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Football emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in western industrialized societies at the same time as the expansion of colonialism and imperialism followed by the Berlin Conference in 1884 which aimed to adjudicate the separation of African continent between European States. 21 years earlier, in 1863, the Football Association was born with the formalization of the eleven rules of the game. Football evolved concomitantly with colonialism and imperialism on the eve of the 20th century. This sport became one’s of the most powerful tool in the diffusion of the colonial ideology “civilized versus primitive”, in disciplinarian of the indigenous and in popularization across the continent.

This essay will attempt to draw an understanding of colonialism and postcolonialism in an anthropological conception of football through the materiality and the social life of things.
The aim is to think football as a global sport interconnected with historical process such as colonialism through buildings to interrogate and build an ethnographic portrait in relationship to its colonial past.

My essay will focus on the now-called “Tata Raphaël stadium” in Kinshasa, RD Congo. The methodology of this essay will be a dialectical research between sports anthropological readings, personal stories of Congolese in newspaper and authors’ contributions such as Kopytoff, Gamble and Bourdieu.

First thing first, I will begin with the properties of a football stadium to better understand the uniqueness of this building in a cultural scene. Subsequently, in the following part, an historical and anthropological perspective of the stadium in the colonial context. Lastly, an ethnographic portrait through questions such as erasure, homogenization and containers of a “football building”.

The football stadium symbolizes a unique place in a city. In the stands, no matter your social background or economic status you live the same emotions as your neighbour. In this essay, the stadium will be studied in a colonial context. Modern sports, particularly football was introduced by settlers and consequently stadiums were built in the African colonies. The Tata Raphaël Stadium was central in the colonial state of Congo and its postcolonial identity until our times.

The stadium was a place to spread the ideology of independence for anti-colonial movement that campaigned against the colonial dominion and a place to domesticate and control the population through the game for the settlers.

Sports occupy a central position in the colonial situation and in the postcolonial thinking. Football has been both a tool for diffusion and education and a space for protest and resistance. The stadium of football perfectly symbolizes the domination, the resistance, and the contradiction of a colonial and a postcolonial state. The aim is to think through the building as a receptacle of social life. What games do as a material entity and as a social process? How and why the stadium was built? How its past resonates with the present? What meaning does it carry now and then? What relationship does the stadium maintain with the colonial past? In an anthropological perspective, the essay explores how the Tata Raphaël stadium and colonialism were imbricated through the experience of players, fans, settlers, and indigenous around the life of the stadium. The Congolese football needs players to play football and they need their temple to perform. With the construction of the stadium, football has become an institution and entered in “the life of a so-called ordinary Congolese”1.

The idea is to draw an understanding of the stadium through the witnessing of people but also through its meaning, its colonial past, and resonance between the present and the past.

A football stadium stands out by the particularity of the fans forming an unbeatable wave that cannot be stopped. It’s an explosive place that colonial authorities needed to control carefully and use wisely for colonial propaganda.2

Building a stadium in a colonial state was imbricated with sports practices and a political vision of settling a better control of the population to reinforce the colonization.

Sports have two faces. It was both a tool for the settlers to control the population and for the “natives” to protest in the stands. Football was also a place for socialization, where the ideal of independence was propagated in the club through the stadium.

The Tata Raphaël Stadium in Kinshasa has been inaugurated in 1952 during the Belgian colonization. Football was emerging among the people of Kinshasa and an increasing part of the autochthones wanted to kick the ball. The most popular sport was governed by the colonial authorities that decides when and with who the autochthones could play football. Initially, it was reserved for white people. Through the years in the colonial state, increasingly indigenous played football and settlers use the sport to discipline the young indigenous boys that wanted to play. In this context, the now-called Tata Raphaël stadium was built in Kinshasa (Formerly Leopoldville from 1881-1966).

In June 1957, Union Saint-Gilloise Brussels-based football club) travelled to Congo for an international tour to play against a Congolese team. Thanks to an advantageous arbitrage, Union Saint-Gilloise won the game 4-2. In the stands of the Tata Raphaël stadium, the anger of the Congolese football fans was growing.
The supporters’ ire exploded into a riot outside the stadium. The particularity of the stadium3 transforms a group of people into a moving force in protest. After the riot, more than one hundred people were injured and some of the protestors were arrested by the authorities. The 16th of June 1957 is remembered as the first anti-colonial protestation of this scale. The contagion of independence rose in the soul of the indigenous.

The game won by Union Saint-Gilloise in the Tata Raphaël Stadium was part of a broader colonial propaganda to ensure the dominance of “white people” and legitimate the cultural domination of the Belgian metropolis in the mind of Congolese. Instead, this umpteenth injustice acted as the metaphor of what they suffer in their day-to-day lives outside the stadium.

“Football has often been compared to a “mirror of society”, but this metaphor is misleading. Rather than reflecting society as it is, it offers individuals and groups a stage for expressing their desires and hopes.”4

In the stands, people express their hopes and anger and their desire for liberation against a colonial State. The football stadium act as a contagious outlet that resonates with the injustice and the violence inflicted by the settlers.

