African Fans of European Football – Cultural Globalisation in Kenya and Zimbabwe
Friday, June 5 @ 5 pm GMT (DakarTime)
1:00 pm US EST – 10:00 am US PST – 8:00 pm Nairobi 6:00 pm Lagos – 7:00 pm Jo’burg
Zoom registration:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pHPtgkA3TVyMlNHOG40Bgg
Book Preface
This book examines the processes and significance of African fandoms of European football. The tendency of African communities to passionately follow European football overtly is part of the wider globalisation of cultural forms. However, these African fandoms of European football
are practised in ways that resonate with and help reconstruct and perform the socio-cultural substance of the African communities in question. This phenomenon leads to a situation where a “foreign-basedˮ cultural form is instrumentalised within other contexts in ways that help to define the identities of the members of the fandom communities and articulate their experience of their reality in their immediate circumstances. In this sense, the global and the local can be perceived to have coalesced around such cultural trends as football fandom. In our contemporary world, football practices have become an important index for measuring cultural interaction patterns between the developed and developing worlds. For instance, Africa’s hosting of the World Cup 2010 was not just a football event but also an opportunity for Africa to signify its identity to the rest of the world. The book, in a sense, explores this interaction of Africa with the rest of the world through football, further focussing on the cultural contact and confluence between England on the one hand and Kenya and Zimbabwe on the other. It has been argued that
the increasing influence of European football in African societies is a manifestation of neo-colonialism. The English Premier League has been very popular in the former British colonies, such as Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The book seeks to deconstruct this view by exploring the Kenyan and Zimbabwean fandoms of the English Premier League teams
not in terms of slavish imitation but proactive appropriation at the level of culture. The book focusses on the Kenyan and Zimbabwean cases and thoroughly describes the socio-cultural character of the European football fandom performances. Using relevant theories from oral performance, popular culture, and social anthropology, the book examines the emerging patterns
of football fandom. The book questions assumptions that these fandoms are a potential site where the global cultural wave meets the local currents and that this phenomenon disabuses the popular perception that African audiences of European football are alienated communities trapped in a web of “apemanship.ˮ
Authors
Solomon Waliaula
Maasai Mara University, Kenya
University of the Witwatersrand,
South Africa
Manase Kudzai Chiweshe
University of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe
Rhodes University, South Africa
Panelist
Violet Jubane
Women Football Consultant at COSAFA, Zimbabwe
Moderator
Martha Saavedra
UC Berkeley (ret.), USA