Paper short abstract:

In telling the life story of a young African soccer player, this paper reflects on the interactions between: the contemporary and the historical; the social and the political; the personal and the structural; and all the diverse meanings and processes soccer takes on in a South African township.

Paper long abstract:

Sixteen year old Abongile Elton Qobisa, better known as 'Maradona', played as a striker for the Rawsonville Gunners Football Club, in a small rural township of Rawsonville, in the Western Cape. His becoming the 'Maradona' of Rawsonville, his aspirations and talent, and the circumstances within which he negotiates soccer - all illuminates a section of social text as it unfolds for a "black" youth in post-apartheid South Africa. Despite the centrality of soccer in the social life of rapidly urbanising African population in the early years of colonial South Africa, the contemporary discourses portray soccer as an innovative tool for "development" and socialization of youth living in structurally constrained conditions. In these discourses and practices, and the particular ways in which they conceptualise the past, present and future of township youth, Maradona's life is largely unintelligible. In presenting a biographical account of amaXhosa Maradona's life, I draw attention to the confused, contradictory and complicated within the processes of social and structural meaning-making, within embedded histories, and in the politics of everyday in which soccer affects and is affected by all those who pursue it.