The football stadium was the fertile field to plant the seed of the resistance’s movement for independence 3 years later in Congo.

In Kinshasa, for example, as one of the world’s football-crazy cities, passion for football often runs wild concerning participation in recreational football as well as spectatorship at the two major stadiums: Stade des Martyrs and Stade Tata Raphael.5

The Tata Raphaël Stadium allowed Congolese to experience a national feeling and to summon up a pan-Africanist ideology in the stands.

He would witness, from the pitch, the passion of Congolese fans, as his team had been invited to open for two of the most anticipated matches of the mid-1970s at the city main stadium, Stade Tata Raphael, later renamed Stade du 20 Mai by the Mobutu regime. On those occasions, those matches would bring together, on the one hand, two African Cup Champions winners, AS Vita Club and Hafia Conakry, and, on the other hand, the derby of Kinshasa between FC Imana (currently Daring Club Motema Pembe) and FC Dragons (also once renamed FC Bilima). Because those types of matches often featured some of the most celebrated African footballers.6

A football stadium has a biography as things and people. Buildings such as houses or stadiums aged and turn in other particular use until it collapse.

The Highbury stadium of Arsenal is an example of how the typical life of this building begins with the home matches of the football club and turned to a real estate complex in the neighbourhood of Islington, North London.

Igor Kopytoff invites us to think “In doing the biography of a thing one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its “status” and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized “ages” or periods in the thing’s life,” and what are the cultural markers for them? How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness?”

In doing the biography of the Tata Raphaël stadium, the history of this building has a social and political focus imbricated with colonialism and postcolonialism. Questions such as the ownerships of the stadium connected to postcolonialism in the social and political focus are compelling to recognize the cultural ideology and the ruling authorities that led Congo through times.

Initially, The Tata Raphaël Stadium was built in 1952 under the name “Stade Roi Baudouin”. The naming has been chosen by the ruling settlers authorities in honour of Belgium’s King to consolidate the relationship with the metropolis. The 30th June 1960, Congo promulgated the independence. The next few months were followed by periods of political upheaval, with assassinations and secessionist regions. In these tumultuous events, the prime minister and leader of independence, Patrice Lumumba got killed and political instability reigned in Congo. Afters years of wars and proclamation of the new constitution, Mobutu takes power in Congo and implements its new dual policy: authenticity and nationalism summed up in Zaïrianisation.

President Mobutu brought even more radical reforms by nationalizing, in what became to be known as Zaïrianisation, all the football infrastructures and institutions.7

On the 20th of May 1967, the new president of Congo enacted the charter of his political party. This day symbolizes the new era in Congo with nationalist ideas and the authoritarian government of Mobutu.

Guise of the “Recourse to Authenticity,” the names of the country, currency, and river Congo were changed to Zaire. In football, the national team, formerly known as the Simba (Lions), became the Leopards. The national anthem and flag were redesigned. The two major stadiums in Kinshasa were renamed.8

This new era was symbolized in the renaming of the stadium from “Stade Roi Baudoin” to “le Stade-du-20-mai”. The naming is not an aesthetic conflict but a political vision. The biography by the ownership with a social and a political focus in relation to Congolese society points out that the stadium embodied different ideology through the renaming and model new form of social life in the postcolonial Congo.

In 1997, Congo entered in a new era with the exile of Mobutu and Kabila’s debut reign. To erase the memory, legacy, and stigma of the authoritarian government of Mobutu, the stadium was renamed “Stade Tata Raphaël”. “Tata" in Lingala means “Dad” and Raphaël by his complete name “Raphaël de la Kethulle de Ryhove” was a Belgian missionary priest in colonial Congo. He created many schools, associations, and sports facilities for the indigenous.

New political faces took place in Congo and a second movement kin to its colonial past has opened. Whereas Mobutu desired clearly to break with Belgian colonialism by creating a national Congolese identity, Kabila honoured the well-known missionary Raphaël de la Kethulle de Ryhove.

These various name changes reveal that the Tata Raphaël Stadium symbolizes an important political meaning in Congo for collective memory and maintains an intertwined relationship with its colonial past. Whether it is a question of divorcing with the past or reconciling with the “benevolent” faces of Belgium colonialism.

Our social relationships are constructed through material culture rather than spoken language9. A social space such as stadiums are material and metaphorical embodiment of our interaction. Things such as a building is interconnected in a network and acquire a symbolic force through experience and sensations of the spectators and people from the environment of the stadium. The relationships are built by how we act and what we act with.10

Symbolic force is instead an emergent property of the necessary relationships of human social life.11

Objects and things are inanimate but they convert bodies when they interact with them. Wear clothes and you change the silhouette of bodies. Things whether they are animate or inanimate conveys meanings in social relationships. A football stadium in interaction with bodies of spectators reunited in stands converts a crowd to a unified community of people. This group of people are reunited and identified under the same team and express the same desires. From the atomic individuals to the sense of belonging, the football stadium in these interactions emerged as a symbolic force. For example, the riot after the Union Saint-Gilloise match in Kinshasa (to see above in Football match: settlers domination/indigenous protestation).

