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Claire Nicolas, "Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970)" (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)
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- [00:00]
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Claire Nicolas
Experian.
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Keith Rathbone
Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Keith Rathbone and I'm coming to you from Macquarie University in sunny, sunny Sydney. It was very hot today. I don't know if you all have seen the weather. Australia is currently the hottest place in the world. It was very hot today at my office and I am happy today to be joined by by a colleague and someone I consider a friend as well, Claire Nicolas. Claire is a chercheuse du fond National Suisse at Basel University and also the holder of the very prestigious of one of the very prestigious ambition research grants at Basel University and she is the author of a fantastic book. I'm holding it up so she can see it and we can look at it together of a great book, the title of which is Un si l' encourse sport genre et cetera Au gane et encot d' Ivoire an est neuf Sant entre Ds neuf sans soi sans d' And I want to first start by saying to Claire, thank you very much for Joining us.
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Claire Nicolas
No problem. Thank you very much for having me. Keith, It's a pleasure.
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Keith Rathbone
I want to apologize to Claire officially. We've tried to do this interview and we had some technical problems before, and Claire has been the most, the most sympathetic, the most generous with her time, and I really appreciate it. So thank you again, Claire, for that and for your understanding. I want to start out by saying I love this book. It was one of the books that I enjoyed reading the most in sport history last year, and I'm really excited to get to talk to you about it this year. I first want to start out by asking you because before we started recording, we talked a little bit about language and the trickiness of language. But I wanted to first start out by asking you how you developed this project and also if you could at the beginning, give us a quick translation of the title so that our audience can understand the ambition of the book, but also just what's the title of the book? If you were going to give it a quick translation.
- [03:56]
Claire Nicolas
Yes. Well, thank you so much. I'm really glad I'm here to discuss the book with you, Keith. So in English, we could say it's Solange Sports, Gender and citizenship in Ghana and Cote d' Ivoire in the years 1900 to 1970s. And une ceylon course is borrowed by Maria Mabat's beautiful novel. She's a Senegalese writer and she wrote so Long a letter in C? L' Angletre in the late 1970s. And it's a book that stayed with me for a very long time, for many years. So it was a way of paying homage to that and also to point out to the very different ways people, I don't know tried to go through these hectic years in West Africa and towards independence, towards emancipation, and not just by political means, but also literally on the field and through sports. And for the project itself, it's actually based on my PhD project. So I did my PhD between Lausanne University in Switzerland and Science Po Paris in France from 2014 to 2019. And I've been working with I did this comparative study between Cote d' Ivoire and Ghana, where I explored how sporting activities were shaped unshaped in reverse gender identities and gender relationships and race relationships in West Africa through under colonial regime and then within independent states. And I had my feet in both sport history in Lausanne, where you have a strong sport history department, and where I was working with Nicolas bancel as my PhD advisor. Meanwhile, in Paris, my advisor, Richard Barnegas, was more into African studies, so specialist of Cote d'. Ivoire. And I think this double PhD really helped me keep my feet in both areas and not lean too much on one side or the other.
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Keith Rathbone
Yeah, it's actually a fantastic book in terms of both sport history. But I would say as someone who's also interested in African history, it's a fantastic work that tries to push the ways we think about colonial post colonial histories. And it does so comparatively. Looking at Ghana and Cote d', Ivoire, it's ambitious. How did you decide? Because I think a lot of people's. I think a lot of post colonial histories take one colonial sphere and one post colonial situation as their goal, but your work doesn't do that. So maybe you can talk a little bit about taking on two colonial states. Two post colonial states, yes.
