At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Reflecting this relative lack of sporting success, African Olympians-aside from elite Kenyan distance runners-rarely register in the minds of even the most dedicated followers of the Games. Yet for all their seeming invisibility on the Olympic landscape, African states, athletes, and officials have long been "winning" at the Olympics, albeit often far removed from the medal podium.
Africa and the Olympics shows how African actors have achieved these nonsporting victories and examines how they have used the Olympics to engage in transformative political activity, realize social mobility, and enhance the quality of life for individuals, communities, and entire nations. In tracing these historical and contemporary processes and the motivations that underlie them, the book complicates reductive notions of the Olympics as solely a sporting competition and instead considers Africa's engagement with the Games as a series of opportunities to improve personal, communal, ethnic, national, and even continental plights.
If few sports fans have thought extensively about Africa and the Olympics, scholars have been only slightly more engaged with the subject. Most of this scholarship focuses on the International Olympic Committee's ban of apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1988. Other works that consider the Olympics more broadly tend to deal with Africa only summarily, further reducing its already low profile. As a result, the academic literature resembles a patchwork of circumscribed studies dispersed in a range of fields and disciplines. Not since the publication of Africa at the Olympics almost fifty years ago has a single volume featured a comprehensive history of the continent and the Games. This book both updates and expands previous work and, most importantly, reframes the analytical engagement with this topic.
Industry Reviews
Meticulously researched, highly readable and clearly argued, Africa and the Olympics steps past Africa's domination of distance running to explore the multifarious ways Africans engage with the games. African colonies and states used the games to push decolonization, engender national pride and dignity, and demonstrate continental solidarity in the struggle against racism. African olympians parlay participation to improve personal circumstances and to effect social change through charitable initiatives and foundations. Africa and the Olympics is a clever analysis of Africans winning-beyond the podium. -- Douglas Booth, University of Otago
The history of sport in Africa is an area of research filled with gaping holes, and Todd Cleveland's work will doubtless be used and cited by historians, Olympic scholars, and students. On top of that the text is very well written; I breezed through it. -- Toby C. Rider, California State University, Fullerton
Todd Cleveland's Africa and the Olympics is an outstanding, accessible account of African Olympic history that chronicles not only the lives of athletes who emerged as superstars on the greatest stage in sport but also officials' and activists' achievement of non-sporting, political victories through their engagement with the Olympic movement. This book is a must-read! -- Michelle M. Sikes, Pennsylvania State University
A superb book, well researched, and clearly argued. Cleveland has effectively and convincingly placed Africa as an integral part in the history of the Olympic movement, a premier platform of local and international politics. -- Antonio Sotomayor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
