Laduma

A boy dreams of getting football boots but will not get any if he doesn't clear the rubbish from his father's yard.

In South Africa there are times when nothing is more important than soccer (football). Laduma! is an immensely informative and vital account of the history of the game in South Africa. In explaining how soccer - a sport imported with colonialism - came to be a mainstay of black sporting experience, it explores the Africanization of the game with the introduction of rituals and magic, and the emergence of distinctive playing styles. Using archival research, interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements and photos, Laduma! chronicles the impact of indigenous sporting traditions such as stick fighting, the rise of Orlando Pirates, the emergence of rivals Moroka Swallows, and the power struggles between different football associations and white authorities. Soccer influenced class and generational divisions, shaped masculine identities, and served as a mobilizing force for township and political organizations. Laduma! embodies sporting history at its best and will be of interest to ardent soccer fans as well as more serious scholars of African history.

Soccer is the most popular mass spectator sport in the world, gaining huge media coverage and reaching all levels of society in countries all around the world. More than just entertainment, soccer has proved to be a reflection of national, cultural, community and ethnic identity as well as an indication of the development and international status of post-colonial nation states. For those nations still at the fringes of the modern global game, soccer represents a vision of potential commercialisation, capable of generating foreign reserves and bringing in considerable economic power. This book explores aspects of the development of soccer in countries which have recently been marginalised in world soccer or have only erratic success on the international stage. These fringe nations include a greater part of Africa, the USA, Australia, Israel, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, Maldives and Sri Lanka, and while these countries are rarely noticed by the global football media, they nonetheless have great potential to excel, and many have a rich soccer heritage that still holds a place of central importance in the every day life of the people. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

As a teenager, I spent my time wondering why in sci-fi movies, every landscape, every object I could see was Western or Asian based. I've finally understood that somewhere our legacy had been locked in the past, that we couldn't be "futuristic" in the eyes of our fellow Europeans. We have to look behind our shoulders, get back to our traditions, seize the best of them and shape a future with it. This without forgetting we are part of the world, totally, unquestionably. The future is for me not only a matter of dialogue with the past, but and beyond everything a dialogue with the rest of the planet. Kossi Aguessy How is it possible to adequately capture histories of design in Africa, a continent with fifty-four countries? How can one avoid producing just another essentialising master narrative of "African Design"? How can one make sense of the many entangled yet often asymmetric and sometimes ambivalent histories of form-finding processes between Africa and Europe? In keeping with the premises of a global art and design history approach, the book offers a change of perspective: focusing on the mobility of people, objects and ideas - on flows between Africa and Europe as well as on a South-South axis - allows for multiple yet necessarily fragmented design histories to be identified and recognised. The contributors trace multi-faceted design case studies from a historical perspective, with attention to the present as well as towards possible futures.

No detailed description available for "The Social Functions of Avoidances and Taboos among the Zulu".

African Fashion, Global Style provides a lively look at fashion, international networks of style, material culture, and the world of African aesthetic expression. Victoria L. Rovine introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion. Taking readers into the complexities of influence and inspiration manifested through fashion, this book highlights the visually appealing, widely accessible, and highly adaptable styles of African dress that flourish on the global fashion market.