Epilogue: a post-colonial legacy
Colonialism had brought both local competition and eventually national leagues and teams, and a nascent national identity, to football. In the post-colonial era, little changed. Certainly no countries rejected football as a symbol of colonialism and colonial domination, as the game was too powerful and popular.
Indeed countries such as Ghana deliberately set out to instil nationalism through football. Its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, believed in the ability of football to transcend ethnic, linguistic, regional and religious barriers, and also tried to capitalise on its possibilities for pan-African unity. Indeed Nkrumah aimed at ‘mobilising the youth of the nation around a common identity... creating pride and self-respect... [and] engendering patriotic sentiments amongst the Ghanaian people’.27 Such sentiments scarcely differed from those that motivated colonial support for football. Locally, too, football was also used as a form of political mobilisation. After independence in 1962, the Ugandan government of Milton Obote sought to patronise football in order to extend the influence of the state throughout the new nation. Almost every state enterprise—from the army and prison service to commercial crop marketing boards—was encouraged to organise its own teams, and so gain respect and status. Football clubs and their supporters were significant social and political organisations, to be used by the state.In the former French colony of Ivory Coast, when Stade d’Abidjan won the second African Champions Cup final in 1966, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who attended the game, proclaimed the victory a symbol of the political stability and economic prosperity of the country which had followed its embrace of free-market, capitalist economic policies. In one of the more surprising results of the 2002 World Cup, Senegal beat France, the former colonial power, prompting massive rejoicing throughout the country.
The editor of the oldest national newspaper, Le Soleil, commented:Look at France and look at us. This victory is not just about football. It’s about showing the world that when we work hard in Senegal, we can succeed in the same way as the people of Europe. A successful football team is the expression of the confident nation, one in which there is democracy and stability and human rights. You do not see Zimbabwe or Cameroon producing a winning team.
A Senegalese relative of one of the French players, Patrick Vieira, observed: ‘How can one feel sorry for France? They live on a different planet from us. They eat cake and we eat bread. They are ten times bigger and richer’.28
Football could both support nations and challenge them. In Burma the military dictatorship that seized power in 1962 neglected the national sport, fearing football crowds as possible flashpoints of dissent, and of violence on the pitch, especially during matches between the universities (whose students were reputed for dissidence) and the military. Football still drew considerable crowds, notably when military and police teams played, since gatherings of more than five people were otherwise illegal. But football crowds were tolerated and provided a rare opportunity for people to gather and abuse the police and military. Rather differently, in South Africa, in the aftermath of the rise of apartheid, black football leagues challenged racial segregation and the white minority’s claim to represent South Africa in sport. The anti-apartheid South African Soccer Federation managed to secure the country’s suspension from FIFA in 1961, and supported an emerging racially integrated South African Soccer League that survived for five years before the government forced its closure.
Football boosted colonialism, challenged it and became a key element in the emergence of nations and, paradoxically, the establishment of a sense of both colonial and national identity. Sport transmitted colonial ideals that were lightly transformed in indigenous contexts, but constituted a set of values and conventions that contributed to consolidating the colonial mission.
Football was more easily able to galvanise group identity at local and national levels, as colonial and later independent governments—alongside schools, industry and missions—promoted sport as a modernising force. Though football dominated most colonial sporting contexts, other team sports, notably rugby and cricket, conveyed similar objectives, and invited parallel forms of participation.Above all, playing football was fun, hence its enthusiastic and successful reception. The combination of sport with the music, dance and alcohol that accompanied football matches provided a hugely enjoyable experience. Alongside pleasure, it enabled the demonstration of physical skills, and of financial and management expertise, enabling the acquisition of status, power and income. Almost universally football proved the ‘people’s game’. Complex cultural relationships embedded football in local cultures and strengthened regional distinctiveness. The divisions that geography, colonialism and missionisation propagated and enshrined live on in divisions further emphasised by sport. Everyday discursive and conceptual markers of the nation, exactly what national football teams personify, are pervasive and consistent markers of nationalism. Critical matches mark the tensions in both colonial and local geographies, and through the colonial and post-colonial eras. Yet sport was only a limited and peripheral part of the colonial endeavour, and ultimately football could not cut across all social and geographical divisions, nor interest all people. It both united and divided: a means of both challenging empire and succeeding within it. But, more than most other colonial innovations and impositions, football was there to stay. Only language, education and sometimes religion—colonial legacies that more effectively cut across gender—were more successful.
Notes
1 No definitive history of football and colonialism exists, but Paul Dimeo and James Mills, Soccer in South Asia: Empire,.Nation, Diaspora (London, 2001); David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football (London, 2006); Peter Alegi, African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Shaped the World's Game (London, 2010) provide a good coverage of British colonialism and football. There are no significant equivalents for other colonial powers.
2 On the relationships between cricket, colonialism and empire, see, inter alia, C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London, 1963); Hilary Beckles and Brian Stoddart (eds), Liberation Cricket (Manchester, 1995); Brian Stoddart and Keith Sandiford (eds), The Imperial Game: Cricket, Culture and Society (Manchester, 1998); and Dominic Malcolm, Globalizing Cricket: Englishness, Empire and Identity (London, 2012).
