ABSTRACT
The history of football in Africa is naturally linked to the political development of that continent and falls into two periods: before and after decolonization. It is, therefore, with one or two notable exceptions such as Egypt, only after the Second World War that independent African nations began competing on the international stage and that Africa became a prominent footballing continent in its own right. If the focus is placed on sub-Saharan Africa, rather than North Africa, then the involvement of black African nations in the global game is an even more recent phenomenon. Black Africa’s first ever representatives at the World Cup finals, for instance, were Zaire in 1974 and they were followed in the twentieth century only by Cameroon (in 1982, 1990, 1994 and 1998), Nigeria (1994 and 1998) and South Africa (1998). By the end of the twentieth century, the Confédération africaine de football had become the largest governing body in the world with 52 member nations, most European leagues (especially the French) had recruited African players and the African Cup of Nations was being widely covered by the audio-visual and print media (see Armstrong and Giulianotti 2004; Darby 2002). However, sports media discourse on Africa tended not to differentiate between the sub-Saharan African nations themselves but rather to focus on the qualities that black Africans are reputedly said to share. These shared attributes generally fall into three categories, focusing on notions of physical power, indiscipline and naïvety (Hand 2002). It is the purpose of the first part of the present chapter to explore sports media texts drawn from the French daily press throughout the latter half of the twentieth century with a view to examining the evolution of portrayals of black Africans competing in world football.
