African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World's Game

Chapter One: “The White Man’s Burden”Football and Empire, 1860s–1919

1 C h A p t e r o n e “The White Man’s Burden” Football and Empire, 1860s–1919 M o d e r n S p o r t S start with European imperial expansion in the last two centuries. The agents of that imperialism played sports among themselves , but also saw sport as a tool of civilization. For example, British soldiers, sailors, traders, and government employees enjoyed football for their own entertainment, but they also saw it as pivotal in the European “civilizing mission” in Africa. Building on their experiences with youth and urban workers in industrial Britain, teachers and missionaries used this inexpensive , easy-to-learn fun to satisfy “the white man’s burden.” This expression, taken from Rudyard Kipling’s famous formulation, meant teaching African converts and colonial subjects about the virtues of Christianity, capitalist commerce, and Western civilization. In this opening chapter, I intend to show how the game of football arrived in Africa in the late nineteenth century through the major port cities and then began to spread into the interior by the 1920s by means of newly laid railway lines, Western-style schools run mainly by missionaries, and the colonial armed forces. Africans, of course, had their own sports, but these activities were little esteemed by their new imperial masters.Sports such as wrestling,martial arts, footraces, canoe racing, and competitive dancing offer compelling evidence of how agrarian African societies embraced Sportgeist—the spirit of sport.1 As the historians William Baker and Tony Mangan explain: “Throughout pre-colonial Africa . . . dances and games were long performed with a seriousness akin to sport in modern industrial societies, and for purposes not altogether different: the striving for status, the assertion of identity, the C h A p t e r o n e 2 maintenance of power in one form or another, and the indoctrination of youth into the culture of their elders.”2 Indigenous sports were spectacles of fitness and physical prowess, technical and tactical expertise. Major competitions were community festivals with their rituals of spectatorship, including oral literary performances of bards (griots) and praise singers in honor of the athletes. Clearly, precolonial athletic traditions had much in common with Western sport. As such, they provided the “soil into which the seeds of [European] sport would be later planted.”3 Not surprisingly, the first recorded football matches come from South Africa , where Europeans began settling nearly four centuries ago. The games involved whites in the Cape and Natal colonies.The record of this European sport seems to begin in 1862, when games between teams of soldiers and civil servants, between “home-born” (i.e., British) and “colonial-born” (i.e., South African) whites, were played at Donkin Reserve in Port Elizabeth and on the Green Point racecourse in Cape Town.4 In 1866, “city” and “garrison” sides played in the Market Square in Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Natal colony. These early rough-and-tumble games featured elements of both rugby and soccer, which was not unusual because different forms of the game existed before the rules of association football were codified on October 26, 1863, in London. Devotees of the kicking game were soon referred to as “soccers” (an abbreviation of “assoc”), as opposed to “ruggers,” who played the handling game of rugby, the rules of which were devised in 1871.5 The influx of working-class British soldiers into southern Africa during colonial military campaigns against the Zulu state and the Afrikaners (mainly descendants of the Dutch and also known as Boers) inspired the founding of the first official football organizations in Africa. Pietermaritzburg County Football Club and Natal Wasps FC were formed around 1880 and the Natal Football Association in 1882. The whites-only South African Football Association (SAFA), founded in 1892, was the first national governing body on the continent. SAFA became the first member of FIFA on the continent in 1910.6 Despite its colonial origins, soccer in South Africa by the 1920s would be increasingly perceived as a blue-collar, black sport, while rugby, cricket, and other middle-class sports such as tennis and golf became intimately linked to white power and identities. looking around the Continent In other parts of the continent, football’s early history was also connected to expatriate European colonizers. Between 1894 and 1897, for example, 3 “The White Man’s Burden”: Football and Empire, 1860s–1919 French settlers in Oran...