By Editor | January 15th, 2012 | 8 Comments
By Andrew Guest (drewguest AT hotmail DOT com)
It’s that time again; the biennial opportunity for Africa’s best national teams to compete for the continental championship, and European club management to complain about the audacity of former colonies holding a tournament smack in the middle of the league season — extracting labor in a reverse flow that might promote some useful self-reflection, if not for the blinders fused on most of the professional football world.
It always good fun to watch the machinations, even from a distance — the actual football starts January 21 in Bata, Equatorial Guinea, and ends with the final on February 12 in Libreville, the capital of co-host Gabon. As in 2010 in Angola, most of us will be watching from a distance: the oil-rich states that CAF has recently favored in its hosting decisions are note easy places to get to.
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By Peter Alegi | December 27th, 2011 | 1 Comment
Photo: Breakthrough Chiparamba girls football team, 20 July, 2011, Olympic Youth Development Center, Lusaka, Zambia. Courtesy of Hikabwa Chipande.
Training and Developing Coaches in Southern Africa: Licensing and Administration
By Hikabwa Decius Chipande
Football is the most popular sport in southern Africa but there are few qualified coaches at all levels. Prior to 2010 most top league clubs in southern Africa were coached by people without even a basic qualification.
One major problem is that Southern African countries have a haphazard approach to coach education. What had been happening until recently was that any person could come to the region, conduct a coaching course for a few days, and declare the participants as coaches with questionable certificates of limited value. It has been, therefore, very difficult to know the actual capabilities of local coaches and their qualifications because there had been no set benchmarks. South Africa is an exception in that it has the South African Qualification Authority (SAQA), although its effectiveness remains debatable.
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By Peter Alegi | August 15th, 2010 | 2 Comments
Schoolgirls playing the game in KwaZulu-Natal (Photo by Peter Alegi)
Remember ‘Feel it! It is here!’ and similar emotional tugs on our football-loving hearts and souls during the 2010 World Cup? A few weeks later, the country is due to host the CAF African Women’s Championship and the silence is deafening.
Media, the South African FA, government and the private sector are back to their usual ways, ignoring everything but the money-spinning elite men’s game. The most recent evidence of the continuing low status of the women’s game in South Africa (and Africa) is that the venues for the African Women’s Championship in October have yet to be decided.
After the World Cup, we are back to reality. Maladministration, commercial disinterest, and male condescension continue to hold African women’s football back. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
By Peter Alegi | June 9th, 2010 | 1 Comment
Melissa Block of NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ interviewed me about soccer’s long history in Africa. Soccer was brought to Africa by British colonials in the mid-1800s. The first documented game on the continent was played in South Africa in 1862, a year before soccer’s official rules were codified. As I argue in African Soccerscapes, soccer has been an important sport in Africa for as long as it was played in Europe.
Click here to listen to the interview and read a transcript.
Was also interviewed by and quoted in this New York Times article: Soccer Returns to its Roots in Africa
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