA Sports FC 25, can in a video game not only to choose female teams, if not playing with a player who looks like his mother.”