Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa, from Its Origins to 2010, and: African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World’s Game (review)

Although both Peter Alegi’s Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa, from Its Origins to 2010 and African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World’s Game focus on “the beautiful game,” these two engaging works also offer superb insights into Africa’s past and present social, political, and economic challenges, while simultaneously highlighting the resilience, creativity, and determination of the continent’s residents. Both Laduma! and Soccerscapes feature material that will edify even the most avid followers of soccer (football), though these highly accessible works also have much to offer more casual readers motivated by, for example, a desire to learn more about how South Africa came to host the 2010 World Cup Finals—the culminating topic in each of the texts. Via these outstanding works, Alegi has placed African soccer on firm historiographical footing, while also popularizing a subject about which little was previously known beyond Africa’s borders.

Laduma!—a Zulu expression meaning “to thunder” or “to be famous,” commonly proclaimed by television commentators after a goal is scored—examines the history of soccer in South Africa, with Alegi expertly interweaving this sporting narrative with a broader account of the political, social, and economic histories of the colony-cum-state that facilitates an understanding of the changing relationship between sport and society. Through the prism of soccer, the book’s chronological organization offers windows into different eras in South Africa’s past, enabling readers to see how the practitioners, organizers, and administrators of football operated during, for example, the colonial period, apartheid, and black majority rule. From football’s humble origins in mission schools and mines, soccer steadily grew in importance within the black, Coloured, Indian and, to a lesser extent, white communities in South Africa, though often only in parallel due to strict racial segregation. Alegi contends that during this roughly 130-year process, soccer became a (largely urban) “sphere of social action” created and maintained by Africans, in which class and generational relations were shaped and contested, rural expressions of masculinity were reconstructed, and neighborhoods and nationalist organizations alike mobilized members to pursue often overlapping social and political objectives. By focusing on various club teams, including a detailed examination of the legendary Orlando Pirates, Alegi renders abundantly evident the ways that Africans’ cultural production and institutionalization of football have shaped individual and collective identities—uniting and dividing both real and “imagined” communities.

Perhaps the strongest analytical contribution that Laduma! makes is its consistent attention to the inextricability of football, politics, and the struggle for racial equality in South Africa’s history. Rather than an innocuous pastime, soccer—as a physical pursuit, spectacle, and organized association—constituted a constant site of tension between the racist agents of the state and South Africa’s marginalized and repressed underclasses. From the early struggles over leisure time and recreational space to the formation of indigenous playing styles and alternative, autonomous, often nonracial football institutions and networks, Africans successfully, if not without considerable pain and suffering, challenged a series of white-only administrations in South Africa. Ultimately these efforts drew attention to the barbarity of apartheid and helped bring about the international sporting bans on, and the political isolation of, what had become a pariah state. Alegi contends that following the institution of majority rule in the early 1990s, the game continued to play an important political role, “symbolizing institutional democratization under black leadership at a time of great uncertainty.”

Laduma’s few faults are related to the book’s organization, rather than its content. One peculiar feature is the highly uneven length of the chapters; for example, chapters 2 and 4 comprise only...