Podcast: Peter Alegi on South Africa’s Footballing History (Plus: Alegi Contributes to New York Times Feature)
“Not many people know that the history of soccer in Africa is longer than the history of modern soccer itself,” says Peter Alegi to the host of WBEZ’s Worldview radio programme in Chicago, USA. “The first documented matches took place in 1862 in what is today South Africa, in the cities of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth” – a full four years before football acquired the codified rules we all recognise in London.
Alegi, who is currently in South Africa to do academic research, spoke by phone just a few days before the opening of the 2010 World Cup. You can listen to his chat on the evolution of the beautiful game inside our borders here:
Podcast: Peter Alegi on WBEZ Chicago
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Meanwhile, a similarly-themed article was published in the New York Times yesterday:
But the white monopoly on the club game would not last out the century. In 1896, Mahatma Gandhi, then a young lawyer in South Africa, was among a group of Indian men who helped found the Transvaal Indian Football Association. Alegi considers it “most likely the first organized football group on the continent that was not run by whites.”
Gandhi would not be the last future leader to use soccer as a training ground. And the black communities and other indigenous people in Africa would gradually take control of the ball and the phenomenon, embracing the imported game, even sometimes — as in Algeria and South Africa — using it as a tool against their oppressors. Along the way, soccer would grow into a pan-African obsession, perhaps the closest thing to a common currency that this vast and vastly diverse continent possesses.
Book details
- Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa, from its Origins to 2010 by Peter Alegi
EAN: 9781869141820
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Laduma: Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa, from its Origins to 2010
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- African Soccerscapes: How A Continent Changed the World’s Game by Peter Alegi
EAN: 9781849040389
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Photo courtesy Afripod
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