- [07:12]
Claire Nicolas
Of course, in retrospect, it might have been a bit ambitious of me at the beginning of a Ph.D. to be honest, because it was a lot of reading and lots to take on. But I don't know, it was really evident from day one that I didn't want to become a country specialist or someone who specializes in one country. And I didn't feel at ease with this idea. And I really wanted also I felt also that comparing between British Empire, French Empire, between also two very different post colonial regime, between Pan Africanism, France, Afrique really helped, maybe going against the grain of preconceived ideas that we have about how does the French Empire work, how does the British Empire work? And if you never get them to speak to each other, you kind of miss maybe how things work in the same way in both territories. And Cote d' Ivoire and Ghana are neighboring countries, they have a similar culture associated in different populations. But then this border made things quite different in a way because Cote d' Ivoire was tied to French West Africa with its capital being in Dakar, very far away from Cote d' Ivoire, in a way. Meanwhile, Ghana was previously known as Gold coast, was really a standalone colonial territory with lots of. Also a very different setting, which was important for me related to sports because of literacy background. And while in Cote d' Ivoire people didn't attend much school and had to go to Dakar to go to higher school to attend higher schooling in. In Ghana you can see the rise of educated elite and it really shaped sporting activities. And from the beginning when I saw that, I felt, oh, that's something that's really interesting to compare. And you can see really that in neighboring places, neighboring cities, things are working a bit differently.
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Keith Rathbone
Yeah. When I was reading it, I Was like, this is fantastically ambitious and an immense accomplishment because you were dealing with two colonial regimes, two postcolonial regimes, two archival regimes, four archival regimes. And you also didn't hesitate to integrate in a lot of theory as well. So it was. Your work is informed by ideas about intersectionality, postcoloniality that a lot of sports historians kind of don't address, I think for the worse in some respects. So I wondered if theory was a driver, if you came to the theory after you'd already started the project, or how central was theory to you when you began.
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Claire Nicolas
I don't know. I guess it was working together. I think it was something my advisors encouraged me to do because both of them are quite keen on. One of them is a political scientist, Richard Banegaz, and not an historian. Meanwhile, Nicolas Bonsell is very keen on postcolonial theories. So it was something I was encouraged to do and also being very interested in gender studies. And I have also quite like, maybe an interdisciplinary background as well. So it was kind of. It came naturally to me that I would not, when I was sitting with the archives especially, that I had to, I don't know, to sit on someone else's shoulders in a way to read them and that I could not just read them and tell what's in there. Because I really needed help from what people wrote about sports, about what does gender mean in West Africa? What does sporting activities? What are sporting activities? Because I needed that theoretical background to also ground my ideas on how I understood what I was discovering.
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Keith Rathbone
Yeah, it was. Like I said, I was incredibly impressed by the work. And for people who are interested, I mean, obviously this is a fantastic book, but you have to be able to read French to engage with it. But the audience who can read French, which is probably not a small audience in a lot of ways, will be happy to discover that this work speaks to broader ideas than just sport. It uses sport to talk to bigger ideas through this use of theory. Just to give listeners a bit of the. The context of the book and how it's shaped. There is a three chapter, three chapter structure. So we have the colonial era and then we have the post colonial era. Although it's. I'm being more rough and ready than it is in the book. Just to say in the book, there is. There's a much more nuance in between that and that. In the pre colonial and in the post colonial, you deal with intern sport, physical education and youth organization. So you're not dividing your work up geographically as much as you're Dividing it up thematically. So I'd love to start with the kind of first bit of the book, the first half of the book, so to speak, and your first chapter, Sport Colonization et modernite. Sport Colonization and Modernity. And maybe just ask you a bit about what was sports like in Africa and how did European sports arrive in the part of Africa that you're studying?
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Claire Nicolas
Well, I think one thing that's quite important is that of course there were sporting activities at the local level before the arrival of Europeans, but very early on, when you have the beginning of warfare, of colonial conquest and so ON in the mid 19th century, you have the rise of small sporting events who very often are actually quite mixed with both women and men. But also in terms of activities, you would have an athletic event being presented as an event that gathers both classic athletic events, but also like kind of festive races, like running with an egg on a spoon or running in a sack, these sort of things. But also local sporting activity, like canoe races, mostly by the coast or by the rivers, or ampe, which is typically Ghanaian sporting activity that. That's only played by women.
