Winner of the Best Football Book at the British Sports Book Awards and shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of The Year 2009 'Written with warmth and understanding, the book for which African football has been crying out.' FourFourTwo Featuring a new foreword by the author, Feet of the Chameleon has been newly released in digital format to coincide with 29th African Cup of Nations in January 2013. A comprehensive study of African football, Ian Hawkey traces the development of the world’s favourite sport through the tangled history and complex social and political life of this fascinating continent. Drawing on a range of sources, including interviews conducted with individuals involved in all levels of the African game, his own extensive experience and years of research, Ian Hawkey, international football correspondent for the Sunday Times, has crafted a unique and remarkable book to satisfy the surge of interest in African football. Engagingly written and comprehensively researched, drawing on a range of accounts from those at grass-roots level through to the very top tiers of African football, Feet of the Chameleon is a compelling mixture of analysis and insight that delves deep into the history of the game in a continent fragmented by history, language and politics. Ian Hawkey is a meticulous and knowledgeable guide to this complex subject, and he has produced a timely and entertaining study of African football’s colourful history, players, supporters and legends.

Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space focuses on a remarkable month in the modern history of Africa and in the global history of football. Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann are well-known experts on South African football, and they have assembled an impressive team of local and international journalists, academics, and football experts to reflect on the 2010 World Cup and its broader significance, its meanings, complexities, and contradictions. The World Cup’s sounds, sights, and aesthetics are explored, along with questions of patriotism, nationalism, and spectatorship in Africa and around the world. Experts on urban design and communities write on how the presence of the World Cup worked to refashion urban spaces and negotiate the local struggles in the hosting cities. The volume is richly illustrated by authors’ photographs, and the essays in this volume feature chronicles of match day experiences; travelogues; ethnographies of fan cultures; analyses of print, broadcast, and electronic media coverage of the tournament; reflections on the World Cup’s private and public spaces; football exhibits in South African museums; and critiques of the World Cup’s processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well as its political and economic legacies. The volume concludes with a forum on the World Cup, including Thabo Dladla, Director of Soccer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Mohlomi Kekeletso Maubane, a well-known Soweto-based writer and a soccer researcher, and Rodney Reiners, former professional footballer and current chief soccer writer for the Cape Argus newspaper in Cape Town. This collection will appeal to students, scholars, journalists, and fans. Cover illustration: South African fan blowing his vuvuzela at South Africa vs. France, Free State Stadium, Bloemfontein, June 22, 2010. Photo by Chris Bolsmann.

This volume provides an analysis of the history, origins, and development of football in Africa. It brings together an edited assemblage of essays that describe and analyse football in nine African countries, including Cameroon, DRC, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda, from a social science perspective. The selection of these countries highlights the three major foreign languages and powers that have governed the continent; The English, the French, and Arabic, and provides a prism through which to analyze and compare how football developed in the various countries throughout Africa. This comparative methodology allow readers to identify similarities and differences in the progression of the game on the continent, and by focusing on football, an important relic of European colonialism in Africa, underscores the continued dependence on, and domination of Europeans on the Africans. In situating the genesis of the game, contributors examine and analyze the history, development, management, and mismanagement by bureaucrats at the political level as well as at various football federations throughout the continent.

This book explores the role of FIFA in brokering the development of football in Africa and its relationship with that continent's football associations and regional governing body. Africa is no longer on the periphery of world football but the economic disparities between the first and the third worlds hinder the development of the game. The author shows convincingly how Africa's advance within world football is tied to its national political economy and how the balance of power within FIFA still clearly favours its European members.

From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, African football today reflects the history and culture of those who play the game and how they have shaped it in a distinctively African manner. Football may obey global rules, but the influence of magicians and healers, the nurturing of different tactics and styles of play, and local forms of spectatorship give football in the continent a cultural and sporting imprint all of its own . In African Soccerscapes Peter Alegi explores how football was influenced by colonialism, the growth of cities, independence, and global capitalism. Regional differences and the links between sport, culture and politics feature prominently in his book. In the independent era football offered a rare form of 'national culture' in ethnically diverse nations and symbolized pan-African unity and solidarity through the anti-apartheid struggle and the campaign for more guaranteed places for African teams in the World Cup finals. Huge numbers of Africans play overseas, disproportionately rewarding European leagues at Africa's expense, and this phenomenon is discussed, as are the recent privatization of the African game, football development programs and the growth of women's football

Football, in many ways, is a visual endeavour. From the visual experience within the stadium itself to worldwide media representations, from advertisements to football art and artefacts: football is much about seeing and being seen, about watching, making visual and being visualised. The FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa has turned into a perfect example of the visual dimensions of football. Stadiums have been built and marketed as tourist attractions, mass media and internet platforms are advertising South African cities and venues, logos and emblems are displayed and celebrated, exhibitions are organised in museums world-wide. This book explores the social, cultural and political role of football in Africa by focusing on the issue of its visibility and invisibility. The contributions consider the history and present of football in different parts of Africa. They examine historical and recent pictures and images of football and football players, as well as places and spaces of their production and perception. They analyse the visual dimensions expressed in sports infrastructure, football media-scapes, and in expressive and material arts. This book thus contributes to the growing interest in football in Africa by exploring a new field of research into sports. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.