prologue: sport and the city in africa

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Prologue: sport and the city in AfricaSusann Baller a & Scarlett Cornelissen ba Department of History , University of Basel , Switzerlandb Department of Political Science , Stellenbosch University , SouthAfricaPublished online: 08 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Susann Baller & Scarlett Cornelissen (2011) Prologue: sport and thecity in Africa, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 28:15, 2085-2097, DOI:10.1080/09523367.2011.623016

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Prologue: sport and the city in Africa

Susann Ballera and Scarlett Cornelissenb

aDepartment of History, University of Basel, Switzerland; bDepartment of Political Science,Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Cities have become one of the most challenging research issues in the African contextin recent years. Almost half of the continent’s population lives in urban areas, andcities in Africa are growing faster than anywhere else.1 At the beginning of thetwentieth century less than 5% of Africa’s population was residing in cities.2

Colonisation fostered the development of cities that served as major administrativeand economic centres. Within 60 years, the population of cities such as LourencoMarques (now Maputo) or Accra increased respectively from less than 20,000inhabitants in 1900 to 184,000 (Lourenco Marques) and 491,000 (Accra) in 1960.3

Durban had a population of 56,000 inhabitants in 1900. By 1960, around 650,000people were living in the area of Durban.4 The population of Ibadan tripled from210,000 in 1900 to 600,000 in 1960. And yet, by 1960 not even 15% of Africans wereliving in cities.5 Africa urbanised most dramatically from the 1960s onwards, partlythrough migration into the cities, but in the last decades, also as a result of thenatural growth in urban populations. Today, Accra has more than two millioninhabitants, Durban and Ibadan almost three million, not to mention megacitiessuch as Cairo or Lagos with more than ten million inhabitants.6 Moreover, smalland medium-sized towns have also experienced rapid transformation. For instance,the population of the predominantly agricultural and university town Stellenboschdoubled between 1970 and 2006, from around 63,000 to 117,705.7

Urban authorities have always tried to exert some control over thesedevelopments: they set up settlement restrictions in cities, fixed zoning regulations,and often shifted large numbers of people from one neighbourhood to another. Incities such as Dakar or Abidjan, thousands of people were moved in the 1960s and1970s from shanty towns in the inner-city to new housing areas – often with poorinfrastructure – at the fringes of the city.8 In South Africa, such processes wererelated to segregationist policies and apartheid laws such as the Group Areas Act of1950, which administratively legitimised the forced removals of urban dwellers fromvibrant inner-city neighbourhoods, and resulted in deep socio-cultural ruptures inurban landscapes.9 At the same time, cities’ administrations tried to respond tourban growth by providing some infrastructure, although the implementation ofsuch infrastructure usually did not meet the needs of all residents.

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

The International Journal of the History of Sport

Vol. 28, No. 15, October 2011, 2085–2097

ISSN 0952-3367 print/ISSN 1743-9035 online

� 2011 Taylor & Francis

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Sport played a significant role in such programmes. Already during the colonialperiod, administrations considered sport a means to create healthy and disciplinedcolonial subjects who would respect the rules of the game.10 Postcolonialgovernments, further, aimed to use sport men and women as models of ‘good’citizenry, while stadiums were often used to serve as icons of development.11 But thesupport for sport and the development of facilities also reflected social and/or spatialdisparities. The question of whose sporting needs would be supported, or who wouldhave access to sport facilities, has always been a contested matter.12 This was mostobvious in apartheid cities.13

