A ‘Rebel’ on the Run: Kenyan Gambles on Intercollegiate Athletics, Apartheid Sport, and US Road Racing of the 1980s – The Case of Samson Obwocha

Sikes, Michelle M.

doi:10.1080/09523367.2022.2114462

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The heads of these institutions brought with them late nineteenth‐ century British and European ideologies of muscular Christianity and competitive sports, by which structured sports competitions were crucial for instilling virtues of courage, self‐control, and endurance – virtues they considered masculine. The representatives of the British Empire considered a competitive spirit central to the making of virtuous masculine subjects, but detrimental to the development of women and femininity (Sikes 2014: chap. 3).…”

Section: Pace‐making: Gendered History Of Competition and Professiona...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In postcolonial Kenya, several women emerged as outstanding athletes, but women continued to encounter ‘structural roadblocks’ (Sikes 2014: 247) to athletic careers, with expectations of marriage and household labour keeping them from careers of training and travelling for races 10. It was not until the professionalization and commercialization of international running in the 1990s that athletic opportunities opened up for Kenyan women on a larger scale.…”

Section: Pace‐making: Gendered History Of Competition and Professiona...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘A place for training, not for competition’: negotiations of competition and agency among long‐distance runners in Kenya

Kovač

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Kenyan long‐distance runners have for decades famously dominated international athletic competitions. Most of the aspiring runners live and train in the highlands of northwest Kenya, in Elgeyo Marakwet County, where they have access to competitive peer groups of budding athletes and an elaborate infrastructure of camps, coaches, and managers. The most promising and successful ones travel abroad to take part in international races, only to quickly return and continue training in the ‘county of champions’. Meanwhile, Kenya is undergoing a rapid transformation, envisioned by the government's development plan, which promises to transform it into a ‘globally competitive and prosperous country’. On the surface, competition is a self‐explanatory notion that drives the transnational sports industry and the state's development plan. However, ethnography of the county's capital, Iten, and its community of athletes reveals tensions: Kenyans take up, negotiate, appropriate, and challenge meanings of competition offered by the state and the sports industry on ecological, gendered, and moral grounds. Ethnography of ideologies of competition in Iten, conceptualized as moral, aesthetic, and gendered projects, complicates accounts of competition as a tool for global neoliberal governance. It also provides an alternative to analyses of African subjects’ agency in global circulation of capital, people, and ideas, namely analyses subsumed under signs of marginality, dependence, and subjection.

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Section: Pace‐making: Gendered History Of Competition and Professiona...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pace‐making: Gendered History Of Competition and Professiona...mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A place for training, not for competition’: negotiations of competition and agency among long‐distance runners in Kenya

Kovač

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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show abstract

“It is the principle behind the issue which is important and sacred”: Kenyan rugby and the 1980 University of Nairobi campaign to end British contact with apartheid sport

Sikes

Anangwe

2022

Safundi

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A ‘Rebel’ on the Run: Kenyan Gambles on Intercollegiate Athletics, Apartheid Sport, and US Road Racing of the 1980s – The Case of Samson Obwocha

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

‘A place for training, not for competition’: negotiations of competition and agency among long‐distance runners in Kenya

‘A place for training, not for competition’: negotiations of competition and agency among long‐distance runners in Kenya

“It is the principle behind the issue which is important and sacred”: Kenyan rugby and the 1980 University of Nairobi campaign to end British contact with apartheid sport

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