Sports in Africa, Past and Present

“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.” ~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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”