3 Quoted in James A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (New York, 1986), pp. 35-36.
4 Gary Armstrong and Jon Mitchell, Global and Local Football: Politics and Europeanisation on the Fringes of the EU (London, 2008), pp. 13-14.
5 Will Rollason, ‘We are Playing Football: Seeing the Game on Panapompom, PNG', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 17 (2011), pp. 481-503.
6 Tony Mason, ‘Football on the Maidan: Cultural Imperialism in Calcutta', in James Mangan (ed.), The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire and Society (London, 1992), p. 143.
7 Terence Ranger, ‘Pugilism and Pathology: African Boxing and the Black Urban Experience in Southern Rhodesia', in William Baker and James Mangan (eds), Sport in Africa: Essays in Social History (New York, 1987), p. 209.
8 Quoted in Philip Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation', Modern and Contemporary France, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2002), p. 496; see also Philip Dine, ‘Shaping the Colonial Body: Sport and Society in Algeria, 1870-1962', in Patricia Lorcin (ed.), Algeria and France: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia (Syracuse 2006), pp. 33-48.
9 Richard Vokes, ‘Arsenal in Bugamba: The Rise of English Premier League Football in Uganda', Anthropology Today, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2010), p. 11.
10 On the role of football in different colonial contexts, see Rèmi Clignet and Maureen Stark, ‘Modernisation and Football in Cameroun', International Review of Sport Sociology, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1974), pp. 81-96; Benèdicte van Peel, ‘Aux dèbuts du football congolais', in Jean-Luc Vellut (ed.), Itineraires croises de la modernite au Congo Belge, 1920--1950 (Paris, 2001), pp.
141-187; Philip Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation', Modern and Contemporary France, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2002), pp. 495-505; Nuno Domingos, ‘Football and Colonialism, Domination and Appropriation: The Mozambican Case', Soccer and Society, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2007), pp. 478-494; Evelyne Combeau-Mari, Le sport colonial à Madagascar, 1896-1960 (Paris, 2009).11 Clignet and Stark, ‘Modernisation and Football in Cameroun'.
12 Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, p. 539.
13 John Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice (New York, 1956), p. 108.
14 Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: The Quest for the Victorian Footballer Who Made Burma Play the Empire's Game (London, 2002), p. 29.
15 Quoted in Brian Stoddart, ‘Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1988), p. 667; see also Mason, ‘Football on the Maidan: Cultural Imperialism in Calcutta', pp. 147-150.
16 Kausik Bandyopadhyay, ‘1911 in Retrospect: A Revisionist Perspective on a Famous Indian Sporting Victory', International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 21, Nos. 3/4 (2004), p. 375.
17 Laura Fair, ‘Kickin' It: Leisure, Politics and Football in Colonial Zanzibar, 1900s-1950s', Africa, Vol. 67, No. 2 (1997), p. 227.
18 Domingos, ‘Football and Colonialism, Domination and Appropriation: The Mozambican Case', pp. 478-494.
19 Peter Alegi, African Soccerscapes, p. 31.
20 Quoted in James Mills, ‘Colonialism, Christians and Sport: The Catholic Church and Football in Goa, 1883-1951', Football Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2002), p. 11.
21 Shaun Lopez, ‘Football as National Allegory: Al-Ahram and the Olympics in 1920s Egypt', History Compass, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2009), p. 285.
22 Rollason, ‘We are Playing Football: Seeing the Game on Panapompom, PNG', p. 496.
23 Phil Vasili, ‘Colonialism and Football: The First Nigerian Tour of Britain', Race and Class, Vol. 36, No. 4 (1995), p. 60.
24 Alegi, African Soccerscapes, p. 41.
25 Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation', pp. 495-505.
26 Eric Hobsbawm,.Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), p. 143.
27 Paul Darby, Africa, Football, and FIFA: Politics, Colonialism and Resistance (London, 2002), p. 36.
28 Le Soleil (Dakar), 1 June 2002, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 3 June 2002.
Further reading
Alegi, Peter, African Soccerscape: How a Continent Shaped the World's Game (London, 2010).
Bale, John, and Joe Sang, Kenyan Running: Movement Culture, Geography, and Global Change (London,
1996).
Combeau-Mari, Evelyne (ed.), Sports et loisirs dans les colonies: XIXe-XXe siecles (Paris, 2004).
Darby, Paul, Africa, Football, and FIFA; Politics, Colonialism and Resistance (London, 2002).
Dimeo, Paul, and James Mills, Soccer in South Asia: Empire, Nation, Diaspora (London, 2001). Goldblatt, David, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football (London, 2006).
Guttmann, Allen, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York, 1996). Mangan, James A. (ed.), The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire and Society (London, 1992).
McDevitt, Patrick F., May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880--1935 (New York, 2004).
Morris, Anthony, Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan (Berkeley, 2010).
Sissons, Ric, and Brian Stoddart, Cricket and Empire (Sydney 1984).
Stoddart, Brian' ‘Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1988), pp. 649-673.
Surin, Kenneth, ‘C.L.R. James and Cricket', in Anthony Bateman and Jeffrey Hill (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Cricket (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 131-143.