Leisure in African history: An introduction

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-16

  Akyeampong, Emmanuel ^a   Ambler, Charles ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADOLESCENT; AFRICA; ARTICLE; CRIME; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; ECONOMICS; EMPLOYMENT; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY; HUMAN; LEGAL ASPECT; LEISURE;

ADOLESCENT; AFRICA; ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; CRIME; CULTURE; EMPLOYMENT; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; LEISURE ACTIVITIES;

EID: 34347215103     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3097363     Document Type: Review

References (60)

1. Andreas Eckert and Adam Jones, "Historical Writing about Everyday Life," Journal of African Cultural Studies 15 (2002), 5-16
2. Chris Rojek, Decentering Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory (London, 1995)
3. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 1, 2002
4. David Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre (London, 1985)
5. William J. Baker and James A. Mangan, eds., Sport in Africa: Essays in Social History (London, 1987)
6. Paul La Hausse, Brewers, Beerhalls and Boycotts: A History of Liquor in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1988)
7. Jonathan Crush and Charles H. Ambler, Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa (Athens, Ohio, 1992)
8. E. J. Collins, West African Pop Roots (Philadelphia, 1992)
9. Kwame N. Bame, Come to Laugh: African Traditional Theatre in Ghana (New York, 1985)
10. Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge, 1995)
11. Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, N.H., 1996)
12. Hildi Hendrickson, ed., Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-colonial Africa (Durham, N.C., 1996)
13. Laura Fair, "Kickin' It: Leisure, Politics and Football in Colonial Zanzibar, 1900-1950s, Africa 67, 2 (1997), 224-51
14. and idem, "Dressing Up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar," Journal of African History 39, I (1998), 63-94
15. Joan-Luis Marfany and Peter Burke, "Debate: The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe," Past and Present 156 (August 1997), 174-97
16. E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (December 1967), 56-97
17. Keith Thomas, "Work and Leisure," Past and Present 29 (December 1964), 50-66
18. nd ed. (London, 1987)
19. Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780-c.1880 (London, 1980)
20. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983)
21. and E. Yeo and S. Yeo, eds. Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590-1914 (Brighton, 1981)
22. Martin, Leisure and Society
23. For a related discussion in a different context, see Chris Rojek, "Deviant Leisure: The Dark Side of Free-Time Activity," in Edgar L. Jackson and Thomas L. Burton, eds., Leisure Studies: Prospects for the Twenty-First Century (State College, Penn., 1999), 81-96
24. Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston, 1986), Ch. 6
25. Tim Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg, 1985), 82
26. Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa: The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York, 1962)
27. th Century South Africa (Johannesburg, 1989), 285-310
28. Eckert and Jones, "Historical Writing about Everyday Life."
29. But note Veena Sharma, "'Leisure' in a Traditional West African Society as Seen Through a Work of Fiction," Africa Quarterly [New Delhi] 28 (1988), 67-74, which examines leisure activities, notably wrestling, in Achebe's Things Fall Apart. See also the three essays in the section on "Indigenous Traditions" in Baker and Mangan, Sport in Africa
30. Edward Kissi, personal communication, October 1998
31. Charles van Onselen explored these issues in his work on the social transformation of Africa's most industrialized region, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, 2 vols. (London, 1982)
32. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline," 92-93
33. Andrew Burton, "Urchins, Loafers and the Cult of the Cowboy: Urbanization and Delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919-61," Journal of African History 42 (2001), 199-216
34. On the contemporary social dynamics of a West African city note a recent article, Tshikala Kayembe Biaya, "Les Plaisirs de la Ville: Masculinité, Sexualité et Féminité à Dakar (1997-2000)," African Studies Review 44 (2001), 71-85
35. Charles Ambler, "Alcohol and the Control of Labor on the Copperbelt," in Crush and Ambler, Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa, 339-66
36. For a useful definition of popular culture, see Johannes Fabian, "Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjectures," Africa 48, 4 (1978), 315-34
37. See, for examples, Emmanuel Akyeampong, "What's in a Drink? Class Struggle, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Akpeteshie (Local Gin) in Ghana, 1930-1967," Journal of African History 37, 2 (1996), 215-36
38. and Charles H. Ambler, "Alcohol, Racial Segregation and Popular Politics in Northern Rhodesia," Journal of African History 31, 2 (1990), 295-313
39. Powdermaker, Copper Town, 196-97
40. On the elaborate handmade toys and the organization of teams involved in making and racing them, see Marie-Françoise Delarozière and Michel Massai, Jouets des Enfants d'Afrique: Regards Sur des Merveilles d'Ingéniosité (UNESCO, 1999)
41. and Magdalene K. Ngaiza and Bertha Koda, eds., Unsung Heroines: Women's Life Histories from Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, 1991)
42. Ambler, "Alcohol, Racial Segregation and Popular Politics"
43. Akyeampong, "What's in a Drink?"
44. and Emmanuel Akyeampong, '"Wo pe tam won pe ba' ('You Like Cloth but You Don't Want Children'): Urbanization, Individualism, and Gender Relations in Colonial Ghana, c. 1900-1939," in David Anderson and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa's Urban Past (Oxford, 2000)
45. Phyllis Martin, "Contesting Clothes in Colonial Brazzaville," Journal of African History 35, 5 (1994), 421-22
46. On the symbolism attached to rugby by Afrikaner men in twentieth-century South Africa, see Albert Grundlingh, "Playing for Power? Rugby, Afrikaner Nationalism and Masculinity in South Africa, c.1900-70," The International Journal of the History of Sport 11, 3 (1994), 408-30
47. Albert Grundlingh, André Odendaal, and Burridge Spies, Beyond the Tryline: Rugby and South African Society (Johannesburg, 1995)
48. and David Black and John Nauright, Rugby and the South African Nation (Manchester, 1998)
49. Fair, "Kickin' It," 225-26
50. On Hindi-inspired modernity in Northern Nigeria, see Brian Larkin, "Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities," Africa 67, 3 (1997), 406-40
51. On the multi-centered nature of modernity, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996)
52. See Karin Barber, ed., Readings in African Popular Culture (Oxford and Bloomington, 1997)
53. Barber's studies of contemporary theater in Nigeria offer a model a for cultural studies approach to the histories of popular culture. See her The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theater (Bloomington, 2001)
54. Frederick Cooper, "What is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian's Perspective," African Affairs 100 (2001), 189-213
55. In addition to the article included here, see also James Burns's forthcoming article in the next issue of this journal, and his recent book, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Athens, Ohio, 2002)
56. This phenomenon reached well beyond movie audiences. Note the influence of the cowboy style in the youth culture of colonial Dar es Salaam and in the youth "gangs" that formed in southern Nigeria in the 1950s. Burton, "Urchins, Loafers and the Cult of the Cowboy"; and P.E.H. Hair, "The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (ca. 1950)," History in Africa 28 (2001), 83-93
57. To borrow a phrase from Larry Yarak; see his "A West African Cosmopolis: Elmina in the Nineteenth Century" (paper presented at the conference of the Historical Society of Ghana, Accra, July 2002)
58. K. Barber, "Preliminary Notes on Audience in Africa," Africa 67 (1997), 347-62
59. Ambler, "Popular Films and Colonial Audiences."
60. Rojek, "Deviant Leisure: The Dark Side of Free-Time Activity."