African Soccerscapes

How a Continent Changed the World's Game

Peter Alegi

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780896804722
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia africana

From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity.

African Soccerscapes explores how Africans adopted soccer for their own reasons and on their own terms. Soccer was a rare form of "national culture" in postcolonial Africa, where stadiums and clubhouses became arenas in which Africans challenged colonial power and expressed a commitment to racial equality and self-determination. New nations staged matches as part of their independence celexadbrations and joined the world body, FIFA. The Confédération africaine de football democratized the global game through antiapartheid sanctions and increased the number of African teams in the World Cup finals.

In this compact, highly readable book Alegi shows that the result of this success has been the departure of huge numbers of players to overseas clubs and the growing influence of private commercial interests on the African game. But the growth of women's soccer and South Africa's hosting of the 2010 World Cup also challenge the one-dimensional notion of Africa as a backward, "tribal" continent populated by victims of war, corruption, famine, and disease.

NOTES

Prologue

1. Ahmed Kathrada, Memoirs (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2004), 371.

2. Mercury, March 16, 2007.

3. See William James Murray, The World’s Game: A History of Soccer (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996); and David Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).

4. Paul Dietschy and David-Claude Kemo-Keimbou, Le football et l’Afrique (Paris: EPA, 2008), 336.

5. I have borrowed the term “soccerscape” from Richard Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 24. Giulianotti uses soccerscape to refer to the geographic and cultural “circulation of players, coaches, fans and officials, goods and services, or formation and artifacts.” As per Michael Schatzberg’s suggestion, indigenous cultures of power should be included in an expanded definition of soccerscapes; see Schatzberg, “Soccer, Science and Sorcery: Causation and African Football,” Afrika Spectrum 41, no. 3 (2006), 351–69.

CHAPTER ONE “The White Man’s Burden”

Football and Empire, 1860s–1919

1. Stephen Hardy, “Entrepreneurs, Structures, and the Sportgeist: Old Tensions in a Modern Industry,” in Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology, ed. Donald G. Kyle and Gary D. Stark (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1990), 45–82.

2. William J. Baker and James A. Mangan, eds., Sport in Africa: Essays in Social History (New York: Africana, 1987), viii. For more on this topic, see Peter Alegi, Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2004), 7–14; Laura Fair, “Ngoma Reverberations: Swahili Music Culture and the Making of Football Aesthetics in Early Twentieth-Century Zanzibar,” in Football in Africa: Conflict, Conciliation and Community, ed. Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 103–13; and John Blacking, “Games and Sport in Pre-colonial African Societies,” in Baker and Mangan, Sport in Africa, 3–22.

3. John Bale and Joe Sang, Kenyan Running: Movement Culture, Geography and Global Change (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 49–50.

4. Eastern Province Herald, May 23, 1862; Cape Argus, August 21, 1862.

5. These early forms of the modern game resembled both the football of British public schools and universities and the preindustrial “folk” game of artisans and farmers; see John Goulstone, “The Working-Class Origins of Modern Football,” International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 1 (2000), 135–43. On early football, see also James Walvin, The People’s Game: A History of Football Revisited (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1994), 41–43.

6. SAFA withdrew from the world body in 1924, along with the British associations, before regaining full membership in 1952. See chapter 4 on the subsequent suspension of SAFA (later renamed FASA) in the early 1960s.

7. Paul Dietschy and David-Claude Kemo-Keimbou, Le football et l’Afrique (Paris: EPA, 2008), 57.

8. See Bernadette Deville-Danthu, Le sport en noir et blanc: Du sport colonial au sport africain dans les anciens territoires français d’Afrique occidentale, 1920–1965 (Paris: Harmattan, 1997).

9. This paragraph is based on Bénédicte Van Peel, “Aux débuts du football congolais,” in Itinéraires croisés de la modernité au Congo Belge, 1920–1950, ed. Jean-Luc Vellut (Paris: Karthala, 2001), 141–87. Additional information is from Dietschy and Kemo-Keimbou, Le football et l’Afrique, 67. Note that the Katanga association did not affiliate with the Belgian FA.

10. Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 68.

11. Ibid., 64.

12. Deville-Danthu, Le sport en noir et blanc; and Phyllis Martin, Leisure in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 100.

13. According to Alice Conklin, the French believed their civilizing mission stemmed from the fact that “France’s colonized subjects were too primitive to rule themselves, but were capable of being uplifted. It intimated that the French were particularly suited, by temperament and by virtue of both their revolutionary past and their current industrial strength, to carry out this task …. [France] had a duty and a right to remake ‘primitive’ cultures along lines inspired by the cultural, political, and economic development of France.” Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1–2.

14. Le Courrier d’Afrique, November 22–23, 1936, cited in Van Peel, “Aux débuts du football congolais,” 164.

15. Stephen Borquaye, The Saga of Accra Hearts of Oak Sporting Club (Accra: New Times Press, 1968), 27.

16. Details about Nigeria in this paragraph are from Wiebe Boer, “Nation-Building Exercise: Sporting Culture and the Rise of Football in Colonial Nigeria” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2003), 238–49.

17. Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: An Autobiography (New York: Praeger, 1970), 402.

18. Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press; London: James Currey, 2001), 228–33.

19. Ibid., 231.

20. Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, “City of Steel and Fire”: A Social History of Atbara, Sudan’s Railway Town, 1906–1984 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 82–83.

21. Soter Tsanga, Le football camerounais: Des origines à l’indépendence (Yaoundé: Centre d’Édition et de Production de Manuels, 1969), 52–54.

22. Anthony Clayton, “Sport and African Soldiers: The Military Diffusion of Western Sport throughout Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Baker and Mangan, Sport in Africa, 114–37.

23. Ibid., 120.

24. Ibid., 122–23.

25. Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); James A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

26. Holt, Sport and the British, 93.

27. James A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (New York: Viking, 1986).

28. Ibid., 35–36. See also Brian Stoddart, “Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 4 (1988): 649–73.

29. Alegi, Laduma! 22–24.

30. For further details, see Peter Alegi, “Sport, Race, and Liberation: A Preliminary Study of Albert Luthuli’s Sporting Life,” in Sport and Liberation in South Africa: Reflections and Suggestions, ed. Cornelius Thomas (Alice: NAHECS and Sport SA, 2006), 66–82.

31. On rugby and cricket in South Africa, see David Ross Black and John Nauright, Rugby and the South African Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Albert Grundlingh, André Odendaal, and S. B. Spies, Beyond the Tryline: Rugby and South African Society (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1995); André Odendaal, The Story of an African Game: Black C...