Identity and Nation in African Football

Fans, Community and Clubs

C. Onwumechili, G. Akindes, C. Onwumechili, G. Akindes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137355805
• eBook ISBN: 9781137355812
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

The 2010 South African World Cup launched African football onto the global stage. This volume brings together top scholars on African football to explore a range of issues such as gender, identity, nationalism, history, cyber-fandom, the media and fan radicalization.

Part I

History and Recording Identities

1

Blurring Touchlines of Empire: The Diasporic Identities of Arthur Wharton and Walter Tull

Phillip Janzen

Introduction

In March 1887, a young man named Arthur Wharton started in goal for Preston North End in a soccer match against Corinthians in London. The match, attended by the Prince of Wales, was played in honor of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Wharton was no stranger to the spotlight: the previous summer he had won the Amateur Athletic Association’s 100-yard dash in a record-breaking time of 10 seconds. He was dropped from Preston’s roster the next season, but he continued playing with other teams until 1902, when he retired and became a coal miner. A generation later, another young soccer player named Walter Tull impressed top London club Tottenham Hotspur and he was quickly signed to the team. He played there for two seasons before moving on to play for Northampton. However, his promising career was cut short in 1914 when he enlisted to fight in World War I. He became an officer in 1916 and was then killed two years later at the second battle of the Somme (Jenkins, 1990; Vasili, 1996, 1998, and 2000).¹

What brings these two stories together? And why do they stand out? In many ways, these two lives do not seem very distinctive. In fact, Wharton and Tull appear to epitomize the idealized narrative of turn-of-the-century British identity: disciplined and patriotic Christians who played for and even died for the British Empire. However, one factor makes Wharton and Tull unique and also precluded them from being accepted as ‘British’: they were both black.² Wharton was born in the Gold Coast to Fante, Scottish, and Grenadian ancestry, while Tull, though born in London, was the son of a Barbadian father and an English mother. Regardless of their accomplishments and their exemplifications of British ideals, the racism that both men experienced made it clear that they could not be ‘British.’ Yet neither were they ‘African’ or ‘Caribbean,’ despite the suggestions of contemporaneous newspaper reporters. Instead, I argue, the identities of Wharton and Tull were intrinsically diasporic, grounded only in the meandering, transatlantic itineraries of the British Empire.

Wharton and Tull’s lives are useful for the historian for two main reasons. The first is that their stories interrogate the word ‘identity.’ As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have argued, humanities and social sciences scholars have used the word with such high frequency in the last 20 years that it has begun to lose its value as a category of analysis. Brubaker and Cooper (2005: 80, 83, 85) claim that the word, with its ‘connotations of boundedness, groupness, and sameness,’ flattens people into ‘sharply bounded, internally homogenous groups.’ They add that using the word ‘identity’ has an ahistorical effect, that it binds ‘past, present, and future in a single word.’ Similarly, James Sweet (2009: 283–4) has made the case that group identity labels are unable to ‘shed light on the possibilities for individuals to move in and out of group or “national” categories of identity over the course of a lifetime.’ Wharton and Tull’s unsettled and shifting identities, rooted only in rootlessness, counteract the reification of misleading and monolithic group identities.

The second reason their stories are useful is that they bring the histories of colony and metropole together into the same analytical field. A great deal of scholarship in the last fifteen years or so (Wilder, 2005; Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Conklin, 1997) has made an explicit effort to emphasize the significance of this integrated approach.³ Historian Gregory Mann (2005) writes that while these works have largely succeeded in making this argument – in blurring the touchlines of empire – they tend to consider only colonial policy and ideology, and thus accomplish their goal only at a discursive level. Mann’s work breaks with this trend by focusing not on discourse, but on places, specifically monuments in France and West Africa. This chapter proposes to further this work by using the examples of Wharton and Tull’s peripatetic lives.⁴ I argue that their stories cannot be told, much less understood, without this unified framework. And, by focusing on their identities, this framework can be understood in a way that moves beyond the realm of discourse.

While the general structure of this chapter follows the chronology of Wharton and Tull’s lives, my aim is not simply to reproduce the biographical work that has already been done. Rather, I want to emphasize their diasporic identities in order to make clear these two important historiographical points. However, before doing so, and in order to properly contextualize the world that Wharton and Tull entered, it would be good to first consider the significance of soccer in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain.