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Keith Rathbone
And here's something fascinating, by the way. I had to look. I had to look this up because I had never heard of it before. So your book introduced this to me and I was. I was totally fascinated. I'm sorry to interrupt, Claire, but it was. It was. This idea of ampe was really great. So if you're. If you're keen. A MPE Am I spelling that correctly? I'm just throwing off memory. But Google. Google it, listeners, because it's a fascinating. A fascinating contest, so to speak.
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Claire Nicolas
Yeah. And nowadays it's mostly something practiced by young girls, like in. Like a game. But in the archives you can see it presented as a real contest between teams of. With adults playing it. And it's quite different. And I was really struck by how rural women would play ampe and would be part of this competition. At the beginning, when colonial authorities were still naturally fixed, the power of the British Empire was not really all encompassing over Ghana. And then when you have the rise of a more structured sporting institution, mostly led in Ghana by Ghanaian men from wealthy background, maybe baristas, journalists, these sort of people who have been educated in England and who create as a funding association for sports, then you have this shift when it becomes more clearly defined what sport is. And then sport becomes what we understand as sports nowadays, like Olympic sports, so athletics, football, cricket and the rest. And then you don't have any women anymore until the 50s. Meanwhile, in Cote d' Ivoire. It was also a bit more complicated because the archive situation is a bit different. It's not as easily accessible as in Ghana, but still I couldn't find these kind of examples of early 20th century example of sporting activities. But you can find this kind of institutionalization by African men in coastal urban cities. But contrary to Ghana, it was very much controlled by the French authorities. And you find Frenchmen from colonial companies, from colonial administration spearheading most sporting association. And the French colonial authorities were very wary of sporting activities being maybe the. For political dissent. I would say.
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Keith Rathbone
Sorry, interrupt you, Claire, you know you please.
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Claire Nicolas
It was true in a way because some of the leading political figures would be part of some of the sporting teams, especially in football. But sports was not really. It was not politics. They were not having political meetings or so on. It was mostly sport. And it was heavily controlled at the French West Africa level. So it was really a wide ranging policy.
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Keith Rathbone
I love these early chapters for the ways that they confound our typical understandings of colonial regimes. Especially the ways that colonial regimes talked about themselves as bringing progress and opportunity for women. But then we were looking at this in your work shows very clearly that that was not true. That they are providing new structures for competition for men when actually structures had existed already. I read a strong sense of irony in some ways in the title. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit thinking about some of the other. The other chapters in this colonial section as well, about the notion of agency and power. So as these colonial institutions are coming to structure sport itself. And you're just telling us about how they were very different, the British and the French, and they were worried both in their own ways. I wonder, well, you know, what your work tells us about the nature of African agency within these institutions.
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Claire Nicolas
Yes, I think first of all we have to realize that they write about sports a lot and what they do and why they are doing it for. And especially in the field of physical education. It's like a logaria about sporting activities and why is it relevant and important and why it is not to do this type of Physical activity and so on and so on. And I was really struck by that. When you read the archives, you have pages and pages of that. But on the other hand, and I think it's especially true for activities that involve children. So scouting activities and physical education in schooling in schools. And I was very keen on having these institutions as well. Because schools help me get a glimpse at girls sporting activities, which you do not find in sports club. And the same goes for scouting and girl guiding. But then in terms of agency, I think there's a new historiographical trend recently stemming from the history of childhood, which I found very interesting. When you can discuss the agency of people who are usually not discussed as agents of history, which are often discussed as powerless. But what you can see in the archives from schools, from scouting movements is that they actually have lots of agency. And they actually decide what they want and what they don't want, mostly about what they're going to be taught. And sports was mostly meant as a civilizing tool, as a way to produce, in the very strict sense of the word, good subjects. They would be efficient at work, they would be healthy. It would be useful for the broader colonial economy. But then when you have kids at school, kids be kids, right? So they don't care about the broader colonial economy. And they just create a bit of havoc sometimes. And they don't do what they are supposed to do. And they don't go to. Maybe they don't want to go to PE or also, something that was very interesting to me is that sometimes they don't want to do PE because they want to do the literary subjects. They want to go to school because they want to get a job, a good job afterwards in the colonial administration. And they are very. And they are quite aware that it's not PE that's going to help them secure land. A job in the colonial administration is being able to write and to count and being able and to have all these skills. So they evade school. And that's something that's a bit of a problem for both authorities. And here the French authorities and the British authorities. They have, of course, different colonial regimes. They rely on different kind of institutions. Mostly public schools on the Francophone on Cote d' Ivoire side. Lots of missionary schools in the British Empire. Schooling is way stronger in Ghana than it is in Cote d'. Ivoire. But in the end, this kind of discrepancy between expectation from the colonial states and this kind of grand hopes and ideas they have about mission civilisatrice on the ground, it's kind of meaningless at times. And yeah, I find it a bit funny at times the fact that kids just don't really care about all this.