At the same time, sport has been very popular in Africa from an early period.This was particularly the case for those sports that did not require extensiveinfrastructure, such as football. Football was already flourishing in many Africancities by the 1920s and 1930s. Across Africa, many urban residents practised sport toimprove fitness, for leisure or for recreation. But sport was also a means to garnerstatus or respect, a conduit of social and political networks (by means of teams, clubsand tournaments), and, finally, a route to success – on the pitch and beyond.14 Sporthas never been a fully controlled space. It draws the masses and also reflectspassions. It can offer niches for people to create their own social worlds, away fromofficial control. Or, it can open up social, political and cultural arenas where socialhierarchies and power relations are negotiated, where access to urban space andsport facilities are claimed, and where social and political movements may develop.Moreover, sport allows for the reconfiguration of urban identities. This can occur inthe way fans choose to express themselves, but it can also reflect in the everyday lifeof teams and clubs. In this way, sport offers a connection for people to their localneighbourhoods. At the same time, local sport offers a connection to a global sportarena, or at least helps such aspirations to be expressed. Different authors havecommented on this mobilising force of sport, which is reflected in how fans celebrateon the streets, how people practise sport and even in how sport associations are setup.15 It is also reflected in the narratives and discourses that characterise sport andthat imbue different sports and sport places with different meanings.

In this special issue we wish to investigate the interrelationship between sport andthe city in Africa more closely. The topic embraces different, albeit interlinked,research angles: the social dynamics of sport in cities; sport’s spatial dimensions inurban environments; and the meanings that people construct around sport. Sportcan be described as an ‘urban event’.16 Sport structures social relations in the cityand can be used to create urban sociability. Cities are a dynamically evolvingmanifestation of social interaction and ‘always an expression and medium ofpower’.17 Sport can play an important role in these interactions. It is part ofeveryday urban life experiences. Sport may serve residents’ identification with othersocial groups, with neighbourhoods, other cities or with other nations. It is aneconomic endeavour. And it may be utilised for political mobilisation. The articles inthis issue reflect different aspects of this.

Three themes underlie the articles. As a first theme, the inherently social,economic and political nature of cities is discussed. This is done through examinationof sport across various historical periods (colonial and postcolonial), in differentscales and localities (the neighbourhood, the street, the entire urban area), and injuxtaposition with other social spaces in Africa (specifically rural locations). Whetherauthors examine the social dynamics of the practice, spectating or representation ofsports such as boxing, football, swimming, surfing or rodeo, they are dealing with

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social interactions that are often highly politicised and that reflect complex politics ofinclusion and exclusion in cities in Africa.

Second, cities have an explicit spatial character,18 and in sport space matters.John Bale demonstrated how sporting landscapes interact with the city. He showedhow specific sports require specific spatial arrangements – such as the football pitch,the golf course or the running track – and how these have changed over time.19 Sportdevelopment and urbanisation processes have been closely connected. In Europe, thepublic swimming pool, the ice rink or the football stadium were built symbols ofurbanisation at the turn of the twentieth century. In the second half of the twentiethcentury, jogging and marathon races, as mass phenomena, reflected a ‘form ofincorporation’ of the city streets.20 Television and digitisation of sport haveproduced more recent forms of interacting with the city, whether in new forms offandom in the living room or through public viewing.21 In Africa, too, the playing offootball in the streets, conflicts over the utilisation of vacant spaces transformed intomake-shift football pitches, or the construction of a stadium as an ‘icon of urbanmodernity’22 demonstrate how sport impacts on the urban landscape. Thesephenomena also underline how urban space determines sport practice. Even sportsthat are not as visible in the everyday life of African cities can have deep impacts onurban space. In this issue authors address different places and spaces of sport in thecity: the bar, the boxing ring, the football field, the rodeo arena, the beach, the sea,the neighbourhood. The authors show how the localities become ‘places of urbansociability’23 which may provide the setting for the local experience of sport, but mayalso incorporate a transnational space of global television broadcast, an imagined‘nostalgic’ space of ‘rural’ life as expressed in rodeo in South Africa, or an openspace for escaping the city, as in surfing along the beaches of Durban and CapeTown.

The third theme that informs the articles in this issue is the way in which cities aresocially ‘constructed’ through sport, and the meanings that sport has in the minds ofurban residents. Here attention is given to complex processes of narrativeconstruction around place, and the way people’s considerations or uses of sportrelate to that. There is a ‘sense of place’.24 Contestations around various, sometimesconflicting, forms of narrative assemblage are also examined. Narratives that arecreated by people about the places they live in exist in all social contexts and atdifferent spatial scales. Such narratives naturalise and render comprehensible thephysical milieu within which people find themselves. The narratives emanate frompersonal descriptions and explanations that individuals create, but more impor-tantly, are spread and sustained socially through the use of common symbols,languages and discourses. It is in this way that ‘people actively create meaningfulplaces’.25 Collective social constructions of place operate often almost imperceptibly.But it is such constructions that enable social groupings to adapt to and act on theirenvironments and to create symbolic and moral orders whereby patterns ofbehaviour are established. Sport, and the meanings attached to it, is an importantaspect of this social process.