Soccer and British identity

The basic rules of soccer were agreed upon in 1848 when representatives from several British schools met at Cambridge University (Garland and Rowe, 2001). Other aspects of the game were formalized in 1863 with the creation of the Football Association, or FA (Russell, 1999). By the 1870s, Saturday had become a half-holiday for many workers in Britain, making soccer matches a weekly ritual. Gradually, the game expanded from the schools to professional sports clubs. The growing popular interest in the sport was a major factor in this professionalization – there was money to be made because people were willing to pay to watch soccer matches. These new professional clubs carved themselves into the minds of people in the towns and cities of Britain, particularly those of the working class. In 1891, there were 12 professional clubs in Britain. By 1894, the number had grown to 31, and by 1923 it had reached 86 (Taylor, 2005).

This rapidly increasing popularity had significant effects, especially in schools. As Jon Garland and Michael Rowe (2001: 24) have put it, soccer was an effective way to ‘propagate an educational experience that would equip pupils mentally, physically and morally with the values they would need to rely upon in the outside world.’ Historian J. A. Mangan (1981, 1985, 1992) asserts that it was in the schools and on the soccer pitches of the country that British identity and feelings of pride about imperialism were woven into future generations. He cites many of the poems and songs that were used in the schools. For example,

The same old game

The same old game

To forget or forgo it were a shame.

When we are past and gone

The young ones coming on

Will carry on the same old game.

(Mangan, 1981: 186)

Many of the poems focused on athletic prowess, honor, and the importance of sport in preparing the boys of England for the work of maintaining the Empire:

. . . the use on peaceful playing fields

Of supple limbs and ever-quickening eye

Win for him laurels in a sterner game

Giving resource and strength that never yields,

Making him such that he would rather die

Than soil the honour of his country’s name.

(Mangan, 1981: 201).

Some were more specifically didactic and oriented toward instilling ‘British’ values such as discipline and selflessness:

’Tis there in friendly rivalry

School meets with neighbouring school

And English boys all ‘play the game’

And learn to keep the rule.

There each one plays for side, not self,

And strength and skill employs,

On the playing-fields of England,

The Pride of English boys.

(Mangan, 1981: 201)

Others emphasized fitness and masculine strength, and the shame of boys who did not eagerly participate in sports. This one is told from a father’s perspective:

What in the world is the use of a creature

All flabbily bent on avoiding the Pitch,

Who wanders about, with a sob in each feature Devising a headache, inventing a stitch?

There surely would be a quick end to my joy If possessed of that monster – a feminine boy.

(Mangan, 1981: 189)

Still other poems suggested that sporting ability was an adequate substitute for – if not an improvement on – schoolwork and ‘bookishness.’ Many of these poems also took a militaristic slant:

Could our young men have turned out so quickly;

Well trained for all the hardships of the front,

Had they not become quite well accustomed

Of hard and nasty knocks to bear the brunt?

No they could not, gentle, thoughtless reader,

Study’s necessary in its way,

But not more so than are games like cricket,

To keep old England where she is today.

(Mangan, 1981: 192)

These poems, all published between 1887 and 1922, tell us a lot about the importance of athletics in turn-of-the-century Britain. First, they describe a very specific form of masculinity, one based on physical and moral strength, discipline, selflessness, pride, and honor. They also suggest that understanding and developing these values required athletic ability. Additionally, the imperialist undertones of the poems inculcated young people with a sense of devotion to the Empire and a willingness to defend it to the death. Most importantly, the poems helped make these values a crucial part of what was considered necessary for becoming a good ‘English boy,’ and more generally, for being British. To play soccer then was not just to play a game; it was to join a celebration of British identity. While not everyone in Britain at the time was a staunch imperialist, a heroic athlete, or an uncritical believer in progress, the growing popularity of soccer and other sports across all ranks of society helped to spread and promote this very particularized notion of British identity.⁵ How then did Arthur Wharton and Walter Tull fit into this framework?

