Sport in the African World


Book Description

Sport has been a component of African cultural life for several hundred years. In today’s globalized world, Africans and Africa have become a vital part of the international sporting landscape. This is the first book to attempt to survey the historical, contemporary and geographical breadth of that landscape, drawing on multidisciplinary scholarship from around the world. To gain an understanding of sport in Africa and its contributions to the global sports world, one must first consider the ways in which sport itself is a terrain of conflict and represents another symbolic territory to conquer. Addressing key themes such as colonialism, globalization, migration, apartheid, politics and international relations, sports media and broadcasting, ethnobranding, sports tourism and the African diaspora in Europe and the United States, this collection of original scholarship offers a significant contribution to this burgeoning field of research. Sport in the African World is fascinating reading for all students and scholars with an interest in sport studies, sport history, African history or African culture.




Sports in African History, Politics, and Identity Formation


Book Description

Sports in African History, Politics, and Identity Formation explores how sports can render a key to unlocking complex social, political, economic, and gendered relations across Africa and the Diaspora. Sports hold significant value and have an intricate relationship with many components of African societies throughout history. For many Africans, sports are a way of life, a site of cultural heroes, a way out of poverty and social mobility, and a site for leisurely play. This book focuses on the many ways in which sports uniquely reflect changing cultural trends at diverse levels of African societies. The contributors detail various sports, such as football, cricket, ping pong, and rugby, across the continent to show how sports lay at the heart of the discourse of nationalism, self-fashioning, gender and masculinity, leisure and play, challenges of underdevelopment, and ideas of progress. Bringing together the newest and most innovative scholarship on African sports, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Africa, African history, culture and society, and sports history and politics.




African Soccerscapes


Book Description

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.




The African Game


Book Description

Puma joins forces with Nigerian photographer Andrew Dosunmu to produce The African Game, a stunningly different vision of the continent and of football through captivating photography and narratives. Highlighting Puma's relationship with Africa as the official supplier of apparel and equipment for African football teams, The African Game showcases the spirit and passion of the African people and the love they have for the game of football. From the fans to the players, this is a unique glimpse into the attitude of African people to the beautiful game.




Gender, Sport and Development in Africa


Book Description

Drawing on various theories and cross-cultural data, the contributors to this volume highlight the various ways in which sport norms, policies, practices and representations pervasively interface with gender and other socially constructed categories of difference. They argue that sport is not only a site of competition and physical recreation, but also a crossroad where features of modern society such as hegemony, identities, democracy, technology, development and master statuses intertwine and bifurcate. As they point out in many ways, sport production, reproduction, distribution and consumption are relational, spatial and contextual and, therefore, do not pay off for men, women and other social groups equally. The authors draw attention to the structure and scope of efforts needed to transform the exclusionary and gendered nature of sport processes to make them adequate to the task of engendering Africa's development. --




Rugby and the South African Nation


Book Description

Conventional historical and political analyses of South Africa have frequently neglected the vital role of sport in general, and rugby in particular. This book fills the gap through a critical interpretation of rugby's role in the development of white society, its role in shaping significant social divisions, and its centrality to the apartheid era "power elite".




Feet of the Chameleon


Book Description

Winner of the Best Football Book at the British Sports Book Awards and shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of The Year 2009 'Written with warmth and understanding, the book for which African football has been crying out.' FourFourTwo Featuring a new foreword by the author, Feet of the Chameleon has been newly released in digital format to coincide with 29th African Cup of Nations in January 2013. A comprehensive study of African football, Ian Hawkey traces the development of the world’s favourite sport through the tangled history and complex social and political life of this fascinating continent. Drawing on a range of sources, including interviews conducted with individuals involved in all levels of the African game, his own extensive experience and years of research, Ian Hawkey, international football correspondent for the Sunday Times, has crafted a unique and remarkable book to satisfy the surge of interest in African football. Engagingly written and comprehensively researched, drawing on a range of accounts from those at grass-roots level through to the very top tiers of African football, Feet of the Chameleon is a compelling mixture of analysis and insight that delves deep into the history of the game in a continent fragmented by history, language and politics. Ian Hawkey is a meticulous and knowledgeable guide to this complex subject, and he has produced a timely and entertaining study of African football’s colourful history, players, supporters and legends.




Sports in African American Life


Book Description

African Americans have made substantial contributions to the sporting world, and vice versa. This wide-ranging collection of new essays explores the inextricable ties between sports and African American life and culture. Contributors critically address important topics such as the historical context of African American participation in major U.S. sports, social justice and responsibility, gender and identity, and media and art.




Sport and Development Policy in Africa


Book Description

This publication is the first of its kind, and the focus on sport and development policy is a new and exciting initiative towards developing a Global Policy Index in the future.ÿ




Taboo


Book Description

In virtually every sport in which they are given opportunity to compete, people of African descent dominate. East Africans own every distance running record. Professional sports in the Americas are dominated by men and women of West African descent. Why have blacks come to dominate sports? Are they somehow physically better? And why are we so uncomfortable when we discuss this? Drawing on the latest scientific research, journalist Jon Entine makes an irrefutable case for black athletic superiority. We learn how scientists have used numerous, bogus "scientific" methods to prove that blacks were either more or less superior physically, and how racist scientists have often equated physical prowess with intellectual deficiency. Entine recalls the long, hard road to integration, both on the field and in society. And he shows why it isn't just being black that matters—it makes a huge difference as to where in Africa your ancestors are from.Equal parts sports, science and examination of why this topic is so sensitive, Taboois a book that will spark national debate.