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Keith Rathbone
It reminds me a little of my research as well on Vichy. You know, that you have these authoritarian states that attempt to impose these systems very rigid from the top down and they run into actors. And I have a chapter in my book as well about children in school sort. They just don't care. They want to do what they want to do and they're going to. They're very clever and good at look at accessing the lessons that they want to learn and doing the things that they want to do. And another part I loved about this chapter on schools, this is the chapter l' Education Physique Colonial is this. Is this tension between the traditional and the. And the modern, the modern people. I'm making scare quotes with my fingers as if listeners can see me doing that. Traditional and the modern, where you have efforts of the colonial state to ban traditional things like dance or to. Or to promote them and running into students who might be resisting that or accepting it for their own reasons and the schools can't really get around or figure it out. Yeah, it's. I thought I loved this chapter for that reason. Your third kind of colonial chapter is Scutisme Colonial Colonial Scouting. Je fromation conjugal et mission civilisatrice. So I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the origins of. Of scouting in West Africa, because I imagine that a lot of people are familiar with the idea that there are schools in colonial situations. And many people are familiar with the idea that there's sport in Africa and a long tradition of sport there. But maybe scouting in Africa might be a little bit unusual for some listeners. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about scouting in a colonial setting.
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Claire Nicolas
Yes, of course. I think there's a very interesting book by Timothy Parsons on the overall British colonial Africa, which explores scouting across the continent. And I think, like, it's. So the Scouting movement was really meant to teach young boys originally in England to become good citizens, but also good citizens for the British Empire. And Baden Powell was himself a colonial officer. So it's really part of the origin story of scouting and scouting. A bit like sports. It has an asynchronous history between British Empire and French Empire. It starts earlier in the. In Ghana. So in the 1910s, you have the first Boy Scouts troops and you have the first Girl Guides troops in the 1920s. So it's really early during the First World War and the interwar period. And it's set up by Ghanaian young persons. So. Elsie Ofoete Kojo, she's the one creating the Girl Guide movement and she went to England to study and when she comes back, she creates a Girl Guide movement based on what she experienced in England. And that's a very common way of creating a sporting institution in West Africa. An African American. West African would travel to England, discover something they would like, and then they would recreate it, invent it in a new way at the local level. Meanwhile, in Cote d', Ivoire, it's a bit later, it's in the 30s, and it's really set up by missionary priests, Catholics this time, because don't get me started on the very complicated history of scouting in France, but it's divided by religion. So you have the Catholics, Protestants, the like, of course, and. Exactly. Meanwhile, it's a bit easier on the British Empire side. So what's interesting, I feel, with scouting is that it's a voluntary activity. Sometimes it's a bit. It's like all voluntary activities for children. Maybe it's a bit more not so voluntary because it's very tied to schooling and you have to be part of the Scouting club if you want to be part of the schooling community. But still, it's not like pe, Right. And I was quite interested in what attracted kids in schooling. And I feel that the sense of belonging, of course, but also the activities themselves, like exploring and later on a bit of sports, are quite important for that. And scouting is way more political also on the part of members, than sports and physical education. So in Cote d', Ivoire, in French West Africa, you have the La Conchaine, so the Grid chain, which is a network of scouting of scout members during the Vichy era. And it was banned because it was too political and too worrisome for the British, for the French colonial authorities. And it was this big network of Scout members based, originating from the William Ponty School in Dakar, and members were originating from all across West Africa. On the other hand, scouting is a bit more, let's say, tricky, I would say, on the Ghanaian side, because its political leanings tends to be more conservative than the overall anti colonial context. Especially in the late 40s, you have the rise across West Africa of strong anti colonial movements which are institutionalized in nationalist parties. And you have big protests. And like in Cote d', Ivoire, you have the Marche sur Combassame led by women in 1949. And in Ghana you have veterans from World War II leading protests and strikes in 48. It leads to heavy repression on the part of colonial authorities. And I'm telling you all this because in the archives of the scouting movement you can actually see that the scouting movement tries to separate themselves from these anti colonial activities. And they really try to be. To be as close as possible to the colonial authorities, including those that were heavily repressing the anti colonial movement. So I think it kind of gives us also a glimpse of the complicated political leanings you can see in this era. Not everyone was an anti colonial fighter or a nationalist activist. And I think it somewhat complicates the story.