We have grouped the articles in three parts: (1) South African cities, (2) colonialcities, and (3) the football city. The articles deal with different sports, as well as citiesas diverse as Accra, Abidjan, Cape Town, Dakar, Durban, Lourenco Marques,Nairobi, Ouagadougou and Pietermaritzburg, and peri-urban or rural locations inSouth Africa. Most articles deal with ‘big’ cities with about two million or moreinhabitants, but this special issue also reflects a growing interest in small and

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medium-sized cities in Africa, such as Bronkhorstspruit and Cullinan nearmetropolitan Pretoria, in which different social groups relate to the impinging ofnearby large cities through the practice of sport. All articles depict sport both as aproduct of urban life, but also as an arena where people make sense of urban life andre-invent the city and its physical and imagined (or discursively constructed)geographies.

Sport in South African cities

Cities have historically played a distinctive role in South Africa’s modern politicaleconomy. They constituted central collection points of capital in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, predominantly through mining; were locations in which theapartheid era’s rationalist planning and industrialisation converged; and as a resultthey displayed, more than any other domain, the vicissitudes of apartheid’spolicies. During the apartheid era, urban governance was designed to service theinfrastructural, but particularly ideological and spatial, requirements of theapartheid state. Urban authority reflected the spatio-administrative logic of theregime. And, since a key rationale of apartheid planning was the control of the flowof black Africans into cities – the intention of apartheid policy being to containAfrican settlement in designated rural ‘homelands’ or bantustans – urban policy washeavily centred on managing and monitoring Africans’ (and other populations’)movements. This active control of labour, accompanied with generally curbed levelsof socio-economic development, amongst others, have produced a societycharacterised by poverty, low levels of education and ostensibly few opportunitiesfor social mobility.26

Overall, therefore, the morphology of South African cities was significantlyshaped by extended processes of colonialism and neo-colonialism (that is, apartheid),with the spatial divisions particular to apartheid having found form in patterns ofsettlements as well as social interaction: being designated part of a specific racialgroup determined people’s experiences of the city, and indeed, the spaces of the citythat they belonged in.27 Yet the apartheid city was also the site of significantresistance and mobilisation, and of cultural vibrancy. The large black townships ofJohannesburg, such as Sophiatown (which was demolished by the apartheidgovernment in the 1950s) and Soweto, for instance provided the locations forpolitical organisation. They also constituted focal points for the emergence of newmusic, arts and other forms of culture, stimulating the development of a townshipurbanity which straddled cultural divides among South Africa’s black residents.28 InCape Town, areas like District Six, and later the Cape Flats, and – in the eastern partsof the country – the townships around Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban allgained their own identities despite their faceless, apartheid-designed facades.29

This duality of the apartheid city and its function as a multivariate space ofcircumscription, resistance, expression and contestation are aptly described in thecontributions by Christopher Merrett, Glen Thompson and Hendrik Snyders.Merrett examines the experiences of the city as evidenced through residents’ access toand practices of sport in the north-east city of Pietermaritzburg. He details a lengthyhistory of exclusion and ambivalence in the city that found force through the controlof leisure spaces, including sport facilities. Many of the major sports in the cityevolved in significant ways from their imperial origins; what stayed constant,however, was the racial ascription and implicit social rules that characterised the


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playing of games – that is, who was expected to practice what kind of sport, and howthose norms were created and kept in place by legislation. Social tensions aroundplaces of play or sport reflected wider-ranging dynamics, and in this way the sportdomain was a microcosm of a fractious South African polity.

