You wouldn't have thought, from the size of their delegation at the opening ceremonies, that Mali had a soccer team playing in the games. But they do! And they made it to today's quarter-finals!

Mali shoulders the responsibility of defending Africa's pride as they take on Italy in the quarter-finals of the Olympic tournament on Saturday ... The Malians remain the continent's sole hope of winning a third successive gold medal.

It doesn't bother me that they note that Mali is the only African nation in the semifinals; that seems appropriate. But isn't it a little weird that the BBC lumps the African gold medals together like that? The first two gold medals they're referring to were won by Nigeria and Cameroon; yes, they are on the same continent, but they are not the same country, and they don't share their gold medals any more than Croatia share theirs with England.

It reminds me of a book I gave my nephew for Christmas last year, called "Africa Is Not a Country." I thought of him as soon as I found it at the Library of Congress gift shop, because I was disturbed by a song he'd learned in school. In the song, the kids sing hello the way they do in many other countries, like France, China, Israel ... and Africa.* It was disturbing to hear him sing about Africa, a continent where hundreds of languages are spoken, like that. Even within country borders people don't necessarily speak the same language. (I can think of half a dozen languages spoken in Mali offhand; there are surely some I don't know about.)

*In my online research, I discovered that the official lyrics to this song specify South Africa. Somehow it got shorted to "Africa" in my nephew's class. Still, there are many languages spoken in South Africa: Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Pedi, Tswana, Sotho, Tsonga, Swati, Venda, and Ndebele, to name a few.

Update: Mali lost in overtime.