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Keith Rathbone
Absolutely. And I think that your book then sits really well next to a lot of other work like Emily Marker's book on black friends, which cites these kind of like other possibilities for empire, but also the way in which young people were participating in that. So it wasn't that everyone was anti colonial or all the evolue are kind of like glommed on to. To systems of colonial power. It was really. There was a lot of fluctuation and a lot of change in sporting institutions were maybe less involved than scouting or physical education institutions. And so for me that flips in some ways both the colonial worries because they were always very worried about sporting institutions. And I often find that sporting institutions are not very good incubators for politics, are not as good incubators as states tend to think they might be. But yeah. So your book makes a move and we could talk more about these chapters. There's some really interesting stuff, especially in the scouting chapter about the role of Islam in some of the histories and some great information on jamboree as well. So just for. For listeners who are listening, if you're interested in some of that as well. But I want to kind of move on to the latter half of the book which looks at the post colonial. So maybe you can give us your first chapter then in that section is Sportive et Sportives Archetype de l' Homme Louvo Independent. So Sportsmen and Sportswomen Archetypes of a New Independent Man. Is that. That's probably not a good translation.
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Claire Nicolas
Oh no, I think it works out.
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Keith Rathbone
Quick. I'd have to think an om. Nouveau New Man. Yeah, very. There's. There's a lot of. There's a lot of that. Your titles are so good. And we even didn't talk about how in the beginning there's a pond in your. In your. In the title of your book as well as the Illusion, you know. But I wonder if you can tell us a Bit about the. The. What's sporting life like in Ghana and in Cote d' Ivoire after independence? What we think of as continuities and what might we think of as kind of ruptures?
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Claire Nicolas
Well, first of all, I think like the main continuity would be that both colonial states really relied heavily on sporting activities in club sports, in schools and in youth movements in order to train the youth, in order to have. And really kind of pursued this enterprise. And they were not very original in this perspective, but like a new states, I would say in the modern era. So they would use sport as a way to educate the youth mostly. And on the other end also, I think something that comes up would be that it's a moment where both states enter as nation independent and autonomous nation states, enter the global sporting arena as such. And then sportsmen and sportswomen now become the new ambassador, natural ambassadors, I think parliamentary called them like that in Ghana. So they are the natural ambassador of Ghana, of Cote d', Ivoire, and they represent the state abroad. And that's something we are quite familiar with, I think, now in the history of sports and global sports, especially in the Cold War. And so we have this shift. But this is particularly, I think, tied to the idea of a new African man. The idea that sports now, it's not meant to teach obedience or being part of a broader imperial community in some kind of fraternity, as they call it in the French scouting archives. But now it's about building the new African man, a man who is proud of himself, who got rid of the colonial authority, and who is going to move towards the future. So there's a huge strong sense of futurity in the 60s of building a new future for people and especially with regard to the youth, a new generation who didn't know the colonial oppression and who is going to move towards this bright future. And it seems a bit awkward to say so nowadays because we live in a quite pessimistic era, but I think that's something the history of Africa really showed, that the 60s were this big moment of opening, of creating the Pan African institutions and so on. It was a very long introduction to your question.
