Susann Baller

Transforming urban landscapes : soccer fields as sites of urban sociability in the agglomeration of Dakar

Vacant spaces in urban landscapes are not so much ‘empty’ places reserved for future constructions, but rather provide arenas for social and cultural practices which transform the vacant plots into sites with multiple functions and meaning. The example of neighbourhood youth clubs in the agglomeration of Pikine/Guédiawaye, a fast growing suburban area of Dakar (Senegal), demonstrates how young people use the ever decreasing number of ‘empty’ spaces in the city for various purposes and in particular as soccer fields. These soccer fields serve as platforms for the construction of urban identities, conflicts and sociability where dreams and desires of urban youth are reflected. The practice of using a field can have spatial, social, and imaginative implications. The erection of simple goalposts or the construction of a whole stadium both change the spatial dimensions of the urban environment and influence the practices performed on a specific site. What is more, by using symbols and signs, the social and cultural practices of young people go even beyond the spatial limits of a site and produce not only visible, but also invisible urban landscapes.

Prologue: sport and the city in Africa

Cities have become one of the most challenging research issues in the African context in recent years. Almost half of the continent’s population lives in urban areas, and cities in Africa are growing faster than anywhere else. At the beginning of the twentieth century less than 5% of Africa’s population was residing in cities. Colonisation fostered the development of cities that served as major administrative and economic centres. Within 60 years, the population of cities such as Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) or Accra increased respectively from less than 20,000 inhabitants in 1900 to 184,000 (Lourenço Marques) and 491,000 (Accra) in 1960. Durban had a population of 56,000 inhabitants in 1900. By 1960, around 650,000 people were living in the area of Durban. The population of Ibadan tripled from 210,000 in 1900 to 600,000 in 1960. And yet, by 1960 not even 15% of Africans were living in cities. Africa urbanised most dramatically from the 1960s onwards, partly through migration into the cities, but in the last decades, also as a result of the natural growth in urban populations. Today, Accra has more than two million inhabitants, Durban and Ibadan almost three million, not to mention megacities such as Cairo or Lagos with more than ten million inhabitants. Moreover, small and medium-sized towns have also experienced rapid transformation. For instance, the population of the predominantly agricultural and university town Stellenbosch doubled between 1970 and 2006, from around 63,000 to 117,705. Urban authorities have always tried to exert some control over these developments: they set up settlement restrictions in cities, fixed zoning regulations, and often shifted large numbers of people from one neighbourhood to another. In cities such as Dakar or Abidjan, thousands of people were moved in the 1960s and 1970s from shanty towns in the inner-city to new housing areas – often with poor infrastructure – at the fringes of the city. In South Africa, such processes were related to segregationist policies and apartheid laws such as the Group Areas Act of 1950, which administratively legitimised the forced removals of urban dwellers from vibrant inner-city neighbourhoods, and resulted in deep socio-cultural ruptures in urban landscapes. At the same time, cities’ administrations tried to respond to urban growth by providing some infrastructure, although the implementation of such infrastructure usually did not meet the needs of all residents.

Visualizing the game: global perspectives on football in Africa 1

Football, in many ways, is a visual endeavour. From the visual experience within the stadium itself to worldwide media representations, from advertisements to football art and artefacts, football is much about seeing and being seen; about watching, making visual and being visualized; about representing and being represented. At all levels of the game, ranging from a FIFA World Cup final to an ordinary youth soccer game played on the street, football is a profoundly visual experience. One of the formal elements of the game relates to the visual landscape of the street or pitch, and players arranged in formations of defence and attack, with attention to the geometries of passing, crossing and the offside rule. Good players are spoken of as possessing ‘vision’, in being able to visualize the patterns of play and likely trajectories of the ball. Football is also enjoyed by viewers, either arranged simply as a crowd or, more formally, as supporters who are assigned different sections of the stadium. These spectators are either hardened fans, who are armed with an arsenal of supporters’ accoutrements and visual markers of partisanship and attentive to vocal or performative rituals of support, or are spectators interested in the more artistic and skilful aspects of the game. The game is a spectacle, played in order to be viewed. The viewing is both a witnessing of a victory, draw or defeat and an occasion for visual pleasure, as an experience of the arts and aesthetics of football. In turn, some footballers play ‘for the crowd’, engaging in showboating, skilled dribbling and trickery, often at the expense of either progress towards scoring a goal or getting a yellow card, for example for removing their shirt. Occasionally, the crowd momentarily departs in unison from the narrative of the match, engaging in its own pleasure of solidarity and comradeship, such as in a Mexican wave weaving its path around the stadium. Moreover, the game today is part of a global, transnational cultural economy of young migrant players, agents, branding and celebrity that is characterized by an intensely visualized fandom of club colours, flags and banners, and a world of advertising on electronic boards surrounding the stadium and often digitally on the field itself. Football’s visuality has been completely changed to suit an age of mass media and satellite live broadcasting, as the game’s viewership is multiplied and transferred into living rooms, bars and public squares around the world, as

Introduction: Connections, Linkages, and Comparisons: African Sports in Transnational Contexts

