In the six months since ASO confirmed its wildcard invitations to the Tour de France, it has been repeated the world over that MTN-Qhubeka will become the first African team to participate in the race. Even MTN-Qhubeka's own press release announcing its Tour line-up rehashed the same mistaken assertion, describing itself as the "first-ever African team to ride the Grande Boucle."
Doug Ryder's squad can, of course, lay claim to its own, deeply significant piece of Tour history, as Eritrea's Merhawi Kudus and Daniel Teklehaimanot will become the first black African riders to take part when they roll down the start ramp in Utrecht on Saturday, but it would be remiss to overlook the fact that the landmark of being the maiden African team in the race was already achieved by another, pioneering squad some 55 years ago.
In the post-war period, the Tour peloton was made up of national and regional teams rather than trade squads and, ahead of the 1950 edition of the race, Algerian journalist Tony Arbona helped to lobby for the inclusion of a North African team, made up of Algerian and Moroccan riders, among the regional outfits designated by Jacques Goddet's organisation.
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At the time, northern Morocco was a French colony, while Algeria was still administered as a part of metropolitan France. For over a century, Algeria had been divided into départements as though it were a normal region like Brittany or Provence rather than a land that had been violently annexed in 1830, and so at the 1950 Tour, "North Africa" came to be listed among the French regional teams such as Sud-Est and Île de France – giving rise, perhaps, to its often overlooked place in history.
There had already been African riders in the Tour, of course, with the Tunisian Ali Neffati, who raced in 1913 and 1914, believed to have been the first, and as cycling grew in popularity in the Maghreb through the 1930s and 1940s, other North African riders began to participate, including Algerian Abdel-Kader Zaaf, who raced for the Sud-Est team in 1948, and Custodio Dos Reis of Morocco, who raced for Centre-Sud-Ouest in 1949.
The decision to assemble such riders under the North African banner in 1950 was not simply an acknowledgement of the talent emerging in the region, however, but must also be viewed in the political context of the time, as France – like others in Europe – struggled to hold on to its colonies. In Algeria, the roots of a coherent independence movement began to take hold in the aftermath of the Second World War. Sport in general, and cycling in particular, played their part in late 1940s attempts to reaffirm the country's status as a part of France.
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