The Pitch of Empire

When looking back at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, many remember Ghana’s run into the quarter-finals and their loss at the hands, or rather the hand of Luis Suárez and Uruguay. Others remember the brilliant first goal of the tournament, off the boot of South African midfielder Siphiwe Tshabalala. Still others remember the slow-motion replay of England’s wrongly disallowed goal against Germany in the round of 16. All this, of course, remembered through the hazy drone of the vuvuzela.

Peter Alegi’s African Soccerscapes and Laurent Dubois’ Soccer Empire were both published in advance of the tournament and they join a growing field connecting soccer with world politics and history. Books such as Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2004), Simon Kuper’s Soccer against the Enemy: How the World’s Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power (1994), and most recently, Brenda Elsey’s Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile (2011), all fall into this category. Why all of this scholarship on soccer? Dubois sums it up best in his preface, saying that after “fifteen years studying the history of the French Empire in the Caribbean and beyond . . . I had seen only passing references to the place of football . . . But once I started looking I discovered that football . . . was everywhere (xix).”

These two books certainly prove that. Alegi covers more than one hundred years of history across an entire continent, and Dubois moves around the French empire over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but both still manage to find soccer just about “everywhere.” The two books share more than just this general similarity, however. They are also both driven by many of the same conceptual questions, namely, what are the links between soccer and empire? Between soccer and national movements? And what is the role of soccer in post-independence societies, both in the metropole and in the former colonies? Importantly, both historians also examine the larger question: what do these links tell us?

Alegi frames his concise and accessible book by asking, “how did an African country come to host the 2010 World Cup (xi)?” His answer is a broad, chronological overview of soccer in Africa that analyzes the influence Africans have had on “the world’s game.” He argues that this influence must be acknowledged and understood. He also uses the lens of soccer to examine the many forms of and responses to European colonialism in Africa. Dubois likewise uses soccer as a frame for understanding colonialism, but he focuses more narrowly on the French empire and on the French national soccer team. His main argument is that the history of French soccer “condenses and illuminates the complexities and ironies of French colonialism (p. 11)” and thus can be used to understand the history of the French empire as well as current debates on multiculturalism in France.

Using soccer as a main reference point may by an unorthodox methodology for writing history, but it allows Alegi and Dubois to coherently discuss a range of topics. Alegi touches on the civilizing mission, magic, apartheid, pan-Africanism, and globalization, while Dubois slides easily between colonialism, multiculturalism, the banlieues and the 2005 riots in France, and even a detailed analysis of Zinedine Zidane’s infamous coup de boule in the 2006 World Cup Final. The soccer approach also allows Alegi to write Africa into world history – one of the goals of the series his book is a part of, David Robinson and Joseph Miller’s “Africa in World History” – and it allows Dubois to write the history of empire into the history of the metropole. These are aims that are often suggested and talked about by historians but not always done, or done well.

Both books begin with...