- [37:21]
Keith Rathbone
No, no, it's a perfect introduction.
- [37:24]
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- [37:53]
Keith Rathbone
I mean, I think. I think, yeah. One of the things that your work shows again is not that, is that the. As Ghana and Cote d' Ivoire come out of this moment of colonial liberation, it's not a blank slate that they. They adopt some of the practices of the colonial institutions that preceded them. And that leads them into very different ways of thinking, even as they do some similar things that can have very different kinds of ways of thinking about sport or consequences for sport. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the way sport differed in Ghana, in Cote d', Ivoire, that is to say in postcolonial Ghana and Cote d'.
- [38:39]
Claire Nicolas
Ivoire. Yes. So what's very important to have in mind is that Ghana is led by Kwame Krumer, who becomes prime minister in 1957, then president in 1960. And in 1960 the former gold Coast Amateur Sports Council is really a bit discarded. And we have the creation of the Central Organization of Sport, which is a state led organization led by Hohene. People interested in the history of FIFA may have come across his name because he was really important in leading Pan African fights at FIFA. So he takes over and he's really in charge of building a socialist and Pan African sporting organizations. So you have an official football club which is part of the national championship, but is also like most players are kind of the ones for the national team when they play abroad. So it's quite contested actually. But you also have very interesting change in the administration itself. And I think especially when it comes to women's sport because lots of sportswomen are recruited in order for them to work within the sporting administration. Sportsmen as well. But it's more original to also hire sportswomen and they can become head of women's sports or they can become have like secretary position or telephonist. This sort of very typical women clerk position in Ghana for women in Ghana in the 60s. And this really helped having a very strong women athletic team for Ghana. And Ghana is actually the first African country to send a black woman to the Olympics in 1960, Christiana Boetang. Unfortunately she'll be sick and she will not be able to partake. But in 1964 she will be back on her feet and she will partake again with other women and also women from other countries, especially Nigeria. And I think you have this very. And this administration really makes possible for these sports women to be part of a broader sporting movement and to have elite sport which is really becoming stronger. It's also connected to training abroad and to a globalization of sports. Part of the Cold War, because they train, some of them are sent to train in the USSR or in East Germany through cultural exchange programs. But the situation is very different in Cote d'. Ivoire. In Cote d', Ivoire, Felix Suffoubhenny is a very strong ally to France and even say he coined the term France Afrique. So I think that says it all. And the administration, unlike the Ghanaian administration, is really, you have lots of French coperent part of it, even at the highest level, not just low level peace corp people, not really at key head positions. And it really shapes the Ivorian sporting administration as really kind of a duplicate of the French sporting administration in terms of like how it's managed.
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Keith Rathbone
But I wonder if that's true about. I was going to say I wonder if that's true as well about other parts of the French West Africa because I think of course of Senegal's post independence team being coached and managed by Raul Dion is the first selection of the Samir Gilles independent team. And his father was a French parliamentarian. He was a former French footballer himself. So he's interesting.
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Claire Nicolas
Actually. Lots of the French corporal actually go from one country to the other and they would apply to positions in Cote d'. Ivoire. You can see in their application letter they have important position in Senegal when they apply or they might come back to France after. I think one of them is quite important is like you have people like Andre Del Sol or Louis Jorion and they really move from one ministry to the other. So I mean you have a whole cooperation setting up, being set up.
