Laura Fair's book Pastimes and politics

Introduction

African cultures absorbed a fair amount of European influences during the colonial era. Sometimes, European ways served as a means to cope with foreign rule or even a way to fight back. Laura Fair's Pastimes & Politics shows how these things happened in Zanzibar under British rule, but in a somewhat cumbersome manner.

Fair's book is thoroughly researched but the author apparently put everything she knew into her text. The result is the reader is literally smothered with detail. An introductory section providing a capsule history of Zanzibar would have been very helpful. Many of her chapters need shortening, in part not to overwhelm the reader or frighten away readers who are not experts on Africa. Zanzibar is one locale in Africa where a large number of cultures come together, and good studies are needed because the islands have had such a pivotal role in East African history. Let us bear in mind Zanzibar was a very major entrepot in colonial times. It was also a major slave trading center. Indeed, the Omani slave trade became so lucrative, the Sultan of Oman moved his capital to Zanzibar to better supervise it. Zanzibar has seen many overlords come and go over the centuries.

Discussion and Analysis

Laura Fair demonstrated in Pastimes and Politics, organised team sports could easily be read as an allegory of life in the British colonial empire. In Africa, as well as other parts of the empire, members of the colonial service, missionaries and company managers advocated the spread of European sports, such as field hockey, cricket and football, as one means of inculcating respect for the values of time, discipline and authority within the minds and spirits of the colonised. (Fair 2001) Drawing on the philosophies of `rational recreation' and `muscular Christianity' developed in England during the preceding century, during the early twentieth century colonisers across the African continent began laying increasing emphasis on the role of sports in moulding a `disciplined' working class from the mixed assortment of individuals living in urban Africa. Defining the boundaries of `appropriate' and `inappropriate' forms of recreation became a major preoccupation and leisure became a central terrain of daily struggle between coloniser and colonised to define the shape of life in the city. (Fair 2001)

Taken as a microcosm of the colonial experience, this study of football in Zanzibar illustrates the limits of Europeans' ability to mould Africans' social experiences. Although the British wrote and administered the rules of play, they exercised very little influence over how teams were organised in the neighbourhoods or the meanings which men attributed to the game within their own lives. Far from directing the transformation of leisure and recreation, colonial administrators often found themselves reacting to initiatives taken by the men, women and children of Zanzibar for whom these activities constituted an important part of their social worlds. (Fair 2001)

Football became an important field of meaning not only for individuals but for communities as well. In football Zanzibari men found a new venue for ...