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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9781-6633

Abstract

Sport in Africa is often studied through the lenses of elite competitions, colonial legacies, or development agendas, yet the everyday sporting practices of ordinary Africans remain under-theorised. This paper focuses on African agency in producing sporting cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across Zimbabwe, I argue that informal football matches, schoolyard games, and community fitness rituals are not merely recreational but rather sites of meaning-making, resistance, and social negotiation. Theoretical frameworks from African sociology (e.g., Nyamnjoh’s incompleteness and Mbembe's banality of power) illuminate how sport operates as a terrain of ordinary ingenuity, where tactics such as repurposed equipment, self-organised leagues, and gendered play spaces subvert material constraints. These practices challenge Northern-centric sports theories that privilege formalisation, commodification, and state-centric models. For example, street football in Nigeria, ‘money games’ in Zimbabwe, or dustball cricket in South Africa tournaments exemplify how Africans reconfigure colonial sports into vernacular forms of joy and belonging. The paper also critiques the Global North's tendency to frame African sport through deficit narratives rather than adaptive creativity. By centring everyday lifeworlds, I propose an African sport theory from below that prioritises embodied knowledge, collective memory, and the politics of play, where a grandmother's netball game in Lagos or a migrant worker's lunchtime sprint in Johannesburg becomes theory-in-motion. The paper calls for a paradigm shift from studying African sport as a problem to be solved to recognising it as a dynamic archive of social theory.

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