ABSTRACT
The 1968 Olympic Games are often regarded as the point of ‘take-off’ for the east African domination of middle-and long-distance running. At these Games athletes from Ethiopia and Kenya dominated most of the races that had traditionally been the preserve of European runners. The relative dominance of Kenyan running, in particular, is referred to in several of the chapters in this book but little work has been done to explore the antecedents and genesis of this cultural phenomenon. In this chapter I stress the cultural character of Kenyan running – the making of it by colonial policies and prejudices – and I seek to deny the existence of what are sometimes termed ‘natural athletes’. In a sense, therefore, this chapter blurs the distinction explicit in the binary of nature-culture (or nature-nurture). In my exploration of pre-and early modern Kenyan running my approach is to explore the ways in which (mainly) colonial writers represented this body culture.
