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Dream Team

Hiannick Kamba


When Hiannick Kiamba's parents went to the office for foreign nationals in Essen in the summer of 2005 to extend their limited leave to remain in Germany they were immediately taken into custody pending deportation.

 

Kamba, a youth player at Schalke 04, was allowed one opportunity to phone his father and visit his mother, who suffers from a heart condition, in a German prison. Soon afterwards they were sent back to the Congo, the country they had been forced to flee nine years earlier due to civil unrest and come to the Ruhr. And on July 15 Kamba was faced with the same problem.

At the time Kamba had been playing for Schalke since 1999 and just helped club's under-19 side win the German Youth Cup. He was in Year 11 at the Berger Feld comprehensive school in Gelsenkirchen, a school that has been running a youth development project with the club for many years. The problem was that adult non-EU citizens are only given a residence permit as a footballer if they play in the 1st or 2nd division.

Headmaster Georg Altenkamp and his pupils were not about to give up on Kamba and so they contacted a lawyer and the hardship commission. "We take in not just the talented footballer, but the person too and we take responsibility”, explained Altenkamp. Some 1,600 pupils and teachers held a general meeting that provided information on the unsafe situation in the Congo and criticised the German law of asylum.

To lay the foundation for Kamba's upkeep until he takes his final school exams in 2007, the school organised a fund-raising campaign. Altenkamp was able to convince the shy, uncertain Congolese boy to make his case a matter for public debate with the help of the campaign and the media. Eventually Schalke intervened and offered the 18-year-old talent a contract as a 'non-amateur without a license'. Kamba was allowed to stay. But what would have happened if he hadn't been a promising young footballer?