To browse Academia. This paper discuss the politics of football in Kinshasa, with a particular focus on the ways this manifested itself during the regime of Joseph Kabila. The literature on the politics of football shows how the sports can play both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic role: whereas the former primarily happens by financing football clubs, and reputation building for individual politicians; the latter happens through collective action by soccer fans, which-for example through riots-are able to contest political regimes.
Similar dynamics play out in Kinshasa. On the one hand, soccer clubs constate an important way to build political capital for the regime s in power: many regime politicians involve themselves with soccer clubs, in a way which allows them to improve-or launder-their reputation.
This primarily happens through financial support, and was particularly important for the Kabila regime, which was largely unpopular in the capital. On the other hand, football also is a space for political opposition in Kinshasa. For example, in a situation of escalating repression under the Kabila regime, football stadiums offered the possibility to voice opposition to the regime, through the singing of anti-Kabila songs.
That being said, this political agency remained confined within a structural context of a much more powerful authoritarian state.
Football and politics: a fruitful relationship or a tool for social manipulation? Football is a cultural phenomenon that has become with time a significant instrument in the political life of Cameroon. Football is now seen as a catalyst of social facts, practices related to identities, an innovative trade, a means to pass on ideologies and new philosophies in Cameroon. The aim of this study is to carry out a functionalist and historicalhermeneutic reading of the impact of football on the Cameroonian society in its pursuit of the construction of national unity and its search for a multidimensional influence on the international scene.
