The Vuvuzela Revolution

The 2010 FIFA World Cup roused a nation, defying South African skeptics and Afro-pessimists alike, and this definitive account of Africa’s first World Cup covers the build-up, the tournament itself, and its aftermath. Offering serious insights into the host country’s management of a soccer event of this magnitude, the book explores the image South Africa chose to convey to the world, revealing the vivid granularity of this beautiful country during that extraordinary month.

This edited volume addresses key debates around African football, identity construction, fan cultures, and both African and global media narratives. Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a lens, it explores how football in Africa is intimately bound up with deeper social, cultural and political currents.

Few issues have engaged sports scholars more than those of race and ethnicity. Today, globalization and migration mean all major sports leagues include players from around the globe, bringing into play a complex mix of racial, ethnic, cultural, political and geographical factors. These complexities have been examined from many angles by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and scientists. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of the full sweep of approaches to the study of sport, race and ethnicity. The Routledge Handbook of Sport, Race and Ethnicity makes a substantial contribution to scholarship, presenting a collection of international case studies that map the most important developments in the field. Multi-disciplinary in its approach, it engages with a wide range of disciplines including history, politics, sociology, philosophy, science and gender studies. It draws upon the latest cutting-edge research to address key issues such as racism, integration, globalisation, development and management. Written by a world-class team of sports scholars, this book is essential reading for all students, researchers and policy-makers with an interest in sports studies.

“There will be a black Springbok over my dead body.” — Dr Danie Craven, President of the South African Rugby Board, 1969 Just a year after the controversial D’Oliveira affair, the organised disruption of the all-white 1969/70 South African rugby and cricket tours to Britain represented a significant challenge to apartheid politics. Led by future cabinet minister Peter Hain, the ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign brought about the cancellation of both tours, presaging white South Africa’s expulsion from the Olympics and the end of apartheid sport altogether. With his brand of attention-grabbing, direct action sports protest, the 19-year-old Hain emerged as a hero to some and enemy to others. Now, reflecting on these experiences with fifty years of hindsight, Lord Hain, together with South Africa’s foremost sports historian and fellow anti-apartheid activist André Odendaal, shows how decades of relentless international and domestic campaigning for equality led to a Springbok team captained by black athlete Siya Kolisi winning the 2019 Rugby World Cup. Interspersing a wide range of examples with personal testimony, Pitch Battles explores the themes of sport, globalisation and resistance from the deep past to the present day. Published in the same year as the Stop The Tour documentary from acclaimed director Louis Myles, this compelling story of sacrifice, struggle and triumph reveals how sport should never be divorced from politics or society’s values.

Content As Brazil 2014 will yet again show, the FIFA World Cup is a mega-event followed by billions of spectators around the globe. This volume is the first scholarly attempt to capture the history of the FIFA World Cup in its entirety. From the first World Cup in 1930 to the one in 2010 the tournament has exerted strong influences and acted as an important indicator of political, economic, social and cultural developments. In bringing together contributions by international experts from history, cultural studies, sociology and politics this volume explores some crucial issues linked to the World Cup: from the political exploitation of the tournament for domestic purposes to its economic ramifications for the host nation and beyond; from its role for national identity and national self-representation to its potential to realize transnational modes of identity and interdependence; from its role as a global media event to its impact on the commercialization of football on the national and transnational stage. Zum Inhalt Auch bei der kommenden Fußballweltmeisterschaft in Brasilien werden Milliarden Zuschauer überall auf der Welt das Ereignis verfolgen: Der FIFA-World Cup ist ein Megaevent. Doch seine Bedeutung geht weit über das singuläre Ereignis hinaus: Seit der ersten Austragung im Jahr 1930 war das Turnier ein wichtiger Indikator für politische, soziale und kulturelle Entwicklungen. Die behandelten Themenkomplexe von Experten aus aller Welt - überwiegend Historiker, Soziologen und Kulturwissenschaftler - reichen von politischem Missbrauch des Turniers für innenpolitische Zwecke über wirtschaftliche Faktoren, nationale Identitäten bzw. ihre Selbstrepräsentationen bis hin zu der Entwicklung eines medialen Großereignisses.

Wild Religion is a wild ride through recent South African history from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the football World Cup in 2010. In the context of South Africa’s political journey and religious diversity, David Chidester explores African indigenous religious heritage with a difference. As the spiritual dimension of an African Renaissance, indigenous religion has been recovered in South Africa as a national resource. Wild Religion analyzes indigenous rituals of purification on Robben Island, rituals of healing and reconciliation at the new national shrine, Freedom Park, and rituals of animal sacrifice at the World Cup. Not always in the national interest, indigenous religion also appears in the wild religious creativity of prison gangs, the global spirituality of neo-shamans, the ceremonial display of Zulu virgins, the ancient Egyptian theosophy in South Africa’s Parliament, and the new traditionalism of South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma. Arguing that the sacred is produced through the religious work of intensive interpretation, formal ritualization, and intense contestation, Chidester develops innovative insights for understanding the meaning and power of religion in a changing society. For anyone interested in religion, Wild Religion uncovers surprising dynamics of sacred space, violence, fundamentalism, heritage, media, sex, sovereignty, and the political economy of the sacred.

Zimdancehall is a musical movement in Zimbabwe that has grown significantly since 2010. The Zimdancehall Revolution brings together critical essays on various aspects of Zimdancehall culture by scholars from diverse disciplines. Traditionally, music critics and senior academics have not taken Zimdancehall seriously, regarding it as vulgar, transient, bubble gum, lacking depth, and in short, a fad. There were also allegations that the lyrics influenced factionalism, incited violence and glorified drug use and unbridled promiscuity among the youth. This book affords this movement the protracted intellectual engagement that it deserves and argues that Zimdancehall is more than just a musical genre but an everyday culture, a way of life. The genre’s close association with the ghetto is telling and enables critics to look at it as a social movement, a revolution, or a raw, petulant and raging disturbance of peace by those who live their lives on the margins. It is, thus, a violent irruption onto the public space by marginalised young people whose presence as artistes creating art from the margins, simultaneously as victims and agents, circulating in a geography that escapes the limits of nationalist ideological and physical territory, in a way subverts communitarian prescriptions and allows young people entry into the world, albeit in a painful, tumultuous and violent way. The essays range from the mapping of the genre’s historical development to theoretical interventions in understanding the genre and its relationship with various aspects of the Zimbabwean society like politics, gender, religion, language, dance, cultural values and other genres.