Laduma!: Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa (review)

Peter Alegi scores with Laduma! His passion for football, its history and politics, enlivens this compact and accessible study. Alegi offers a history of South Africa's favorite pastime, its relation to South African society and politics, as well as an analysis of its technical and tactical practices. His audience is not just academics but also a football-adoring public and perhaps a more specific body of past and present players, coaches, and sports administrators.

Alegi's temporal focus is the period from the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the Soweto uprising of 1976. According to Alegi, this was the critical era for the development of the game both organizationally and technically, a time in which its specific culture and role in black South African life were honed. Alegi reads soccer as a gendered cultural, economic, social, and political resource in segregation- and apartheid-era South Africa. While women have become increasingly important as fans and enthusiasts, football in South Africa is most important for illuminating the workings of masculinities.

The book's first chapter addresses precolonial athletic practices in agrarian South Africa (stick fighting, cattle raising, hunting, and dancing) and their relation to masculinity, age, and authority. Alegi notes that these were not strictly precolonial practices but ones that continued after the introduction of European sport and industrialization and thus served as a resource that Africans used to shape the development of football culture in South Africa's urban and rural areas. Chapter 2 discusses the colonial introduction of soccer in South Africa in the late nineteenth century by British soldiers, traders, and missionaries. The quick and enthusiastic adoption of the game by Africans (predominantly mission-educated), Alegi argues, led to a European defection to rugby, where social and racial exclusivity were more easily established.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus, respectively, on football in Durban between the wars, on Johannesburg and the Rand in the 1930s, and on the Africanization of the sport. These chapters show a shift in the game from mission-oriented African leisure practice to urban black working-class recreation, from informal to institutional organization. Mission-educated elites dominated in the administration of the game, whereas players and fans were increasingly young, single, male workers. On the Rand, football was associated both with attempts to control black labor and with mineworkers' attempts to resist capital's demands on their bodies and time. In Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town, both the way the game was played and the practices of spectatorship were Africanized, showing the reinvention of agrarian cultural practices in urban life.

Chapter 6 zooms in on Soweto's Orlando Pirates, demonstrating how "through soccer, people created a social institution that instilled civic pride and forged community bonds" (65). Football's meaning and networks extended beyond the field to social life and politics. Chapters 7 and 8 develop the off-field implications of football, including the role it plays in national and internation politics and the way in which it created a cultural ethos that helped build and sustain black communities under the pressures of segregation and then apartheid. The epilogue covers the period from 1976 until 1992 (when South Africa was again allowed membership in the international football federation), and an appendix situates this work vis-à-vis the literature on leisure and sport in Africa.

Alegi makes good use of public archives, personal papers, and newspapers (especially the black press) from the period as well as oral evidence (his own and others). The Orlando Pirates' meeting minutes are particularly useful for illuminating problems of gambling and hidden professionalism. This reader wanted to know more about the relationship between soccer and formal politics, to which Alegi alludes in the subtitle. That said, his work contributes to a field (shaped by Akyeampong, Fair, Martin, and others) in which African practices and lives shape the analysis.