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.

Across the African continent, college student activists have long fought to decolonise African institutions. Reflecting ongoing Western colonisation, however, Indigenous African languages, thought, and structures remain excluded from African universities. Such universities remain steeped in Eurocentric modes of knowing, teaching, researching, and communicating. Students are rarely afforded the opportunity to learn about the wealth of knowledge and sustainable wisdom that was and is generated by their own home communities. Such localised Indigenous African perspectives are critical in a world committed to anti-Black racism, capitalist materialism, and global destruction. This book thus clarifies decolonial efforts to transform higher education from its anti-Black foundation, offering hope from universities across the continent. Writers are university administrators and faculty who directly challenge contemporary colonial education, exploring tangible ways to decolonise structures, curricula, pedagogy, research, and community relationships. Ultimately, this book moves beyond structural transformation to call for a global commitment to develop Indigenous African-led systems of higher education that foster multilingual communities, local knowledges, and localised approaches to global problems. In shifting from a Western-centric lens to multifaceted African-centrism, the authors reclaim decoloniality from co-optation, repositioning African intellectualism at the core of global higher education to sustain an Ubuntu-based humanity.

This is the first book to focus on race, sport, protest, and the Black Atlantic. It brings together innovative scholarship on African, African-American, Afro-European, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Caribbean sports in a manner that speaks effectively to the diversity of the African diaspora, its history, and culture. The book explores the history of sports, including baseball, basketball, boxing, football, rugby, cricket, and track-and-field athletics to show athlete and fan protests in sport intersected with discourses of nationalism, self-fashioning, gender and masculinity, leisure and play, challenges of underdevelopment, and the idea of progress. It shows how sport in the African diaspora is a crucially important lens through which to understand the challenges, changes, and continuities of Black Atlantic history, the history of protest, and racism. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport history, social and cultural history, post-imperial history and decolonization, or the sociology of sport, race, and political protest.

Far and away the most popular sport in the world, football has a special place in Middle Eastern societies, and for Middle Eastern states. With Qatar hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, this region has been cast into the global footballing spotlight, raising issues of geopolitical competition, consumer culture and social justice. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the complex questions raised by the phenomenon of football as a significant cultural force in the Middle East, as well as its linkages to broader political and socioeconomic processes. The establishment of football as a national sport offers significant insight into the region’s historical experiences with colonialism and struggles for independence, as well as the sport’s vital role in local and regional politics today–whether at the forefront of popular mobilisations, or as an instrument of authoritarian control. Football has also served as an arena of contestation in the formation of national identity, the struggle for gender equality, and the development of the media landscape. The twelve contributions to this volume draw on extensive engagement with the existing body of literature, and introduce original research questions that promise to open new directions for the study of football in the Middle East.

This is a fundamental text for the study of sport history. It answers the ‘why,’ ‘how,’ and ‘what’ questions, introducing the key principles and practices of sport history and walking the reader through the fascinating stories, debates, issues, and national and international narratives that constitute the history of sport. The book provides an overview of the field and the various professional roles assumed by practitioners, such as researchers, academics, and public historians. It is brief, crisp, and to the point. The main general topics of interest within the field – gender, race, nationalism, religion, sport and leisure, and megaevents – are covered with introductory vignettes, stories of interest, a wide variety of theoretical frameworks, and relevant historiography in the most current and timely text of its kind. Each chapter provides a list of further readings for more in-depth study. Students are taught how to conduct research and present their findings in a variety of mediums, and teaching and publication tips are offered for educators. Sport History: The Basics is essential reading for any student on a sport-related degree course or with an interest in social and cultural history. It is also fascinating reading for anybody with a general interest in sport.

Since Pauline Konga’s breakthrough performance at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, the world has become accustomed to seeing Kenyan women medal at major championships, sweep marathons, and set world records. Yet little is known about the pioneer generation of women who paved the way for Kenya’s reputation as an international powerhouse in women’s track and field. In Kenya’s Running Women: A History, historian and former professional runner Michelle M. Sikes details the triumphs and many challenges these women faced, from the advent of Kenya’s athletics program in the colonial era through the professionalization of running in the 1980s and 1990s. Sikes reveals how over time running became a vehicle for Kenyan women to expand the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. Kenya’s Running Women demonstrates the necessity of including women in histories of African sport, and of incorporating sport into studies of African gender and nation-building.

This volume provides an analysis of the history, origins, and development of football in Africa. It brings together an edited assemblage of essays that describe and analyse football in nine African countries, including Cameroon, DRC, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda, from a social science perspective. The selection of these countries highlights the three major foreign languages and powers that have governed the continent; The English, the French, and Arabic, and provides a prism through which to analyze and compare how football developed in the various countries throughout Africa. This comparative methodology allow readers to identify similarities and differences in the progression of the game on the continent, and by focusing on football, an important relic of European colonialism in Africa, underscores the continued dependence on, and domination of Europeans on the Africans. In situating the genesis of the game, contributors examine and analyze the history, development, management, and mismanagement by bureaucrats at the political level as well as at various football federations throughout the continent.

This handbook provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary overview of key theoretical and analytical approaches, topics and debates in contemporary scholarship on African masculinities. Refusing to privilege Western theoretical constructs (but remaining in dialogue with them), contributors explore the contestations around and diversities within men, masculinities and sexualities in Africa; investigate individual and collective practices of masculinity; and interrogate the social construction of masculinities. Bringing together insights from scholars across gender studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, literature and religion, this book demonstrates how recognizing and upholding the integrity of African phenomena, locating and reflecting on men and masculinities in varied African contexts and drawing new theoretical frameworks all combine to take the discourse on men and masculinities in Africa forward. Chapters examine a range of issues within the context of masculinities, including embodiment, sport, violence, militarism, spirituality, gender roles, fatherhood, homosexuality, health and work. This handbook will be valuable reading for scholars, researchers, and policymakers in Gender Studies (particularly Masculinity Studies) and Africana Studies.

Africa is a continent of 54 countries and over a billion people. However, despite the rich diversity of the African experience, it is striking that continuations and themes seem to be reflected across the continent, particularly south of the Sahara. Questions of underdevelopment, outside exploitation, and misrule are characteristic of many - if not most-states in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this Very Short Introduction Ian Taylor explores how politics is practiced on the African continent, considering the nature of the state in Sub-Saharan Africa and why its state structures are generally weaker than elsewhere in the world. Exploring the historical and contemporary factors which account for Africa's underdevelopment, he also analyses why some African countries suffer from high levels of political violence while others are spared. Unveilling the ways in which African state and society actually function beyond the formal institutional façade, Taylor discusses how external factors - both inherited and contemporary - act upon the continent. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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. --