SPORTS IN AFRICA, past and present

299pp., illus., paperback, Athens, 2021

“The Sport in Africa collective, active since 2004, has helped kick-start a movement. Here it adds seventeen more topics to the growing corpus of works on African sports history - from surfers in Transkei and women in Nigeria to Kenyan athletes and the football migrations to Europe (happening alongside desperate refugee journeys in the Mediterranean) - showing what a rich field of study sport is becoming.” André Odendaal, co-author of Pitch Battles: Sport, Racism and Resistance

Contributions include:

"Reflections on Pathways to the Writing of South African Sports History" by Albert Grundlingh and Sebastian Potgieter

"On Teaching South African Sports History at a US University" by Peter Alegi

"Beyond South Africa's Draconian Racial Segregation: Transkeian surfing narratives, 1966-94" by David Drengk

"Racing Out of the Shadows: Black competitive cycling in Johannesburg and Cape Town, ca. 1900-1964" by Todd Leedy

"The Gambling Games: 'Unorganised structure' of South African soccer" by Tarminder Kaur

Todd Cleveland is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. His books include Following the Ball: The migration of African soccer players across the Portuguese colonial empire, 1949–1975 (2018); Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate paternalism and African professionalism on the mines of colonial Angola, 1917–1975 (2015), and Stones of Contention: A history of Africa’s diamonds (2014).

Tarminder Kaur is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg.

Gerard Akindes is a senior program specialist with the Josoor Institute in Qatar.