Radio Soccer Commentary as Reconstruction and Performance of Political and Social-cultural Reality: The Case of Kenya in the 1980s

Abstract

This paper has developed the argument that live radio soccer commentary (LRSC) is a representation of soccer match events at one level but a performance of dominant socio-cultural and political trends of the societies at another level that produce and consume them. This echoes Reaser’s (2003) and Ryan’s (1993) perceptions of sports announcer’s talk as a complex performance form based on but not limited to the “verbal imitation” of live sport events. We have understood the performativity of the LRSCs in the light of Schechner’s (2006) emphasis of what he termed “restored behaviour” in understanding performance. In our context, we have treated the interpenetration of Kenyan soccer, politics, and society as the “restored behaviour” upon which the script of the LRSCs are based. The methodological apparatus of this paper is largely qualitative, consisting in the critical analysis of audio-recordings of Kenyan LRSCs. Focus is made on the Kenyan society of the 1980s, an era perceived to have been characterized by a close interaction between soccer, society, and politics. The analysis is informed by Fabian’s (1997) inter-textual approach to the “reading” and interpretation of performance texts. This approach seems to echo a wider discourse of the social nature of media-text interpretation that has been proposed by Burn and Parker (1985). Conclusions drawn from the analysis reveal what Muponde and Zegeye (2011) had described as a soccer “ecosystem” involving soccer as a sport, and the socio-cultural realities of its immediate context. This paper has argued thatLRSC is one of the channels through which this ecosystem is expressed.