- [43:31]
Keith Rathbone
Yeah, it should be no surprise to people who are familiar with the political histories of French West Africa that it, that it doesn't disappear immediately. One of the things I really loved about your post, your post independence chapters, your post colonial chapters is the way in which you kind of dealt with the possibilities and limitations for female physical culture and again, kind of resisted any narrative of progress. It wasn't like an obvious and now things are much better for women. And so I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about and how that was working for women and girls in these two postcolonial states.
- [44:23]
Claire Nicolas
Well, yeah, of course I think something that's quite striking is that ideas that are again a bit familiar to historians of sports and physical education, but the idea that you should not do the same Activity if you're a girl or if you're a boy you should do because some are appropriate and some are not. So you play netball or you play football but you don't do both. You do dancing and this sort of thing. And for girls it's meant for them to think one of the physical educators call it equip them for motherhood. And these ideas which are really all over colonial education systems are really taken over. And while sports is a bit shifted because of this idea that independent state have to project to the world a new identity, I think it's a bit more conservative on the side of physical education and girls. Sporting education is kind of similar and doesn't change much. You have of course some exceptions but overall you still have this very strong sense of sporting activities being at school being mostly targeted to boys and that girls have to. When they shy away from girl sport they are quickly reprimanded. And I think there's an example in the book about a fight between two teams during a match of netball. And you have these two girls school and they are supposed to have to host this netball game which is the most gender based sporting activity you could find. Right. Because it was invented with a precise goal of teaching elegance and womanhood to girls. But then it completely. It doesn't work out this way because the girl there's a fight, they start throwing sand and stone at each other. The opposite team has to flee and they are sent away. They seek the protection of boys being oppressed, of boys being around and meanwhile the host team chase them with rocks. So the initial goal again is not really accomplished. And you can see here like the cracks within this very strict ideas surrounding girls education and sports.
- [47:05]
Keith Rathbone
There's a lot of material in this book and for people who are interested in the youth movements and scouting. The last chapter, the last body chapter on scouting and post colonial states is really interesting especially in the. In the way in which the Ghanaian state wanted to use scouting and create their own scouting institutions like the Ghana Youth Pioneers. I encourage people to check that out but I kind of want to move a little bit in the interest of time towards scout some concluding questions and I. So I wondered. I had. This book was such a fascinating book for me but I wasn't. There were a few things I felt like I wasn't able to answer for myself and I wanted to know your thoughts Claire as the. As the expert. But so much of what the book does, did for me was confound Europeans efforts to kind of impose European models of bio citizenship Maybe on subjects. Right. But then postcolonial regimes tried to do the same thing and also stymied. And I wondered if we could say that there were unique aspects of post colonial biopolitics that were not European or not fundamentally drawn from the colonial experience, or was there something that Ghana and Cote d' Ivoire were doing that was completely different, in a sense. And I felt like you would be better able to answer that than I was because I kind of vacillated in between, in reading the book going, oh, there's something unique. Or did the colonial situation kind of just erase that pre colonial moment when there was a lot of a very different system at work?
- [48:59]
Claire Nicolas
Thank you. That's a very important question. I think I tried a lot in the book to emphasize also the dichotomy between what the state wants and what people are actually doing and whether it is the colonial state or the post colonial state. And especially when it comes to the youth, where states in the 20th century have great expectations for the youth, which translate in various activities, can be very authoritarian and so on. And I think that's why I really have this running all over the book, this debate. But I do believe it was fundamentally different between colonial and post colonial era, mostly because of the core project. It's not just in terms of what activities are being played. Right. It's what they are turned into and what they are used for. And I think that's Arjuna Padurai's beautiful work on India that really showed, led the way towards that direction. But the colonial authorities allowed sporting activities for civilizing purpose and were very keen on physical education for having a stronger colonial economy. It was really utilitarian, really. Meanwhile, on the other hand, it's very different to train young people because you want to project a new dignified identity. And I think it really, that's actually what matters, I think, and I think you can really see it. It's especially explicit in the Cadre Young Pioneers movement because you have all these theater plays and these speeches and so on, but also in the speeches by director of sports or physical education officers during grand events when they always emphasize the key role played by the youth in being the future leaders of the country, which is never the case, of course, during colonial era. And I think that's what makes it really different. Even if they are still playing football or whatever.
