SPORTS IN AFRICA, PAST AND PRESENT

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.

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.