But such tensions also had greater significance in the context of Pietermaritzburg,for they hinted at the instability of the city’s identity, as each of the city’s ethniccommunities nurtured a sense of belonging to a locale other than the city – theneighbourhood, township or, in the case of some of the white residents, an imperialhome. In his article in this issue on football in the town of Stellenbosch, SylvainCubizolles also describes this fragmented construction of an urban identity, wherepeople harbour greater loyalty to the local neighbourhood (in his analysis, this wasthe black township of Kayamandi) and where people’s experiences of the city areconcentrated and shaped by their immediate local environment. The ‘city’ is in thisregard a vague spatiality, and merely incidental to people’s understandings of theworld and their place in it.

Glen Thompson’s analysis of surfing in the apartheid city – even thoughgeographically positioned at the beach, an extra-typical urban terrain – carries manyof these themes of shifting spatialities and shifting and multiple identities.Thompson’s ‘Surf City’ is one which has undergone change over the past decades,shaped by the political trends of the day. The definitive part of ‘Surf City’ – thebeach – was also racially, spatially and in other ways a divided social arena. But forsurfers, once they left behind the coast, a different sensibility and a different set ofsocial rules prevailed. Thompson provides an authoritative account of the contoursof surfing, as well as the sport’s place in South African sport historiography.

Hendrik Snyders provides an insight on the issue of place, sport and identity byfocusing on a sport – rodeo – which has probably been most obscured fromthe academic study of leisure in South Africa. Snyders demonstrates, however, thecentrality of rodeo for a part of South Africa’s urban environment that even in thepost-apartheid era has been marginalised in urban scholarship, as well as urbanpolicy. Rodeo is rooted in a number of South Africa’s peri-urban spaces, the bufferzones between the sprawling metropolitan areas, of Gauteng province in particular,and the rural hinterlands of the country. The sport’s geographical in-betweenness ismirrored in the nature of its patrons. Unlike rodeo in North America, where a fewwomen as well as some African-American rodeo practitioners exist,30 rodeosupporters in South Africa are predominantly white, predominantly Afrikaans andpredominantly lower middle class. For many of the sport’s participants, Snyderscontends, rodeo was a means to satisfy nostalgia for a rural existence which, even iflargely imagined, was not possible to have under prevailing economic conditions. Inthe post-apartheid era, rodeo has gained an additional function for its supporters, asa space of sociability and as something that can give sense to a community for whomthe political transition has left many without identitarian anchors. Snyder remindsus, however, that these ‘romantic’ aspects of rodeo have to be weighed against themore exclusionary facets of the sport in South Africa, most prominent of which is itsstrong masculinist traditions.

Together, these articles add to a significant volume of literature on urbanexistence and meanings in South Africa. Further, even though a very rich body ofscholarship has emerged in recent years on life in the post-apartheid city,31 the socialconstructions of place, and the processes of identity and struggle that go along withit, have not yet received the attention it deserves. The articles by Merrett, Thompson


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and Snyders help shed light on the contours of urban identities, the way that theycome to be created, the discord that their creation may evoke and the broad waysuch identities interrelate with constructions of place in apartheid and post-apartheidSouth Africa.

Sport and colonial cities

According to Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, cities are ‘places of colonisation parexcellence’.32 Both urban geography and cultural life in African cities were highlystructured by the colonial situation, but also by its ambivalences. During the colonialperiod, cities not only served as administrative and economic centres, but alsorepresented imperial power. City centres were built of brick and stone, with tree-linedstreets and representative buildings such as the town hall, the governor’s building andthe train station. African neighbourhoods were situated at the fringes of the city,often separated from the city’s centre by a ‘cordon sanitaire’, intended to keep malariamosquitoes away from the European settlers. This resulted in what Philipp Curtinhas called a ‘sanitary segregation’ which often went along with a ‘racial’ one. But‘the’ colonial city never did exist. Colonial administrations always had to deal withlocal contexts. Africans tried to use the urban environment for their own goals,and they re-figured the city in a way which was not always intended by the colonialadministration.33 For instance, in Accra – a city that was already in existencebefore colonisation – the colonial administration was unable to implement amaster plan in the way of ‘sanitary segregation’ because of a politically influentiallocal group of Africans who had opponents, but also allies, in the administration.34

