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Modernization and the Game of Soccer in Cameroun

Durkheim has shown how the functions ascribed to physical education among Ancient Greek communities vary with their respective modes of social organization.’ This proposition may be generalized and refined. Thus, the incidence of a variety of sports and more specifically the relative importance attached to collective over individual sportive activities should vary with the socio-economic and cultural profiles of the societies taken into consideration.2 Moreover, there should be a parallel set of relationships between modes of social participation in a particular game and the dominant traits of the society at large. In the present paper, we intend to focus our attention on soccer and to show how the participation of players, officials and audiences in that game is influenced by larger societal structures and processes. We use Cameroun, in West Africa, as a case study for two reasons. First, soccer is and has been a popular game in that country since the early days of colonization. In addition, the country has been subjected to the triple influence of German, British, and French colonial authorities. Our main task is accordingly to isolate a significant set of interrelationships between patterns of colonization and subsequent forms of social differentiation on the one hand and patterns of participation in soccer on the other. In the first part of the paper, we will treat modes of participation in soccer as dependent variable. We will reverse our approach in a second