South Africa and the Global Game

Football, Apartheid and Beyond

Peter Alegi, Chris Bolsmann, Peter Alegi, Chris Bolsmann

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415518598
• eBook ISBN: 9781317968177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Firmly situating South African teams, players, and associations in the international framework in which they have to compete, South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid, and Beyond presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how and why South Africa underwent a remarkable transformation from a pariah in world sport to the first African host of a World Cup in 2010. Written by an eminent team of scholars, this special issue and book aims to examine the importance of football in South African society, revealing how the black oppression transformed a colonial game into a force for political, cultural and social liberation. It explores how the hosting of the 2010 World Cup aims to enhance the prestige of the post-apartheid nation, to generate economic growth and stimulate Pan-African pride. Among the themes dealt with are race and racism, class and gender dynamics, social identities, mass media and culture, and globalization. This collection of original and insightful essays will appeal to specialists in African Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sport Studies, as well as to non-specialist readers seeking to inform themselves ahead of the 2010 World Cup.

This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

Football as code: the social diffusion of ‘soccer’ in South Africa

Lloyd Hill

Centre for Culture and Languages in Africa, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

This essay explores the processes associated with the emergence of rugby and soccer as distinct ‘sporting codes’ in South Africa. Beginning with an elaboration of the concept of ‘sporting code’, the author traces in broad brush strokes the events that transformed the two English codes into new forms of cultural capital in transnational sporting fields. Set against this wider context, the focus then shifts to the ‘social diffusion’ of rugby and soccer in the territories that would subsequently constitute the South African state. It is argued that between 1859 and the discovery of gold in 1886 rugby and soccer emerged in two relatively distinct fields, centred on the British Cape and Natal colonies. The essay then explores the stratification of these fields, following the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Particular attention is given to the relative status of rugby and soccer in the colonial education systems and in the post-1910 national education system.

Introduction

The sociology of sport is relatively underdeveloped in South Africa.¹ A lot has been written on sport, but most publications have tended to be produced from the perspective of the ‘sportsman’ (mostly men) or from the perspective of ‘the sporting code’, which is to say, focused on the internal development of a specific sport – the history of teams, fixtures, clubs, record tables and regional/national governing bodies. In South Africa these ‘code chronicles’ have more often that not tended to celebrate sporting achievements in the ‘establishment sports’ – notably cricket and rugby – and to underplay the associated history of racial fragmentation and discrimination.

At issue for the sports sociologist is the need to move beyond sporting hagiography in general to explore the social significance of sport in South Africa. The problem with sporting hagiography is that it tends to overstate individual prowess and to understate key social, economic and political factors that cannot be reduced to individual action. Sport may be studied ‘for itself, or as an autonomous system of ideas and practices, but this comes at the cost of understanding underlying social processes. One of the objectives of this essay is therefore to show how sport has helped to ‘codify’ the relationship between key social categories, notably those of race,² class and gender.

The tendency towards hagiography is not unique to South Africa. It can be categorized under a more general tendency to read history teleologically, which is to say the tendency to reconstruct history from the perspective of one's experience of the present. Avoiding this problem is no easy matter, even for the professional historian. Moreover, we live in an age in which the social significance of languages in the construction of texts – and markets for texts – has emerged as a key methodological issue in the social sciences. The objective should therefore be to recognize teleology as an inherent tendency in the writing (and publishing) process and to strive to limit it. The comparative method provides one means of doing this and in this essay takes the form of a comparative exploration of the ‘diffusion’ of two football codes – ‘rugby’ and ‘soccer’ – in South Africa.

The essay has three main objectives. Firstly, my analysis begins with the observation that the two codes in question have a history that predates the English terms that are now routinely used to distinguish them. I explore these terms, within the context of a broader discussion of the older concepts of ‘football’ and ‘code’. Secondly, I elaborate a distinction between the diffusion of technical innovation and the ‘accumulation’ of a social or cultural code. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, I argue that the spread of the major British sporting codes can be understood in terms of the establishment of transnational sporting fields, in which alternative codes are displaced and in which the major English codes function as new forms of cultural capital.

Finally, I provide a comparative analysis of the social diffusion of rugby and soccer in South Africa between 1859 and approximately 1930. My analysis of the spread of the codes examines the role played by different institutions, including schools, military units and the media. Particular attention is given to the emergence of a national education system – in the context of an Empire-wide field of English education – and the role that stratified education played in the attribution of social status to the two codes before and after the unification of the state in 1910.