Arthur Wharton

Arthur Wharton was born in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1865, but his story should begin with his parents and grandparents. Wharton’s father, Henry Wharton, was born in 1819 in Grenada. Henry’s father was a Scottish trader and his mother was a free-born Afro-Grenadian whose mother had been a slave. Arthur’s mother, Annie Florence Grant, was born in the Gold Coast. Annie’s father was another Scottish trader and her mother was from the Fante royal family of the Ekumfie state. How did Henry, the half-Scottish, half-Grenadian, meet Annie, the half-Scottish, half-Fante royal? Henry left the Caribbean for London in 1845 to study at a Methodist seminary in order to become a missionary. When he graduated, his superiors decided to send him to the Gold Coast because they thought – completely erroneously – that as a black man he would be less susceptible to disease. In 1849, soon after arriving, he met Annie Grant. She had also gone to school in Britain, as was the practice of many wealthy Fante. Henry and Annie married and had ten children, four of whom survived infancy. The eighth of these was Arthur.

The coastal towns where Arthur spent his childhood were generally quite cosmopolitan, populated not only by Fante and Asante and other local groups, but also by people from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Europe, and the Caribbean, among other places (Jenkins, 1990). He grew up with wealth and status: his mother’s side of the family was involved in trading palm oil, rubber, and gold around the world, while his father was the General Superintendent of the Wesleyan mission in the Gold Coast by the time of Arthur’s birth. Most of the extended family, as well as many others in Arthur’s social world, had been educated in Europe. Unlike the Asante, who generally lived in the hinterland, many of the coastal Fante had assimilated into British culture, at least to an extent. Their language, dress, beliefs, and even occupations were largely influenced by Britain, yet these coastal Africans were not fully accepted as British. Nor did other Africans always see them in a particularly positive light. For example, when Henry Wharton first came to the Gold Coast, he was often referred to as ‘white man’ and was considered a European (Vasili, 1998). This left him and others like him – such as his son Arthur – in a peculiar middle position.⁶

In 1873, the Anglo-Asante conflict emerged again. The British, sometimes with help from the Fante, fought four wars against the Asante over the course of the nineteenth century. This war lasted from 1873 to 1874, and like the other wars, it disrupted trade and farming and led to mass starvation and the spread of disease. During the fighting, Henry Wharton served as a chaplain for the British, but not for very long. In October 1873, he became sick and died. Arthur, then eight years old, was left to be raised by his mother and her brother, F. C. Grant, who was a wealthy merchant. They sent Arthur to school in London from 1875 to 1879. He then returned to the Gold Coast and went to a high school in Cape Coast. In 1882 he went back to England and studied at a private Wesleyan college in Cannock, just north of Birmingham, which other members of his extended family had attended. His uncle encouraged him to follow his father’s example and become a Wesleyan missionary or a teacher and then return to the Gold Coast (Vasili, 1998). Instead, he stayed in England and became a sportsman.

Wharton played soccer at the college, as well as for a local amateur team, but his breakthrough came in 1886 when he set the record in the 100-yard dash, as described at the beginning of this chapter. This change in Wharton’s trajectory from studying to become a missionary to training as an elite athlete was highly unusual. While he did participate in sports as a boy, he did not grow up in an environment where sports were seen as an important pursuit. In fact, in the coastal towns of the Gold Coast – unlike in most British colonies – there was a strong backlash against playing sports.⁷ Most people, including Wharton’s uncle and guardian, F. C. Grant, believed that sports were a waste of time. Young people were instead encouraged to develop ‘political, business, and professional skills’ and virtues such as ‘hard work, self-restraint, thrift, and educational achievement’ (Jenkins, 1990: 38).

Despite these attitudes, Wharton continued on with athletics. His feat on the track made him somewhat of a celebrity in England, so Preston North End, one of England’s major soccer clubs, signed him to a contract in September 1886 (Vasili, 1998). Wharton’s status as a track and field celebrity drew large crowds that provided the club with some extra income, but Wharton was not signed just to attract attention – he was also a strong goalkeeper. During th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Africa, Fandom, and Shifting Identities: An Introduction to Football and Identity
• Part I: History and Recording Identities
• Part II: Ethnicity/Race, Club, and Identity
• Part III: Nation, Football, and Identity
• Part IV: Identity from Outside
• Index