Sports in Africa, Past and Present

Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, Gerard Akindes, Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, Gerard Akindes

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780821424254
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446966
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

These groundbreaking essays demonstrate how Africans past and present have utilized sports to forge complex identities and shape Africa's dynamic place in the world.

Since the late nineteenth century, modern sports in Africa have both reflected and shaped cultural, social, political, economic, generational, and gender relations on the continent. Although colonial powers originally introduced European sports as a means of "civilizing" indigenous populations and upholding then current notions of racial hierarchies and "muscular Christianity, " Africans quickly appropriated these sporting practices to fulfill their own varied interests. This collection encompasses a wide range of topics, including women footballers in Nigeria, Kenya's world-class long-distance runners, pitches and stadiums in communities large and small, fandom and pay-to-watch kiosks, the sporting diaspora, sports pedagogy, sports as resistance and as a means to forge identity, sports heritage, the impact of politics on sports, and sporting biography.

ONE

Historiography of South African Sports

ONE

Reflections on Pathways to the Writing of South African Sports History

ALBERT GRUNDLINGH AND SEBASTIAN POTGIETER

This chapter focuses on the historiographical trajectory of sports history in South Africa and the academic frame through which empirical material has been refracted, as well as possible future directions. The quest for academic relevance and for the recognition of embedded meanings in sports is outlined. Central to this analysis is an assessment of the salience and durability of a flexible social history paradigm. The implications of more recent challenges are noted with a view of broadening the overall scope of sports history without sacrificing its core components. While fully recognizing the early activist antiapartheid writings that highlighted the many discrepancies and contradictions of South African sports at the time, the emphasis here is on academic historical work as such.

Pioneering Days and Wider Meanings

In trying to establish an academic foothold in the last decades of the twentieth century, the history of sports in South Africa had to contend with other areas of research that dominated the historiographical landscape: Afrikaner politics and its historical antecedents, Black resistance movements and their origins, and of course apartheid itself and its many ramifications. Moreover, besides jostling for position in the marketplace of thematic preferences, sports history also had to differentiate itself sharply from popular books about the history of sports, particularly of the biographical kind, and those focusing on specific teams, sports tours, and clubs.

It fell to early academic pioneers to demonstrate how their work intersected with the fault lines of South African society and to carve out a niche in order to elevate sports history to a respectable level of scholarly inquiry.¹ Underlying the skepticism was the almost unspoken assumption, given South Africa’s turbulent history and the dramatic way in which opposing political forces squared up against one another, that sports and leisure are rather trivial phenomena, best left to amateurs and not the kind of topics to be taken seriously by guild historians. As also happened in other countries, to some the field even appeared frivolous, outside the domain of serious intellectual endeavor, and sports historians seemed to be hardly more than “fans with typewriters practising their esoteric craft with little contact with the historical mainstream.”² One of the authors of this piece experienced such disdain at first hand when he was bluntly told in the early 1990s that sports history is simply something one does at one’s leisure after watching rugby at Loftus Versfeld stadium in Pretoria on Saturdays. Such an attitude can be misleading, “for it is in the fertile loam of the marginal that we may find the structures of power revealed in peculiarly fascinating ways.”³

That point is nowhere more apparent than in dealing with the issue of sports and politics. Only those who do not wish to probe any deeper can believe the assumption that sports and politics are completely separate domains. In South Africa, even more so than in most other countries, despite the best protestations of some, this was never the case, as the sporting boycotts during apartheid strikingly revealed.

Apart from formalized sports politics, as played out for instance by antiapartheid and pro-apartheid forces in the previous South African dispensation, the study of sports history can also be conceived of as a form of “deep politics” in which “social traditions and attitudes are expressed through recreational practises.” Tony Collins, a British author of rugby history, has reminded us that all “sports that have mass appeal reflect the preferences and prejudices of those sections of society that nurture them.”⁴ It is for the sports historian to ferret out the precise significance and meanings of a particular sport over time in a changing context and to establish how these interconnect with other relevant forces in the rest of society. These linkages, of course, must be proven and cannot simply be assumed or assigned. Nor can their outcome be considered preordained. Jeremy MacClancy has made the salutary point that any “particular sport is not intrinsically associated with a particular set of meanings or social values. What it is meant to represent is not laid down like some commandment etched in stone.” Accordingly, sports are rather “an embodied practice, in which meanings are generated, and whose representation and interpretation are open to negotiation and contest.”⁵

The Social History Project and Sports History

For the academic historian of sports and leisure, it is important to be constantly aware of his or her moorings in the wider historiographical landscape. South African historiography over the past forty years or more has exhibited certain distinct traits: from an Afrikaner interpretation of history that foregrounded White nationalistic interests; to a liberal version usually emanating from White English speakers who emphasized “wrong turnings,” premised on notions of individual agency within a free-market economy; to an oppositional neo-Marxist frame that included a strong social history tradition and an emphasis on the material underpinnings of society. Within such a stark characterization there are of course many overlaps and nuances.

