Nation building exercise: Sporting culture and the rise of football in colonial Nigeria

In Nigeria, the rhetoric surrounding football focuses on how important the game is to national unity and how the rare moment when Nigerians feel a unity of purpose is when their national team is playing. How did football, a completely foreign cultural practice, come to become so important to Nigeria and Nigerians?;Football did not come to Nigeria as the only British cultural export, and it certainly did not arrive into a cultural vacuum. This study of the dispersion of football must also, therefore, examine attitudes, perceptions, motivations, and practices from both sides of the cultural exchange, as well as other recreational activities. In light of this, the body of work is divided into two parts. The first part describes how British ideals and practices of sport came to Nigeria, how the cultural diffusion to Africans took place, and the varied African responses. The second discusses how and to where football first came to Nigeria, various ways in which the game spread throughout the country, different responses of Africans to football as the sport was indigenized, and the contribution football made to the development of a Nigerian sense of common purpose and identity.;Even while the British found sport an intrinsic aspect of the development of their own ideals of leadership, they believed that for Africans sport could be an ideal mechanism through which to inculcate European values of loyalty, time, sportsmanship, and fair play. While the British colonial establishment favored elitist British sports like cricket and polo, the Nigerian masses turned instead to football so that by the 1940s what was introduced as a means to create loyal subjects was reversed to become a tool of anti-colonial mobilization and process. As the colonial period drew to an end, football's important role as a national cultural unifier and as a way for Nigeria to become integrated into the international community increased so that by the time Nigeria emerged as an independent nation, football would provide a rare means of unity in a country otherwise plagued by conflict and division.