It takes a team to raise an athlete
Race, class and the story of struggle and sacrifice in the making of South Africa’s next generation of track and field athletes.
SPORTS
Soccer capitalism
Soccer academies in Africa sprang from European club interventions with varied success, but, as examples in Ghana prove, they can be sites of local, entrepreneurial spirit.
The art of football
Why should people be invested in a football game in a bubble called the art world? “Exhibition Match,” a multifaceted installation, explores responses to this question.
Not so quiet resilience
David Samaai was the first black (and coloured) South African to play at Wimbledon in 1949. He was 21 years old. He did so before the Americans, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe.
Silencing the past of Egyptian football
The 10th anniversary of the tragedy at Port Said passed without much notice in Egypt. Have Egyptians forgotten, or are they just trying to move on?
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere
Thoughts on the conclusion of the 2021 African Cup of Nations.
The African Cup of Nations is our World Cup
Reflecting on the 2022 edition of the African Cup of nations, and the successes of small countries.
Tweeting apartheid sport
What if the social media conditions of 2021 existed in 1981? A group of New Zealand writers tweeted the damned 1981 Springbok rugby tour as if it was happening now.
AFCON is decolonization
On this episode of AIAC Talk, Will Shoki and Sean Jacobs discuss the history and politics of the African Cup of Nations football tournament.
Zimbabwe’s second innings
In November 2017, Robert Mugabe was toppled in a coup. Amid this epochal change, life—and cricket—simply went on for Zimbabweans, who are still in search of a better future.
Beyond the boundary
South African cricket is currently the subject of TRC-style hearings into the racism and nepotism in the game. It makes for riveting TV, but focuses too much on individual instances of racism and discrimination.
Disentangling memory from truth
In the collective consciousness of global football, Zaire and Haiti—which both qualified for the 1974 World Cup—are remembered for their dismal performance. But is this legacy justified?
South Africa’s fatigued and narcissistic nation-building discourse
Springbok rugby projects itself as progress, but preserves the way things are in the popular consciousness of South Africans.
When the spirits of the ancestors call you back
A homage to a true pan-African athlete-activist, Lee Evans, who at the Olympics Games in 1968 broke the 400-meter world record and embarked on a life of political activism.
Abnormal rugby in an abnormal society
The British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa, in the middle of a pandemic, exposes the professional sports system for what it is.
Another hero falls
Eric “Bucs” Damons existed beyond the frame of the narrow scope of the elite South African sporting narrative.
The problem with South African football
South Africa failed to qualify for the 2022 African Cup of Nations in Cameroon and has failed to qualify for the World Cup since 2002. What else can their long suffering fans endure?
Football and empire
AIAC Talk this week: the historical entanglement of South African football with English football, and what that tells us about politics and sport. Watch it on our YouTube channel.
The life and times of Trevor Madondo
Trevor Madondo achieved a certain immortality in Zimbabwean cricketing lore precisely for the way in which he confronted cricket’s history as an instrument of empire.
Diego Maradona, anti-imperial symbol
For the peripheries and proletarians of the world—most of the world—Maradona is a symbol of defiance against the football aristocracy, corporate bosses and empire itself.