Like ‘Oumuamua, Fashanu was gone from each new place just as quickly as he had arrived there: in his nineteen years as a footballer, he played for twenty-two clubs, an existence not so much nomadic as frantic. For, just like that ageless voyager, Fashanu was elusive, fast-moving and ultimately unknowable. Sometimes, when I think of Justin Fashanu – the first openly gay footballer to play in the men’s professional game, and still the only Black one – I think of ‘Oumuamua.
Never before had an inter-stellar visitor passed through our region of space, and so, when astronomers came to name this mysterious immigrant, they called it ‘Oumuamua, which roughly translates from Hawaiian as “a messenger from afar arriving first”. The object, travelling too fast to be trapped by the gravitational pull of any star system, tore through our Solar System and then surged back out into the open ocean of the universe.
In 2017, much to the excitement of scientists, an unknown object emerged from the depths of the cosmos and cut a majestic arc across the night sky.
