ABSTRACT
Sub-Saharan Africa has not received its due attention within histories of sport internationally, nor has the role of sport been given fair coverage in histories of Africa whether over the pre-colonial, colonial or post-colonial eras. It is not enough to merely assert that the Sudan was ‘a land of Blacks ruled by Blues’, in reference to the tendency of the British colonial service to prefer Oxbridge sportsmen as colonial officials. It is important to interrogate both sides of the racial divide in examining the place of sport in subSaharan Africa over the past several centuries and while there are several excellent studies of sport and body cultures in Africa, there is much still to do. Historians of sport have made some progress in recent years, most notably in South
Africa which has a well-developed literature among local academics and has also been well covered by foreign based researchers (though there is still much to be done there as well). A large proportion of the early critical work on South Africa revolved around the politics of apartheid and was generated by activists in the anti-apartheid movement.1
Since the 1990s, however, a broader more contextualized literature has emerged out of the struggles for equality of opportunity in society and on the sports field that will be discussed below.2 Other countries have had their share of coverage but in most cases we can count on one hand (sometimes one finger) the number of researchers who have published academic works on a particular country or region.3
