Title:	Leisure and society in colonial Brazzaville
Authors:	Phyllis M., Martin Professor Naomi Chazan Professor Christopher Clapham
Keywords:	Leisure - Congo (Brazzaville) - History
Issue Date:	1995
Publisher:	Cambridge
Description:	In 1936, a controversy erupted over Brazzaville football. The subject of debate was whether players should wear shoes in matches or play barefooted. The European administrators of the Native Sports Federation decreed that wearing shoes encouraged violence on the field, that Africans were unsportsmanlike, and that they must, therefore, play barefooted. Some team captains, who were also part of the urban elite and wore shoes on a daily basis, were so outraged that they wrote to the Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa (AEF) asking him to reverse the ruling, which, on the advice of sports administrators, he did not. This shoes controversy brought to a head the already contentious relationship of European sports organizers with players in Bacongo and Poto-Poto, Brazzaville's two African districts. When the team leaders organized a boycott, the official football league collapsed.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/18910
ISBN:	0 52149551 2
Appears in Collections:	African Studies

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