Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville

Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press
9780521524469
0-521-52446-6

In this book, Phyllis Martin, a well-known Africanist scholar, opens up a whole new field of African research: the leisure activities of urban Africans. Her comprehensive study, set in colonial Brazzaville.

read more…

and based on a wide variety of written sources and interviews, investigates recreational activities from football and fashion to music, dance and night life. In it, she brings out the ways in which these activities built social networks, humanised daily life and forged new identities, and explains how they ultimately helped to remake older traditions and values with new cultural forms.