Augusto Nascimento, Marcelo Bittencourt, Nuno Domingos, Victor Andrade de Melo. Esporte e Lazer na África: Novos Olhares

Esporte e Lazer na África: Novos Olhares, edited by Augusto Nascimento, Marcelo Bittencourt, Nuno Domingos and Victor Andrade de Melo, is a welcomed addition to the growing corpus of scholarship that examines sports, athletics and, in this case, leisure in Africa’s past and present. This edited volume grew out of a collaborative research project initially launched in 2007, spearheaded by an international group of Lusophone scholars. Esporte e Lazer constitutes the third major effort of this cohort, following international fora and the attendant publication of Mais do que um jogo: o esporte e o continente africano in 2010. This current collection of essays features a number of new contributors and, arguably more importantly, the volume expands the topical scope of this interdisciplinary endeavor via the inclusion of leisure. Sports and athletic activities – both organized and informal – continue to dominate the constituent contributions, but the incorporation of leisure illuminates pursuits that often feature only distant or tangential connections to more “traditional” sporting endeavors. Temporally, the volume’s chapters engage with events and topics that range from the early colonial period, an era during which Europeans were first introducing so-called “modern sports” to the continent, to current times. This broad temporal span enables readers to identify the shifting fields of power on the continent, reflective of the dramatically changing political landscape, and also the ways that Africans’ sporting and leisure practices correspondingly changed within this fluctuating environment. The volume focuses almost exclusively on the five former Portuguese colonies: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, but the rather unexpected presence of a chapter that considers Germany’s former colony of South West Africa (modern day Namibia) adjusts this geographical spotlight ever so slightly. While the editors contend that this inclusion is intended to prompt thinking in “comparative terms and to look at the continent in 250 Recensões a more panoramic fashion,” incorporating additional non-Lusophone chapters would have appreciably furthered these objectives