Samia Yaba Nkrumah – daughter of Ghana’s first President has declared her unflinching support for the men’s senior national football team, the Black Stars as they prepare for a showdown with the Pharaohs of Egypt in what promises to be an epic playoff to determine which of the two teams will represent Africa in the next World Cup, Brazil 2014.

Although she has roots in both African nations, Samia Nkrumah says she will be supporting the Black Stars all the way.

Responding to a question from Yaw Acheampong – Host of ‘Inside Afrika’ a Pan African Development Programme on Accra based Radio Univers on which of the teams she will support when the two countries meet, Samia explained that “Egypt is home too, and I have spent some of the most important years of my life there but it’s Ghana we’ve always supported.”

“Even when we were little and Egypt would play any black African team, we always support the black African team…our friends wouldn’t understand but that love for everything black was instilled in us at a very young age,” she noted.

The former Legislator for Jomoro, however, stressed that her love for the Black Stars and the black race “is not a racist thing, it is just a reassertion of our strength and potential as a people, Black people.”

Ghana and Egypt have a history of excellent diplomatic relations and the two countries have mutually supported each other’s football teams at both the senior and juvenile levels largely due to the marriage between Ghana’s first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and Samia’s mother Fatia Rizk of Egypt.

The mutual respect between Egypt and Ghana can also be traced to the close friendship that existed between Dr. Nkrumah and former Egyptian Prime Minister and President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who like Nkrumah, was an anti-colonial hero.

The first leg of the playoff between the Black Stars and the Pharaohs will be held at the Baba Yara Stadium in Kumasi on Tuesday October 15, 2013. The return leg has been scheduled for November 19, 2013 at Cairo Stadium in Egypt; however, the Ghana Football Association has appealed to FIFA to switch the venue for safety reasons due to the recent unrest in the North African country.