Academic scholarship concerning sports on the African continent has exploded over the past two decades. Sport studies has not only gained legitimacy within academic circles at large, but, increasingly, Africanists are joining and leading this shift. Mirroring and fostering this trend, thirteen ‘Sport in Africa’ conferences have occurred with regularity since 2004. The volume, Sports in Africa: Past and Present, ultimately was born out of the research shared in these conferences.
As the editors argue in the book's introduction, their volume's goal is to build upon ‘mainstream academic recognition of African sports studies by generating an instructive text that engages with the core themes that have emerged’ since the conferences began (1–2). Offering a multiapproach and interdisciplinary collection of essays relating to sports either on the African continent or involving African athletes abroad, Sports in Africa successfully covers the state of sport studies in African Studies.
The book is divided into eight sections: ‘Historiography of South African Sports’, ‘African Sports Pedagogy’, ‘Resisting Discrimination and Forging Identity Through Sports’, ‘Crossing Racial Boundaries: Sports and Apartheid’, ‘On the Margins: Informal Engagements with Sports’, ‘African Sports Migration: European Dreams and Nightmares’, ‘Sporting Biographies’, and ‘The Durable Impact of the Past: Sporting Legacies and Heritage’. Each of these sections features between one and three essays related to the particular section's theme.
The volume's introduction not only outlines the text itself and provides justifications on why the text is organized the way it is, it offers analysis of where sports studies stands within the fields of African history and African studies. In many ways, the introduction provides a strong (but brief) history of the field and details the major advances that have occurred in recent decades.
In a field where the preeminently popular sport, football (soccer), can easily dominate the discussion, Sports in Africa's careful attention to less popular or niche sports is noteworthy. Although nearly a third of the book (five chapters) focus on football, rugby, cricket, cycling, surfing, running (both sprinting and long-distance), and bodybuilding and weightlifting are all examined in at least one chapter. Readers will come away from this text recognizing and appreciating this diversity. It is important to note, however, that the text contains very little analysis of indigenous sports that originated from the African continent or that were practiced prior to the colonial era. If this text is representative of the field, then it is important to note that sport scholars must make better strides in understanding Africa's precolonial sporting past.
Perhaps Sports in Africa's greatest strength lies within the diversity of approaches and methodologies within the text. Its contributors come from various countries, backgrounds, and academic disciplines, resulting in a collection with breathtaking range. From exploring how surfing spurred interracial interactions in rural parts of South Africa under apartheid (authored by David Drengk), to how a predominantly Indian cricket club repeatedly remade itself in response to changes in twentieth century Zimbabwe (Trishula Patel), to how Kenyans consume English Premier League soccer via communal television kiosks (Solomon Waliaula), to how Nigerian women footballers have confronted and resisted gender-based marginalization (Chuka Onwumechili and Jasmin M. Goodman), to suggestions on how to teach sports-based courses at the university level (the three chapters related to this topic are written by Peter Alegi, Todd Cleveland, and Matthew Carotenuto), each chapter in Sports in Africa demonstrates how African sports can be studied from various angles and by employing very different approaches.
Although wide-ranging, the book also focuses heavily on South Africa. Eight chapters specifically focus on that country, while only two chapters pertain to West Africa, two focus on East Africa, one on another Southern African nation (Zimbabwe), and three (including the introduction) on the continent as a whole. This unevenness, however, is not the fault of the editors, but instead reflects the current state of African sports studies, which the editors themselves note in the text's introduction. South Africanist scholarship remains overly represented within African sport studies scholarship. The volume's imbalance is a reminder that the subfield needs to push towards greater equity in terms of regions studied and languages used (virtually all of the contributions in this piece heavily rely on English or Afrikaans-language sources). One hopes that a similar volume published in later decades may be better representative of the continent as a whole.
With its lack of technical jargon, well-argued chapters, and thoughtful analyses, Sports in Africa will be a valuable text for scholars, educators, students, sport enthusiasts, and general readers. Whether one wants to learn about a particular sport's history, desires to read about sport's significance in general, or use it in a university classroom, this volume will leave readers satisfied. It offers a representative collection of African sport studies, capturing the current creativity, breadth, and limitations presently within the subfield. Sports in Africa is a ‘must read’ for any scholar working in the field. It should shape the field for decades to come.