Sport reflects these complexities. As Emmanuel Akyeampong and CharlesAmbler show, colonial administrations attempted to promote ‘appropriate leisure’activities, thus also deeply transforming local perceptions of ‘leisure’,35 a processdescribed by Tim Couzens as ‘moralising leisure time’.36 Sport was considered suchan ‘appropriate’ activity. But as Terence Ranger has indicated, sport ‘had alwaysbeen more than play’.37 For colonial administrations, sport was a means of control.But Africans made sport their own, adapting it according to their own needs, whilesome colonial administrators and other social actors in the city, such as missionstations, simply liked sport and created their own teams and tournaments. This alsocreated opportunities for Africans to claim better facilities or to engage in certainsports which the colonial administration would not have advocated as much.38 Thearena of sport created its own – often unintended – dynamics, which reconfigured thesocial and cultural meanings of sport.

The articles in this issue demonstrate this. While the British usually preferred thespread of amateur sport, in Accra, as Jan Dunzendorfer highlights, local boxersopted, beginning in the 1920s, for professional boxing and its milieu of money, showbusiness and entertainment. In Nigeria, the British administration was favourabletowards men’s football, but, as Chuka Onwumechili shows, women started to playfootball as early as the 1930s and 1940s. This is striking, since the footballassociation in England during this period still forbade its members to supportwomen’s teams. In Lourenco Marques football was first organised in terms of ‘theindigenato’s mechanism of segregation’, as Nuno Domingos explains. But eventuallysome of the best footballers playing for Portuguese teams were Africans fromMozambique. These players inspired the incorporation of a ‘metropolitan’ footballnarrative into local popular culture of the suburbs of Lourenco Marques.


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This special issue contains two articles which explicitly address the localdynamics of sport in the colonial city, Dunzendorfer on boxing in Accra andDomingos on football in Lourenco Marques. These are two case studies, situated invery different contexts. Domingos indicates that Lourenco Marques was a highlysegregated city. It comprised the ‘Cement City’ – the city’s centre – and the African‘suburbs’, as well as two football leagues, one based in the Cement City, the other inthe suburbs. One could compare this situation with what Mongo Beti has describedin his novel Ville Cruelle, of the fictional colonial city, Tanga, as a dual and dividedcity of ‘two Tanga. . . two worlds. . . two destinies. . .’.39 And yet, Domingos alsodepicts the vibrant football life in the suburbs, with some teams having connectionsto political parties, though there was ‘little scope for open protest’. At the same time,settlers and other European players played in their own league, but again there was asmall number of non-whites who joined them, which raised expectations andfurthered the search for talent in the suburbs by ‘downtown’ and metropolitan clubs.The fact that Mozambican players signed at clubs in Portugal had a deep impact onlocal football culture. Suburban football was disadvantaged, even more, when theAfrican league was integrated as a third division in the football league of the CementCity. But the end of the indigenato also opened up new opportunities for Africanplayers. While ‘downtown’ and metropolitan football thus became hegemonic, theywere also integrated into a local football narrative, reflecting the ambiguities of thePortuguese assimilation system and colonial authority.

Accra was hardly a segregated city, and sport expressed the heterogeneouscharacter of the city. Dunzendorfer questions the concept of ‘ludic diffusion’ which isrelated to amateur sport. Although different social actors, such as schools, the BoyScouts and the Anglican Diocese of Accra, also encouraged boxing for the ‘purposeof channelling the energies of young people’, it was professional boxing whichbecame most popular. In other colonies, such as Southern Rhodesia, boxing wasconsidered as something suspicious, as Ranger has shown.40 But surprisingly, it wasnot the inherent violence of boxing which the colonial administration feared, but itsindividualism, its connection to ethnic association and its specific form. In Salisbury,for example, African boxers practised a distinctive form of the sport: nobody wasknocked out, no points were scored, there was no referee and ultimately no clearresult, but there was a lot of popular enthusiasm.41 In Accra, it was a small numberof mostly Europeans, often employees of companies based in Accra, and usuallyformer boxers themselves, who trained and promoted local boxers. And it was amoney-driven sport, part show business, part spectator sport, celebrated in the ringand covered by local media. In this form of the sport, victory was important.

