Sports in Africa, Past and Present

by Todd Cleveland (Editor), Tarminder Kaur (Editor), Gerard Akindes (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821424513
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	07/30/2021
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Todd Cleveland is an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas. His books include these Ohio University Press titles: Sports in Africa, Past and Present (2020), Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975 (2018), Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975 (2015), and Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds (2014).

Tarminder Kaur is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. Her research is particularly concerned with the everyday sporting lives of South African laborers and working-class peoples, who are often characterized as “in need of development.” She is currently working on a monograph that explores the role of soccer and violence in the legacies of oscillating labor migration between apartheid’s Bantustans and the commercial agriculture centers of the Western Cape.

Gerard Akindes is a senior program specialist with the Josoor Institute in Qatar. His research interests include the migration of African athletes, the political economy of sports broadcasting in Africa, and African sports management. His most recent work examines football academies and education in Senegalese football development.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction More Than Just Games Todd Cleveland Tarminder Kaur Gerard Akindes 1

Part 1 Historiography of South African Sports

1 Reflections on Pathways to the Writing of South African Sports History Albert Grundlingh Sebastian Potgieter 19

Part 2 African Sports Pedagogy

2 The Final Frontier: African Sports Studies in the Classroom Todd Cleveland 33

3 African Sports in the Liberal Arts Classroom Matt Carotenuto 47

4 On Teaching South African Sports History at a US University Peter Alegi 62

Part 3 Resisting Discrimination and Forging Identity Through Sports

5 "The Gist of the [Game] Is Played Out on the Edges of the Cricket Boundary": The History of an Indian Cricket Team in Africa, 1934-95 Trishula Patel 77

6 Nigeria, Women's Football, and Resisting the Second Fiddle Chuka Onwumechili Jasmin M. Goodman 95

Part 4 Crossing Racial Boundaries: Sports and Apartheid

7 Beyond South Africa's Draconian Racial Segregation: Transkeian Surfing Narratives, 1966-94 David Drengk 111

8 Racing out of the Shadows: Black Competitive Cycling in Johannesburg and Cape Town, ca. 1900-1964 Todd H. Leedy 125

Part 5 On the Margins: Informal Engagements with Sports

9 English Premier League Football Kiosks and the Emergence of Communal Television Viewing as a Sporting Practice: The Case of Eldoret, Kenya Solomon Waliaula 141

10 The Gambling Games: "Unorganized Structure" of South African Soccer Tarminder Kaur 155

Part 6 African Sports Migration: European Dreams and Nightmares

11 African Footballers' Migration to Europe: Shifting Perspectives and Practices Ernest Yeboah Acheampong Michel Raspaud Malek Bouhaouala 177

12 Postcareer Precarity: Occupational Challenges among Former West African Footballers in Northern Europe Christian Ungruhe Sine Agergaard 190

Part 7 Sporting Biographies

13 Black Physical Culture and Weight Lifting in South Africa Francois Cleophas 207

14 Sprinting Past the End of Empire: Seraphino Antao and the Promise of Sports in Kenya, 1960-64 Michelle Sikes 219

Part 8 The Durable Impact of the Past: Sporting Legacies and Heritage

15 Rugby Transformation as Alibi: Thoughts on Craven and Coetzee Derek Charles Catsam 233

16 No Place of Honor: The Erosion of Historical Space and Place within the Kimberley Rugby Narrative Mark Fredericks 249

17 The Gift of a Running Shoe: Heritage and the Comrades Marathon House Marizanne Grundlingh 264

About the Editors and Contributors 279

Index 289

Editorial Reviews

An extraordinary volume…. Not only is the writing empirically driven, but, more importantly, the theoretic content is grounded in prose that is fresh, vibrant, and something not always associated with what is a university textbook, fascinating. Cleveland, Kaur, and Akindes are to be congratulated for putting together a team that explores complex identities and the dynamic nature of African sport…. Hats off to the Ohio University Press for not only supporting the venture but publishing a book that looks like, and reads like, a classic.”—Scott A. G. M. Crawford, Journal of Sport History


“A long-overdue project by scholars committed to building African sports studies as a humanities subject. It presents close studies of sports like cycling, surfing, track and field, ultra-marathoning, and weightlifting, which are often neglected in favor of bigger and more popular sports such as soccer, rugby, and cricket. Scholars of social history, nationalism, popular culture, social anthropology, media, and cultural studies will appreciate this book.”—Sean Jacobs, author of Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization


“The Sport in Africa collective, active since 2004, has helped kick-start a movement. Here it adds seventeen more topics to the growing corpus of works on African sports history—from surfers in Transkei and women in Nigeria to Kenyan athletes and the football migrations to Europe (happening alongside desperate refugee journeys in the Mediterranean)—showing what a rich field of study sport is becoming.”—André Odendaal, coauthor of Pitch Battles: Sport, Racism and Resistance


“Sports in Africa heralds the arrival in sports studies of an empirically rich, theoretically informed, methodologically rigorous, and incisive African-focused genre. The volume demonstrates the centrality and complexity of sport in the daily rhythms and social fabric of life on the continent, across time, and in the formal and informal economies. It challenges longstanding racial, ethnic and cultural stereotypes pertaining to Africans, and dispenses with any notion of fixed and prescribed social and cultural identities.”—Douglas Booth, dean, Faculty of Adventure, Culinary Arts and Tourism, Thompson Rivers University


“This collection of essays opens up the debate on the influences of social history, subaltern studies, and postmodernism in stimulating new research and pedagogical approaches to sport studies in Africa. It offers exemplary studies of mainstream sports (athletics, cricket, football, and rugby) and those on the margins (cycling, surfing, and wrestling) and reflects on the contributions and trajectories of those sporting pasts and their present impacts and meanings across the African continent. A go-to volume for those seeking a solid introduction to the politics, poetics and practices of the fascinating life-worlds of sports in Africa.”—Glen Thompson, research fellow, Stellenbosch University

From the Publisher