In April 1958 a small group of footballers led by Rachid Mekloufi quietly left their professional teams in France and quit the country clandestinely. Convened in Tunis, they announced their commitment to the FLN’s struggle for Algerian independence from France as the first national football team of Algeria. The move won the ‘Onze de l’indépendence’ enduring admiration and scored the FLN a significant public relations victory. As this episode illustrates, sports constituted a compelling terrain for political action during decolonization. From 1957 through independence, the FLN and the French Army both looked to sports as a tool – not only to win loyalty and build legitimacy, but to transform rural Algerians into modern political subjects. Despite their deeply opposed visions of Algeria’s future, the FLN and the French Army shared remarkably similar developmentalist worldviews. For both, the underdevelopment, illiteracy, and underemployment of Algerian youths – who represented a disproportional sliver of the population – were key problems. And for both, sports offered a preliminary solution. Sports hardened bodies. It taught perseverance, self-discipline, and teamwork. In short, sports offered a means of socialization (and nationalization) that was both cheap and attractive. This paper draws on the archives of the French Army and colonial administration to examine one athletic program in particular: the ‘foyers sportifs.’ These rudimentary sports clubs were originally designed by French army officers as a tool to help socialize Muslim youths whose purportedly ‘backward’ religious and cultural habits rendered them ill-prepared for ‘modern’ life. But as they ballooned in number to more than seven thousand by 1961, I argue, they became sites not just for asserting state power, but contesting it. By situating these camps in a longer history of political contestation through sports in Algeria, and by tracing their eventual absorption into the independent Algerian state as a tool of youth education, this paper complicates the notion of sports as a straightforward tool of socialization and highlights the deep ties between physical cultural and developmentalist thought at midcentury.

In this paper, I consider how postcolonial Amazigh activism has been constituted through public performances of appropriately gendered subjects. I focus on how sporting disciplines of football and pétanque in Kabylia and southern Morocco have served as training grounds for young men to internalize and embody Amazigh pride as both a collective consciousness and individualized expression. Not only do football fields and pétanque courts serve as a spaces for activist organization and militant demonstrations, but the games themselves become occasions for meta-social reflections on the dynamics of political struggle, the fragility of group solidarity and the precarity of rural life writ large. Moreover, given their decidedly colonial and military genealogy, playing football and pétanque reflects transformations over the last century of a Berber masculinity ambivalently defined by resistance. While such a violent past might now appear institutionalized and secularized, occasional acts of unanticipated expression -- like Zinedine Zidane's famous head-butt (coup de boule) -- break the frame of play and interrupt the putatively disciplined sportization process. The paper pays particular attention to such frame violations and spectacular gestures, to the incompletion of the postcolonial peace.

During the 2018 African Nations Championship soccer tournament, Morocco had the opportunity to showcase its prowess in hosting international sports teams in brand-new stadiums in city suburbs around the Kingdom. While ultimately these displays proved fruitless in winning the 2026 World Cup bid, they did contribute to Morocco’s campaign to reform its image among its fellow African Union members. Inasmuch as the tournament’s official slogan reflected a mix of Moroccan Arabic and French (Dima Africa, Always Africa), so did the blurring of cultural and religious boundaries that occurred among spectators of the matches. Normally antagonistic Nigerian Christian and Cameroonian Muslim im/migrants mixed in the stands of Tangier Ibn Batouta Stadium as they rooted against the Libyan national team, who tried to withstand constant jeering and indeed verbal abuse related to the recently exposed allegations of slave markets in Libya. This paper builds from ethnographic research among West and Central African match-goers, primarily from Cameroon, Senegal, and Nigeria, who attended 2018 championship matches in Tangier, Morocco. From this position, it situates social and linguistic solidarities that emerged across ethnic, religious, and national boundaries within the broader context of pluralism and immigration in the region. In doing so, it describes a Moroccan social fabric transforming because of religious pluralism, immigration to North African countries, and the regional apprehension of the Maghrib as seen from the south. This changing social fabric reveals the importance of time spent waiting among im/migrants in Morocco, who forge bonds of solidarity that appear fully and seemingly spontaneously articulated in events such as sports tournaments. Rather than considering migrant time spent waiting as vacuous, this paper argues for an understanding of waiting as productive of both distracted (and thus exploitable) time , as well as community fostering social exchange time .

Female participation in sports, including equestrian sports, is on the rise in the Middle Eastern and North African nations. Using interviews, participant-observation, photography and film, I address how Moroccan women are increasingly becoming involved in the male-dominated equestrian sport of tbourida. With the ethnographic example of Amal and her fellow tbourida riders, I discuss how tbourida is a telling case of a male–dominated sport. I demonstrate how women became involved, why they chose to ride with women or men, exerted themselves for their position on the field, endured sexism, how the women have worked (or have not worked) together to create more teams and more invitations to festivals. In this presentation, I consider tbourida festivals spectacles within everyday life. It is a sport, a spectacle, a martial art, but for participants young and old, and for spectators of all ages from urban and rural areas. First, I will discuss Asef Bayat’s social nonmovements and how the women’s presence (physical and online) on the tbourida field works within this framework. It examines other aspects of their lives, as they reveal agency in a social nonmovement for gender equality within this equestrian sport in Morocco. I will look at women’s visibility via using social media as a tool for change leading to growing acceptance among their male counterparts and the Moroccan public recognizing and normalizing the women’s presence in tbourida. I argue that the tbourida women’s nonmovement such as visibility as a generation on the streets, in male-dominated jobs, on social media, and in the news, has allowed for more support of the female riders. Instead of being political actors in social movements that are organized (such as the aforementioned arrested protestors and activists), these tbourida women’s “act of presence” and embodiment of their principles in everyday life to be viewed as equals have instigated widespread acceptance at the local festival level, briefly at the national level, and acknowledgement through their online presence (Bayat 2013). I will also discuss the downside of social media in this social nonmovement. Finally, I will give examples of how the women in tbourida fit into Harkness and Hongsermeier’s (2015) strategies of resistance and build on an existing strategy.