By Darragh Mcgee a Thesis Submitted in Conformity with the Requirements
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NAVIGATING BODIES, BORDERS AND THE GLOBAL GAME: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF YOUTH, FOOTBALL AND THE (PRODUCTIVE) POLITICS OF PRIVATION IN GHANA, WEST AFRICA By Darragh McGee A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Exercise Sciences University of Toronto © Copyright by Darragh McGee (2015) NAVIGATING BODIES, BORDERS, AND THE GLOBAL GAME: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF YOUTH, FOOTBALL AND THE (PRODUCTIVE) POLITICS OF PRIVATION IN GHANA, WEST AFRICA Darragh McGee Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Exercise Sciences University of Toronto 2015 ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the precarity and politics of youth as it intersects with the game of football in postcolonial Ghana. Departing from scholarly assertions of a ‘crisis’ of youth in its masculine guise, the study is predicated on the lived experiences of a male youth citizenry excluded from the prosperous narrative of Ghana’s neoliberal state, and unable to procure the basic means to work, wage and wedlock. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in southern Ghana, I ask of how this generation of peripheral male youth construct the game of football vis-à-vis the precarious nature of their societal ‘becoming’, and their broader quest to live productively through the fractured, crisis-ridden exigencies of these neoliberal times. Drawing on the metaphor-concept of the borderland, I proceed to argue that the game of football – both as a mediated form of global popular culture and a hegemonic masculine practice – has come to represent an alternative source of mobility and a most millenarian resolution to the ‘crisis’ of youth in its masculine and West African guise. I contend that the game now serves as a primary vehicle for utopian imaginaries of future amongst male youth in Ghana, where migration and the quest to ‘go outside’ have become fundamental ii features of a youth culture edging ever-further away from its former anchoring in Pan- African narratives. Ultimately, this project is an ethnography of the non-linear journeys that are enacted by male youth in their quest to become mobile out of Africa, and through their corporeal investment in the ‘global’ game. Stretching from the impoverished hinterlands of Accra to the insulated rural confines of one of West Africa’s premier football academies, it is an ethnography which speaks to the virile forging of personal biography amidst postcolonial history – its foremost contribution being to illuminate the productive politics of youth, agency and mobility as they manifest on the margins of the modern world. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1. A Paradox of the Present 1 1.2. Youth, Africa and the Neoliberal Politics of Privation 4 1.3. Borderland Masculinities, Football and the Quest for Exile 7 1.4. Reading the Thesis 12 1.5. Chapter Outline 15 2. CHAPTER 2: THEORIZING AFRICA, YOUTH & THE GLOBAL-PRESENT 2.1. Introduction 20 2.2. (Dis)Engaging Globalism: From the Margins of Modernity 24 2.3. (Re)Figuring Futures: On the Borderlands of Youth 33 3. CHAPTER 3: FROM FLOW TO FRICTION: RE-PLACING THE ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELD 3.1. Introduction 41 3.2. Ethnography and its Global Discontents: The Politics of Scale and 45 Vantage Point 3.3. Ethnographic Praxis and the (Global) Production of Place 49 3.4. The Friction of ‘Doing’ Fieldwork 56 3.5. Becoming an ‘Infrastructure’: Negotiating Race, Power and 62 Privilege in the Field 4. CHAPTER 4: ON THE BORDERLANDS: THE POLITICS OF YOUTH, FOOTBALL AND MASCULINE PATRONAGE ON THE URBAN POSTCOLONY 4.1. Introduction 72 4.2. The (Productive) Politics of Privation: Youth, Masculinity and the 76 African City 4.3. Playing the Global Game? Football, Masculinity and Mobility on 82 the Urban Postcolony 4.4. Masculine Patronage and the Quest to Justify 92 4.5. Conclusion 103 iv 5. CHAPTER 5: BODY POLITICS: COMMODIFICATION, CAPITAL AND THE CORPOREAL AMIDST GHANA’S FOOTBALL FRONTIER 5.1. Introduction 107 5.2. From Nkrumah to Neoliberalism: The Production of Ghana’s 113 Football Frontier 5.3. Body Sovereignties: Towards a Geography of Bodily 122 Commodification 5.4 The Politics of Commodity Value: Encountering the ‘African 132 Agent’ at Work 5.5. Conclusion 142 6. CHAPTER 6: ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT AND THE RIGHT TO DREAM 6.1. Introduction 147 6.2. The Academy in Africa: On Development and the Dream 154 6.3. The Fount of Futures Reinvented 162 6.4 On Ritual and Regimen: The ‘Total’ Program of Academy Life 168 6.5. ‘Professional Prospects’ and ‘Geek Recruits’: Forging a Future 177 within the Academy 6.6. The Field of Dreams 183 6.7. The ‘African King’ who Conquered Europe 198 6.8. Beyond the Borderlands: The Foreign Flight of Africa’s Future 202 7. CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION 210 