Until recently, social history as an analytical frame had a proven record as a fertile point of departure to pursue the wider connections between sports, leisure, and society. Writing in 2007, Tony Collins had little doubt about its salience in the United Kingdom: “It remains the case today that the most interesting work published on sport and leisure history is produced by historians working with the methods of and asking the questions originally posed by social historians.”⁶ The situation has been the same in South Africa, where early pioneers all had some exposure to the development of social history, which emanated primarily from the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand during the 1980s and which in turn was influenced by “history-from-below” intellectual currents at certain universities in the United Kingdom. Significantly, it was at the History Workshop conference in 1981 that historians who had made their names working on other historical topics prized open the field of modern sports history. At that conference, Jeff Peires presented a paper on Black rugby in the Eastern Cape, and Tim Couzens presented one on soccer in South Africa.⁷ These were modest beginnings, but locating sports history within the social history genre gave it a certain respectability and academic legitimacy.

Although the term social in social history has not always been defined with precision, three main aspects can be discerned. First, it can be seen as a synthetic notion, interrogating spheres that at first glance may appear as distinct but may actually be intricately interwoven. Second, as opposed to focusing only on individual agency, it foregrounds systemic forces usually rooted in, but not necessarily axiomatically defined by material considerations as, the encapsulation of the “social.” Third, social history declared a strong focus on the everyday lives of “ordinary people.”⁸ Overall, the main thrust is to grasp, often simultaneously, the manifestations of large and abstract structures as well as the small details of life; recapturing people’s experiences and understanding the multiple grids that mediate these.

These elements of social history were sufficiently flexible to incorporate a cultural practice such as sports or leisure. Culture in this respect was loosely defined as an awareness and expression of how phenomena were perceived and how they were represented and internalized.⁹ At the same time, the notion was infused with an understanding that the “cultural” cannot operate in isolation. Writing on these developments in a Western context, Nancy Struna has emphasized that in the phrase “sports and society” the conjunctive indicates equal attention. Therefore, “one of the goals of this kind of social history is the telling of a ‘large’ story about the nature, fit and meanings of sporting practices as these were embedded in society; hence the common focus on the making of sporting life as an inextricably linked dimension of the making of a nation, a people or a sub-period.”¹⁰

Though all of this is valid, it is also necessary to enter a caveat. Ideas, meanings, and representations that help to constitute the “larger” story about sports and society do not exist in a vacuum but are more often than not grounded in the prevailing realities of life. In contemporary South Africa, professionalization of sports has helped to shape a reality in which class considerations as much as race help to shape the sporting environment.¹¹

This fact is equally important historically, where class and material conditions largely determined the growth of a sporting code such as cricket among Afrikaner as well as Black communities. It was only once Afrikaners had become financially relatively prosperous during the 1960s that they took to cricket in greater numbers and began to assert themselves on the pitch during the ensuing decades.¹² Historically, Black cricketers, with some exceptions, are likewise the products of a class-oriented system. During the late nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth, a tiny sliver of an emerging Black middle class slowly moved up the slippery class ladder, with cricket being a culturally constituent expression as part of a patient quest for wider recognition.¹³ The postapartheid dispensation generally provided ample new opportunities for a purposeful class scramble to the top to compensate for the long and lean years of the past. Moreover, as far as cricket is concerned, Black administrators who moved to the higher echelons of the game were inclined to adopt a class outlook similar to those of their White predecessors.¹⁴

Although there may be varying emphases in a social history approach to sports history, at the core of it the omission or neglect of material conditions is likely to have an overall attenuating analytical effect. There are also some other related challenges. When using class as an analytical tool, it cannot be restricted, for example, only to the aspiring Black middle classes who took to cricket, as it leaves the great swathe of underclasses untouched and marooned, far removed from organized mainline sports.¹⁵ Focusing on the acculturated class and foregrounding that segment of Black sportspeople by writing them back into history can of course fill important gaps in coming to a fuller understanding of South African sports and society. Yet there are also limitations; as far as Black communities at large are concerned, this can only be a partial recovery, as too much is left unaccounted for in terms of explaining preferences, apathy, or rejection of certain sporting codes. Ideally, such silences should also be interrogated.

Moreover, there are also problems as far as decolonial thinking is concerned. As S. M. Clevenger has recently asked: “[C]an a historical field dedicated to a modern concept like sport represent physical cultural pasts without presuming or imposing the epistemology and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: More Than Just Games
• Part One: Historiography of South African Sports
• Part Two: African Sports Pedagogy
• Part Three: Resisting Discrimination and Forging Identity Through Sports
• Part Four: Crossing Racial Boundaries: Sports and Apartheid
• Part Five: On the Margins: Informal Engagements with Sports
• Part Six: African Sports Migration: European Dreams and Nightmares
• Part Seven: Sporting Biographies
• Part Eight: The Durable Impact of the Past: Sporting Legacies and Heritage
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index