This dissertation explores the complex relationships between football, culture, and politics in Zambia, from the Second World War through the aftermath of the first multiparty elections of the postcolonial era. It reconstructs the rise and development of African football clubs, competitions, players, and personalities, and connects the everyday lives of ordinary people to broader shifts in colonial and postcolonial political history. The main primary sources for this study are Zambian government records, local newspapers and magazines, and dozens of oral interviews and informal conversations I recorded in Zambia with former players, administrators, journalists, and fans. The research reveals how football was used as a tool for social control and propaganda. As the economic heartland of Zambia, the Copperbelt looms large throughout this story. Beginning in the late colonial period, football boomed in this industrial region as miners and other African wage-earning workers quickly made the British game their own. They did so not only by acquiring sporting skills, but also by forging new loyalties and identities that nurtured, directly and indirectly, the broader anti-colonial struggle for self-determination.Football took on a nation-building function after independence in 1964. Under President Kenneth Kaunda, a former player and referee, and his UNIP ruling party, the government invested considerable economic and political capital into the Football Association of Zambia, school sport, domestic clubs, and the national team. Kaunda’s one-party state embraced football as a means to create consent and support for its ideology of “African humanism,” to consolidate power and authority, and gain international visibility and prestige. Following the nationalization of the mines and other sectors of the economy, in the 1970s and 1980s parastatal companies and the armed forces played a vital role in growing the game despite a worsening economic crisis. The government’s gradual withdrawal from sport after the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs brought the domestic game to its knees, and may have contributed to the Gabon air disaster of April 1993 in which the entire national team perished.This dissertation takes the cultural agency of Zambians seriously. It explores the impact of radio and the press, fan groups, and the inclusion of spiritual beliefs and practices, such as magic and sorcery. In so doing, this study also sheds light on the tensions produced by fierce rivalries between different clubs and competing notions of masculinity among miners, bakaboyi (domestic workers), and civil servants in urban communities. The gendered dynamics of sport meant that women fans struggled for inclusion in an overwhelmingly male domain; but female fans were neither unusual nor passive and some channeled their passion for football into founding the first women’s clubs and leagues.As the first scholarly history of association football in Zambia, this work makes at least three contributions to national and African historiography. First, it expands on the new revisionist history concerned with moving beyond UNIP- and Kaunda-centered nationalist readings of the past. Second, it demonstrates the value of seeing football as a cultural space in which power is contested and where individual, community, and institutional identities come to life. Finally, this study uncovers new documentary and oral evidence that deepen our understanding of sport’s capacity to both shape and symbolize social change in an African nation’s colonial and postcolonial past.
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