8. REFERENCE LIST 220 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Ethnographic projects are collaborative in the most abundant sense, and this thesis is testament to the social in all its complexity, compassion and collegiality. The project would not have a reached a point of fruitful conclusion without the support and inspiration of friends, colleagues and family on both sides of the Atlantic. For their unique expressions of scholarly advice and encouragement over the course of this project, I sincerely wish to thank my thesis committee; Peter Donnelly and Caroline Fusco. I wish to thank all those who welcomed me into the intellectual culture of the University of Toronto, as well as my adopted home amidst the Varsity Blues Soccer family and at Massey College. Then there are the immense and incalculable debts that I amassed during the course of my ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana; to all those at the Right to Dream Academy, including James Meller, Tom Vernon, Joe Mulberry, Andy Farrant, Richard Evans, Gareth Henderby, to the teaching, pastoral and campus staff, including Kate and James Foxon, Emma and Paul Wassell, Harry Adekpui, Mary Yeboah, Samuel Kelly, Awal Kamin, Louise Kilding, Matthew Fanning, and most warmly, to all the ‘academy boys’ for granting me access to their everyday lives on-field and in the classroom. In Accra, I wish to thank the Ike family, as well as Coach Fifi, Big Bro and their aspiring crew of youth footballers for respectively sharing their passion for the game and for welcoming me into their everyday lives. For new colleagues at the University of Bath, the Department for Health and the Physical Cultural Studies research group, I am extremely grateful for the critical energy and guidance that has been offered. I have also been extremely fortunate to have students who have challenged the core themes at the heart of the project, and for lending their critical eye onto the predicament of youth at large. Finally, I reserve special thanks for the triumvirate who have sustained me intellectually, emotionally, and beyond: to my supervisor, Michael Atkinson, at the University of Toronto, I will always be indebted for the opportunity, patience and inspiration you have shown me reaching back to our early days at Loughborough University; to my parents, Jacqueline and Liam, and my siblings, Ambre, Ryan and Jonathan, your support and humour has driven me on and kept me grounded in equal measure; and to my fiancé, Saba, who has critically shaped and devotedly informed this project at every turn, your love, support and unwavering faith has been boundless. In ways unique and profound, this thesis is dedicated to each of them. vi LIST OF PLATES 1.1. Map of south Ghana detailing principle research sites 1.2. Right to Dream ‘Open Trial’ Notice 1.3. The entrance to the ‘school side’ at Right to Dream 1.4. The ‘school side’ campus from outside its walls 1.5. The village of Old Akrade adjacent to the ‘school side’ 1.6. The back wall of the open-dining hall 1.7. The archway entrance to the school courtyard 1.8. The global mapping of the academy’s graduate pathways 1.9. Dusk scene from the upper field at the ‘football side’ 1.10. The typical evening scene in the Obama Library vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1. A PARADOX OF THE PRESENT ‘THE ONLY DREAM is to go outside to play’, explains Big Bro as we amble by a cluster of small boys tenaciously battling for possession of a tattered old football, their unrelenting enthusiasm contrasting sharply with the sudden tranquillity of the evening scene. It was fast approaching sundown amidst the sprawling, shanty-like margins of Accra, and as the manic disorder of daylight softened into darkness, Big Bro and I were returning to ‘camp’ following an interview with nineteen year-old, Nana; an aspiring young footballer who – despite his recent ‘sacking’ from one of Ghana’s premier football academies – told of his unwavering faith in the transcendent power of the game. ‘I know it’, he replied when asked if he had a future in professional football, ‘I am certain He has such plans for me. No one can doubt His power to guide me in my dream’. ‘You see it now?’, asked Big Bro – evidently unmoved by such divine optimism – as we meandered back through a dense and decaying maze of makeshift dwellings, their mud- caked narrow alleys treacherously riven by a morning downpour. ‘All the boys, they are thinking like this… they don’t see anything here now’, he bemoaned, his frustrations evidently shifting from Nana’s fading hopes as a footballer, to the emergent ‘crisis’ that is said to confront his entire generation. As a self-proclaimed ‘local boy’ himself, Big Bro knew only too well the abject realities that now befell Ghana’s ever-swelling reservoir of idle, impatient male youth – their expectations of future progressively shadowed by soaring rates of unemployment, ever-receding labor opportunities, and a related decline in the perceived value of education1.