Both articles demonstrate the ambiguities and complexity of colonial cities andhow sport served as a means of control. The articles however also show theimportance of local agency in the quest for professionalism and success. Colonialcities were defined by boundaries. Sport helped these boundaries to be crossed. Thepeople who reconfigured cities and sport in this way were Europeans, Africans and(in the case of Lourenco Marques) mesticos. They were involved in sport for differentreasons.

The football city

Football in Africa has been well-researched, and South Africa’s hosting of the 2010FIFA World Cup inspired much new research on African football, from a diverse


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range of angles.42 Topics that have received much attention in the recent past haveincluded football migration, football, peace and development, and mega-events inAfrica.43 Yet, a few exceptions aside,44 football’s place in Africa’s urbanenvironment and its meaning for the continent’s population from an explicitlyurban perspective, has been surprisingly under-studied. The articles in this issue offersome original perspectives on football and the city, focusing on the mediatisationand related digital consumption in Africa’s suburbs; football’s role in local(neighbourhood) identities; and changes in women’s football from the colonial,postcolonial to present-day eras.

While it is well acknowledged that the media is increasingly becoming a centralactor in Africans’ everyday experiences as well as in wider political processes on thecontinent,45 the role of the media in African cities and its relationship to sport is lesswell documented. Some work has emerged in recent years on football and visuality.46

In his article, Gerard Akindes adds to this nascent area of investigation by exploringthe way football is consumed through the medium of the television. He shows hownew sites of fandom and sociability are created, as African football supporters swapa visit to the stadium for one to a neighbourhood bar. There have been significantchanges in Africa’s media landscape in recent years, following trends indemocratisation and in some cases economic growth on the continent. Accordingto Akindes this has paved the way for the development of local media corporations,but also the entry of global conglomerates. It is the latter, rather than the former,who have come to dominate the African broadcast market, and who are catering tothe appetite of the African youth for European rather than local football content.Therefore, as spaces of fandom are digitising and shifting in the African setting, soare the actors who shape these spaces – they are international, rather than domestic.Paradoxically, the digital era appears to have given African football less, not more,agency and autonomy, in the view of Akindes.

Sylvain Cubizolles’ analysis of football in the township of Kayamandi carries thistheme of the ambiguities between global dynamics and the local particularities inresidents’ experiences of the game further. Cubizolles explores the way in whichfootball identities and affiliations in Kayamandi were moulded over time by a varietyof forces – changes in the township’s demographic character as a result of migration,apartheid-era policies, the racism of South Africa and exposure, since the end ofapartheid, to a glittering global football arena. Through all this, football has beendefined in terms of space, that is, by township residents’ playing of and identificationwith the game according to their immediate spatial reference – the street on whichthey lived. Football rivalries expressed deeper-lying social tensions created aroundpeople’s designation of place of origin, or length of stay in Kayamandi. The adventof democracy in South Africa, and the country’s reintegration into global sport,brought new opportunities for both the sport’s administrative elite and for players.New waves of commercialism and professionalism, which Cubizolles likens toeconomic neoliberalism, evoked stronger senses of individualism and aspirationamong the country’s footballers. A place as remote and small as Kayamandi was notuntouched by this, and similar to Akindes’s description of the shaping of Africanfootball by global forces, the township has seen the shift from football as a space forcollective pleasure (in the neighbourhood or street), to football as a vehicle forindividual enhancement, distinction and achievement.

Chuka Onwumechili’s discussion of women’s football in Nigeria also interpretsthe dynamics of the sport in a particular local context against broader, global


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changes in the sport arena. While significantly stunted by the masculinist andpatriarchal structures of colonial and postcolonial systems, women’s footballmanaged to gain a foothold in urban Nigeria. The sport flourished over the past 20years, in part as a result of the global trends that Akindes and Cubizolles describe,which have opened up new spaces for Nigeria’s women footballers. The transmissionof certain values from the international arena legitimised women’s participation infootball in the country, but the material empowerment of Nigerian women has alsoplayed a key role in this. It should not be overlooked that the success that theNigerian women’s team has enjoyed in recent years – and the fact that they oftenoutperform their male counterparts at the international level – has given themconsiderable new bargaining power.