‘Football’ as a sporting code

In many parts of the world the English word ‘football’ is commonly used to refer to the world's largest ‘sporting code’ – association football or ‘soccer’. This symbolic practice tends to obscure the fact that the term ‘football’ currently refers to a variety of sporting codes, including rugby football (Rugby Union and Rugby League), Gaelic football, American football, Canadian football and Australian Rules football. The close historical association between the main alternative codes and the Anglophone nations is evident in this list. The historical significance of the English language is also evident in the manner in which the word ‘football’ – designating the association game – has been translated into numerous other languages. Thus, whereas the French football is clearly a borrowed word – as in the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) – the more widespread tendency has been to calque the word into the native language.³ One notable exception is the Italian ‘calcio’, which simply means ‘kick’, but which also evokes the memory of football traditions dating back to the Roman Empire.⁴

The etymology of the word ‘football’ is thus a useful point of departure for an essay on the origins of association football. The English word ‘Football’ has Germanic origins, deriving from the combination of the Old English word ‘fot and the Old Norse ‘böllr’. Written references to ‘football’ date back to the fourteenth century⁵ – the period in which Middle English began to replace French as the language of record in England.⁶ There are however, earlier documented references to a football-like game called ‘soullr’ (in French) or ‘choule’ (in Norman French) dating back to twelfth-century France and England.⁷ Anglophone historians have adopted the term ‘folk football’ to distinguish earlier forms of football in Europe from the modern ‘codes’ that arose in England during the nineteenth century.

One way to think about the relationship between ‘folk football’ and modern forms of the game is to consider the manner in which we use the term ‘code’ to refer to ‘a type of sport’. The word ‘code’ derives from the Latin term ‘codex’, whose literal sense was ‘a block of wood that could be split into “leaves” or “tablets’“.⁸ ‘Code’ enters English via French – the earliest English record dates to 1303.⁹ The sense of ‘code’ as a ‘systemic collection of laws and statutes’ is established in English during the fourteenth century. The association with a system of military and telegraphic signals dates from the nineteenth century.¹⁰

Bourdieu¹¹ notes the historical shift in the use of the word ‘code’ from law to linguistics, and it is this shift that is particularly relevant to the study of sport (and other cultural domains). At issue is the use of language in the process of ‘systematizing’ a field of human endeavour.

What then is the change in the processes of systematization associated with the shift from folk football to the modern codes? It is not simply the existence of written codes that makes the difference, but rather their institutionalization in new and highly stratified forms of social structure – notably ‘the market’ and the ‘nation state’. To understand the relationship between sport and power it is necessary to explore the process whereby a code or symbolic system develops, over time, to be manifested as a form of cultural capital.

Codes, imperial ‘diffusion’ and cultural capital

The problem with the use of the term ‘diffusion’ to describe the spread of a sporting code such as soccer is that it invokes ‘a hydraulic imagery’¹² in a manner that suggests widespread consensus on the value of the new code. Like ink diffusing through water or a sheet of blotting paper, new cultural practices are assumed to have spread ‘naturally’ from one community to another.

‘Soccer’ and ‘rugby’ are not simple ‘good ideas’ with associated techniques or ‘skills’. They are instead complex systems of ideas and practices, which carried in their tran...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series page
• Abstracts
• Introduction
• 1. Football as code: the social diffusion of ‘soccer’ in South Africa
• 2. White football in South Africa: empire, apartheid and change, 1892–1977
• 3. A biography of Darius Dhlomo: transnational footballer in the era of apartheid
• 4. Women and gender in South African soccer: a brief history
• 5. ‘You must support Chiefs; Pirates already have two white fans!’: race and racial discourse in South African football fandom
• 6. ‘It wasn’t that I did not like South African football’: media, history and biography
• 7. Soccer in a rugby town: restructuring football in Stellenbosch
• 8. Differing trajectories: football development and patterns of player migration in South Africa and Ghana
• 9. Football’s tsars: proprietorship, corporatism and politics in the 2010 FIFA World Cup
• 10. Sports as cultural diplomacy: the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa’s foreign policy
• 11. World Cup 2010: Africa’s turn or the turn on Africa?
• 12. The 2010 FIFA World Cup: critical voices from below
• Index