PhD Students

I examine how, within the context of their structural position in South African society, soccer clubs in black townships provide young working class males with a means of articulating a sense of political identity and masculinity, and with a vehicle for contesting unequal power relations. What cultural meanings are attached to, and generated by, soccer, and have these meanings changed historically? What factors influence participation in soccer and membership of soccer clubs? As importantly, I look at soccer clubs as institutions. How do key figures within the governance of such clubs perceive their role in a changing society?

The history of soccer in South Africa illustrates how the sport and sporting organizations have been major sites of ideological struggle. A British cultural export, the sport initially served colonial attempts to control and ‘moralize’ the leisure time of African workers. During the first half of the twentieth century, it quickly became the most popular sport among black South Africans. Its institutionalisation during this period of increasing racial segregation enabled soccer clubs to develop into one of the bastions of resistance, and an important means of political mobilization for certain township populations, during apartheid. I examine how the current political activity of specific soccer clubs has contributed to, and been affected by, broader social and political changes that have taken place since the demise of apartheid.

With the successful dismantling of the apartheid regime, sport, including soccer, has provided an arena in which to present the new South Africa in a very positive light on the world stage. International sporting success, at the Olympic Games as well as in rugby, cricket and soccer, contrasts with how South Africa is often portrayed, as a country burdened by violent crime and a HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is not surprising, therefore, that sport has been consistently appropriated by the state as a symbol of the unity of the fledgling democratic nation in the post-apartheid era and has played an important part in a discourse concerning the nature of a new, modern South African national identity. The course of this dialogue, however, has tended to be steered by government officials who have characterized sport, singularly, as a unifying and emancipatory mode of political identification, and have thus fostered the 'One Nation, Many Cultures' vision of South Africa outlined in the African National Congress's (ANC) initial 1994 election manifesto. My research into the current socio-political role of soccer clubs in a black township provides a novel way of looking at how, and to what extent, the ANC’s vision for democratic South Africa is accepted, appropriated, or contested by previously disenfranchised young black working class males, a population that has yet to derive many material benefits from the collapse of the old order.

My current project builds on previous research I carried out for my MA thesis, which looked at the reproduction of national and sectarian identities in Irish soccer.

This research is funded (2004) by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.