From these three articles it can be said that the ‘football city’ in Africa is anambiguous space, a site for social identification, but also an arena of contestation.And it is ever-shifting, shaped by various physical, social and political processes thataffect the way in which the continent’s populations engage with, or use, football.Also, the ‘football city’ involves different spaces – the local and the global, theneighbourhood and the nation, the playing field and digital media. It is throughthese different spaces that the ‘football city’ embraces different narratives.

Conclusion

Recent research on cities has stressed the heterogeneous and fragmented character ofurban spaces. Cities embrace many worlds. They are ‘intersections of multiplenarratives’, as Massey writes. There is not only one city, but many, and ‘individualcities have distinctive stories to tell; they have their own trajectories’. 47 Sport is oneof the arenas where these multiple narratives are created, where urban dwellers liveand experience the city, where they shape, transform and represent it. The articles inthis issue demonstrate how much cities differ from each other, and how each city ismade up of different narratives. These narratives are connected to different socialactors and to different spatial arrangements. They serve the configuration of urbanidentities and the discursive construction of places.

Sport is a field in which the complex spatial character of the city is reflected, andsport itself is a spatial practice. The articles provide insights into these aspects.Important are the local and global interconnections in sport. Crucial is also theproduction of specific urban places, through which sport structures the urbanenvironment and imbues it with meaning. And telling are the creation andtransgression of boundaries in the urban arena of sport.

Moreover, the authors enquire into how urban identities – and identifications –are produced through sport places and practice. Urban identities are oftenconstructed around local elites and connected to the identification with aneighbourhood or a specific locality. Different case studies reflect this, such as thefootball clubs in the suburbs of Lourenco Marques, the township club ofKayamandi, or the rodeo tournaments in the peri-urban areas of Gauteng. At thesame time, sport, in these contexts, is used as a means to reaffirm an identity,sometimes by those who perceive themselves as marginalised. It is striking how muchsport and leisure are considered as a ‘male’ social sphere.48 Sport is an arena in whichmasculinity is produced and celebrated. This is most evident in the articles byDunzendorfer and Snyders, but also women in Nigeria have to cope with men infootball.


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Furthermore, we can discern in the contributions of this issue a widespread andoften strong ambition to become part of a transnational sport world, the aspiration toassume an identity as professional sportsmen or women and to have success. Finally, awidespread issue of ‘longing’ and ‘belonging’ is expressed in almost all the articles. Theauthors write about belonging to a neighbourhood, a social group, a suburb, or a city,but also refer to a very strong sense of ‘longing’ for something else, going out of thecity, beyond the limits and the constraints of the city: football players from colonialLourenco Marques went to Europe, footballers in the South African townshipKayamandi recently used their club to have success somewhere else. Womenfootballers in Nigeria may represent their country in the world. Those involved inSouth African rodeo use this sport in their longing for a rural life, and surfers in SouthAfrica go out in the sea, leaving behind them the city and its daily challenges.

The authors of the volume Struggle for the City raised the question what the‘urban’ means. Frederick Cooper highlighted in that volume that it is worth takinginto account specific urban places rather than whole cities in order to understandurban processes in Africa. One should therefore ask how specific urban spaces arerelated to social processes in cities and how these spatial-social configurationstransform over time.49 In this issue we contribute further insights into the complexinterconnections between urban spaces and social dynamics ‘through the prism ofsports’,50 and by exploring the multiple narratives of sport and the city in Africa.

Notes on contributors

Susann Baller is postdoctoral lecturer in African History at the University of Basel. She haspublished widely on football, youth politics and urban history in Africa. Her dissertation onneighbourhood football in Senegal was published in 2010.

Scarlett Cornelissen is Professor in the Department of Political Science at StellenboschUniversity in South Africa. She conducts research on Africa’s political economy, theinternational relations of sport and mega-events, and Japan-Africa relations.