- [51:20]
Keith Rathbone
Yeah, that, that makes sense to me. I, I, I, I, I'm always twisted between the idea of being unable to tear down the master's house with the master's tools like that once you in institute these kind of Foucaultian systems, like it's very hard to dismantle them. And, and, and so I wondered what, what your thoughts were. But that makes sense to me what you're saying, Claire.
- [51:46]
Claire Nicolas
And also I think it speaks to recent historiography in postcolonial Africa that also emphasize on African states in the 60s. Even the most progressive bureaus of emancipation were also sometimes at times very authoritative at national level. And we can see it with Kwame and Krumer. I think Jeffrey Almond's book showed it quite well. And you have also this tension by post colonial heads of state towards how they deal with Rhodey youth. And they should know because they were the rody youth a few decades before. So they are especially worried, especially in the late 60s when you have the global 60s movement. Youth movement which is very strong among students. Movement.
- [52:36]
Keith Rathbone
Yeah. No, no. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you.
- [52:43]
Claire Nicolas
Thanks.
- [52:44]
Keith Rathbone
No, it's making me laugh. No, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. I'd like to take the one last opportunity to ask you one more question, which is the question I always ask people at the end, which is in many ways my most unfair question, which is what is it that you're working on now? What can we look forward to enjoying next?
- [53:12]
Claire Nicolas
Well, thank you. Actually it's not unfair because it's also a bit easier to answer what you're working now than what you've been working in the past few years. In a way that is true.
- [53:23]
Keith Rathbone
Yeah.
- [53:26]
Claire Nicolas
The project I'm leading in Basel is a study of the world's Young Women's Christian association. And so I'm moving a bit away from sports towards women's movement and here a faith based Christian movement. And the idea is the World Young Women's. The Young Women's Christian Associations in most of the British Empire were very important for African women's rights movement at the local level. So you have a very strong interplay that was addressed by the literature. But on the other hand, it's really also a very imperialist, British led, US led enterprise of civilizing women towards new ideas about womanhood. You can see here some connection with my previous work and I'm interested in this paradox and I'm trying to unpack it, especially focus on Ghana and South Africa for this. And I'm especially interested in African women, how they moved around the organization, sometimes leading it. Like Ani Jage, who became vice president of the world organization and she was a judge from Ghana. So that's pretty much it. And I'm in the middle of the archives and they have beautiful archival repositories here in Geneva with so many letters and reports written by African members, women members. So it's really a fascinating read.
- [55:09]
Keith Rathbone
No, you can't resist the comparison approach. I love it. I'm looking forward to reading it already.
- [55:18]
Claire Nicolas
Thank you very much.
- [55:19]
Keith Rathbone
Thank you so much, Claire, for joining us. You've been listening to New Books in Sports, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Keith Rathbun and I am a Senior lecturer in History at Macquarie University, and I've been speaking today with Claire Nicolas. She's a Chercheus du Fond Nationale Suisse at Basel University and also the holder of an Ambition Research Grant at Basel University, and she is the author of MCI Long Course Sport Genre et Citoenite Ogana et Encot des roir Annethaneuf sans Soissendis, out from Crest Universitaire de Rennes in 2024. Thank you for joining me, Claire, and.
- [56:07]
Claire Nicolas
Thank you so much for having me.
- [56:09]
Keith Rathbone
Thank you everyone, for listening.
- [56:25]
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