At the Rio de Janeiro summer 2016 Olympic Games, African teams won a total of 45 medals, a record for the continent. The bulk of the medals were won by Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa, and African athletes and teams continue to be well represented on the international stage and in professional sports leagues around the world. Whilst there have been several notable African successes across a range of sports, Africa’s most popular team sport, football, continues to underperform on the global stage. At the 2014 men’s World Cup in Brazil, two of the five African qualifiers progressed past the group stages of the tournament. Neither Algeria nor Nigeria passed the round of 16. Similarly, at the women’s World Cup finals in 2015, Cameroon was knocked out of the tournament after the round of 16 stages. In 2015, it was announced that the South African city of Durban would host the Commonwealth Games in 2022, a first for the African continent. Eighteen months later, South Africa relinquished the right to host the games. Despite the mixed fortunes of African sports more generally, scholarly work on African sport continues to grow. This special issue explores connections, linkages, and comparison of African sports across a transnational context. A total of 11 articles address a range of issues within multiple sports, regions, and themes. Collison, Darnell, Giulianotti and Howe consider the burgeoning and contested field of sport for social change and development. Their focus explores transnational relationships in Rwanda. Dubinsky and Schler build on an important body of scholarly work that considers academies and the production of young African football talent in relation to Ghana and Lebanon. African migration and sport remains an important theme within sport studies more generally. The focus within this field has primarily been on the migration of football players. Greenfield, Osborn and Rossouw provide new insights into European law with a focus on African cricketers. Ungruhe’s article considers west African football migration and the role of player agency in navigating the complexities of sporting mobility. Chepyator-Thomson and Ariyo discuss east African migration through athletics. Chipande provides an insightful analysis into the contested domain of Zambian football. Within South African sport, the legacies of segregation and apartheid remain evident. Cleophas explores sporting connections between African-Americans and black South Africans in athletics. He highlights linkages beyond the traditional British–South African nexus. Allen uses this conventional nexus to consider cricketing ties and cultural transfer.

Introduction: Sport, Leisure and Consumption in Africa

Leisure is a fluid concept, always depending on time, context and perspective. Its meaning has often been discussed, negotiated and contested by academics and those involved in leisure activities and practice. Some argue that an ‘activity is leisure if it is perceived as leisure by the individual participant’. According to Gary D. Ellis and Peter A. Witt, definitions of leisure have been focused on three themes, i.e. time, activity and state of mind. Paul T. Zeleza, who understands leisure as ‘a profoundly social practice’, takes a different approach and explains that the ‘process of leisure production and consumption’ are mainly conditioned by four variables, i.e. participation, place, provision and politics. Both perspectives can be useful in our aim to explore the role that consumption plays in sport and leisure activities, politics and concepts. In this special issue, we wish to ask what people – individual and/or representatives of different institutions – perceive as leisure and in what ways they come to consume it in the African context. We raise the question which activities are defined as leisure and by whom. And, we inquire how time is defined as ‘leisure time’ and/or itself becomes commodified and consumed. But we also examine leisure as a social practice. We ask how people are involved in leisure, how they produce and consume it and where. Moreover, we analyse who provides leisure activities and what role politics plays in – or against – it. Zeleza underlines that ‘politics pervades leisure’, given that it is ‘as much a social construct as it is a political one’. In this regard, we have to keep in mind that leisure is a ‘contested terrain’ that involves actors in different ways. Leisure produces different social, cultural and political meanings, and also has deep economic implications as it is often commoditised. Defining leisure as a specific activity has, at first glance, probably been the most pragmatic solution. This has resulted in different lists of activities considered as ‘leisure’. Sport is usually one of these activities. Ministries of Youth, Leisure, Recreation and/or Sport all over the world often start by determining leisure activities. The problem, however, is that these lists can include anything and everything, because what is ‘considered as leisure’ always depends on the historical context and/or individual perception. The individual perspective has been highlighted by the psychologist John Neulinger. He first proposed the concept of leisure as a ‘state of mind’. According to him, leisure is characterised by ‘perceived freedom’ and ‘intrinsic motivation’, and not just an activity or space of time. Yet, his definition becomes very broad, as people may also feel free and intrinsically motivated at work. Ellis and Witt also ask, ‘what does perception of freedom mean?’ We know that leisure practice may be shaped by individual intrinsic motivation, but it is often

Football and the representation of history: the Senegalese 2002 'success story' in football cartoons and advertisements.

This paper considers the Senegalese national football team, Les Lions de la Teranga (Lions of Hospitality), and its successful participation at the 2002 African Cup of Nations in Mali and the FIFA World Cup in Korea/Japan. By analysing Senegalese newspaper cuttings, advertising and football comics and cartoons published before and during the international tournaments, it explores the visual worlds created around the national football team in 2002. The first part of the paper demonstrates how Senegalese cartoons, advertising and press covering constructed a ‘Senegalese football epic’ around the national team which was imbued with historical meaning. The second part reflects on how football comics and cartoons, in particular, commented on the political implications of the Senegalese football ‘success story’ on an international level (around the opening match against France) and in domestic politics (in relation to the Senegalese government which tried to take advantage of the public euphoria, but was criticized).