Kasi Football: an Ethnography of South African Rural Working-Class Football Traditions

Kasi football is the most popular form of informal urban football that emerged in the low-income black working-class neighbourhoods of South Africa. This football tradition took shape in the early 20th century in the context of forced labour migration in the industrializing South Africa. Autonomously organised, free-flowing, football games played for a sum of money or other stakes not only served as a way to cope with pressures of rapid urbanisation and displacement, but also as a way to reclaim ownership over their leisure space and time. In this paper, I examine how these urban football traditions are reimagined and performed among the rural working-class in contemporary South Africa. This ethnography of kasi football, games played almost every weekend, exposes the cultural robustness, adaptability to the conditions of disenfranchisement, as well as rawness of extreme inequality, which sustain these practices.