Notes

1. UN-Habitat, The State of African Cities, 1.2. United Nations, The World at Six Billion.3. Freund, The African City, 66.4. Ibid., 149–51.5. Freund, The African City, 65–6.6. UN-Habitat, The State of African Cities, 244–6.7. Zietsman, ‘Recent Changes in the Population Structure’ , see also Cubizolles’ article in

this issue.8. Verniere, Dakar et son double Dagoudane Pikine, 33; Freund, ‘Contrasts in Urban

Segregation’, 535.9. Ibid., 531 and 538 and Freund, The African City, 123 and 125.10. Mangan, ‘Ethics and Ethnocentricity’.11. Manzo, ‘Visualizing Modernity’. See also a speech by Kwame Nkrumah: ‘Sports and

African Unity’.12. See for instance Baller, Spielfelder der Stadt, 193–225.13. See the article by Christopher Merrett in this issue; also see Alegi, Laduma! and Cobley,

‘A Political History of Playing Fields’.14. See for instance Fair, Pastimes and Politics and Martin, Leisure and Society.15. See for instance Alegi, ‘Playing to the Gallery’; Baller, Spielfelder der Stadt; Baller and

Saavedra, ‘La Politique du Football’.16. Koller, Sport als stadtisches Ereignis.17. Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor, 284.


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18. Massey, Allen and Pile, City Worlds.19. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport and Sport, Space, and the City.20. Ibid., 115.21. Koller, Sport als Stadtisches Ereignis.22. Manzo, ‘Visualizing Modernity’.23. Fourchard, Goerg and Gomez-Peres, Lieux de Sociabilite Urbaine.24. Wagner, ‘Sport: Culture and Geography’.25. Stokowski, ‘Languages of Place’, 372.26. Smith, The Apartheid City.27. Swilling et al., Apartheid City in Transition.28. See for instance Hart and Pirie, ‘The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown’.29. On football and forced removals in District Six, Cape Town, see District Six Museum,

Fields of Play.30. See LeCompte, ‘Cowgirls of the Rodeo’; Ford, ‘Race, Gender, and Cultural Identity in

the American Rodeo’; Pearson, ‘Shadow Riders of the Subterranean Circuit’.31. See for example, Beal, Crankshaw and Parnell, Uniting a Divided City; Tomlinson et al.,

Emerging Johannesburg; Dixon and Durrheim, ‘Displacing Place Identity’; Visser, ‘GayMen, Tourism and Urban Space’; and Ballard, ‘Middle-class Neighbourhoods’.

32. Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘Histoire et Historiographie’, 37.33. Cooper, Struggle for the City, 7; Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘The Process of Urbanization’, 33–

5.34. Curtin, ‘Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning’, 601–3.35. Akyeampong and Ambler, ‘Leisure in African History’, 5–7.36. Couzens, ‘Moralising Leisure Time’.37. Ranger, ‘Pugilism and Pathology’, 196.38. See for these processes in particular Martin, Leisure and Society.39. Boto, Eza [alias Mongo Beti], Ville Cruelle, 20.40. Ranger, ‘Pugilism and Pathology’, 201–4.41. Ibid., 204–6.42. See Alegi, Laduma!; Alegi and Bolsmann, South Africa and the Global Game; Cornelissen

and Grundlingh, (Trans)forming the Nation; Calland et al., The Vuvuzela Revolution.43. See for instance Darby et al., ‘Football Academies and the Migration’; Armstrong,

‘Talking up the Game’; Levermore, ‘The Paucity of, and Dilemma in’; Cornelissen, ‘‘‘It’sAfrica’s Turn!’’’.

44. Guillianotti and Armstrong, Drama, Fields and Metaphors; Baller, Spielfelder der Stadt.45. See for instance Nyamjoh, Africa’s Media.46. Of note is Baller et al., Global Perspectives on Football.47. Massey, Allen and Pile, City Worlds, 171 and 123–4.48. See on the predominantly male character of leisure Akyeampong and Ambler, ‘Leisure in

African History’, 4.49. Cooper, Struggle for the City, 13.50. Vidacs, ‘Through the Prism of Sports’.

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prologue: sport and the city in africa

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