As two hands of a same person embracing each others. They are engaged mutually in the relationship of that embrace. The right hand is not purely active while the left hand is purely passive and awaiting to welcome the right. They are both active and passive. They are both engaged in the embracing.

The incipit of the “Eye and mind” of Merleau-Ponty is “Science manipulates things and refuses to inhabit them”. He continues further “The enigma is that my body is both seeing and visible”. By these ideas of Merleau-Ponty, we interrogate the Cartesian perspective towards the visible, perception and the interaction with things.

The artefacts we make and the things we interact with such as trees, animals, rocks and hills are not, as a Cartesian perspective implies, simply passive while flesh and blood people alone are active agents.12

The football stadium is not a building that we interact with in a unique active relationship as if the stadium awaiting for us to fill the stands. The supporters resonate in the stadium through their chants as the stadium makes the supporters resonates. The interlacing act in this continuum like two hands in an embrace.

Hybrid culture takes our cognitive ability to see something as something, the basis of metaphorical understanding, and logically concludes that in terms of materiality, something is somebody.13

Through this metaphorical contribution, football stadiums are seen as bodies. To enter a stadium is “to enter a mind”, is to see through windows as we see through eyes, is to touch the metallic layer at the entrance as we touch the skin. The stadium is a body recessed in space and time and has consequently a birth and death date. (Ex. Highbury and Emirates)

The stadiums contain people, memories and are culturally embedded. There’s different classifications of stadiums and all of them are an “embodiment, lifecycles, cosmology and social organisation” of societies.

“…they resonate in the present, in both conscious and unconscious ways shaping our perception, serving to build cultural identities, producing affective reactions, and even spurring political movements. Their visibility and/or invisibility cannot be taken for granted, even when in plain sight, and their significance is highly variable depending on who is in their presence. These are sites demanding further ethnographic research in order to understand the ongoing presence of colonialism in contemporary societies.” Mary Douglas

Building stadiums refers to build social relations and a common world that cultivates collective memory and collective action. In the Tata Raphaël stadium, the resonance with the present and the past through colonialism is structuring in its history and collective action. The structure of the stadium is a metaphor of the city and the living of local residents. The social life in the cities are constantly in redefinition through interactions with material worlds or people and so stadiums are constantly in aim to rebuild themselves. They reflect the breathe of the changing-cities involved in a local and global process such as colonialism and postcolonialism.

A stadium is an enclosed space towards the city and wide-open turned inwards on the fields to welcome its inhabitants in the stands. The space of modern stadiums are increasingly build in oval with no discontinuity to guarantee the best view for all the spectators. The fact remains that in the spatial disposition and collective identity of the supporters, the stadium has four faces in opposition. The stadium is part of a cultural life with norms, traditions and languages. “Ends”, “Curva” or “terraces” are words that need a cultural integration to understand the disposition of the stadium. The Curva is located behind the goals.

The structural work of Bourdieu invites us to think this specific disposition in the spatial opposition. The stadium is a space that contains a social life with norms and codes where the belonging of a group of Ultra is a key to read the spatial disposition of people. The belonging of an upper social class is a criterion that also need to be interrogated. The stadium is organized in opposition of the stands (Curva Nord/Curva sud in Milan) and in opposition of the outside/inside. The purpose of the Ultra group located behind the goals is to be heard and to be seen through the chants or tifo . The football stadium on the outside is to see and to be seen, the football14 stadium on the inside is to network and arrange deals. The inside is dedicated to VIP spaces for business. An increasing proportion of tickets to see a football match is reserved for business.

The Tata Raphaël stadium was a tool for Congolese authorities to be praised and applauded when they were in the stands located in presidential stands.

The stadium is a place where identities are built through your sense of belonging to a team.

Spectatorship at stadiums has often generated contradictions. Every major Congolese city has its valued derbies, which, on occasions, have not only brought about joy and excitement to those present at these stadiums but also loss of spectators’ lives and the destruction of neighbourhoods.15

The stadium hosted The Derby de la Capitale between AS Vita and Daring Club Motemba Pembe gathering a large part of the Kinshasa population. These two clubs were founded by Raphaël de la Khetulle Ryhove in 1935-1936. Their confrontation was staged in the Tata Raphaël Stadium. The rivalry materializes in the stadium, where supporters’ identities are convened

There is also the Congolese classic between AS Vita and le tout-puissant Mazembe. In May 2014, these two clubs played against each other in match that was decisive for the league title. Rage spread through the stands and some fans threw bottles at the players. The referees stopped the game, police invaded the stands and 15 people died in the intervention. Jeanric Umande, one of the spectators this day, told us what happened in France 24:

"When things started to get out of hand, fans from the east wing and surrounding stands tried to leave the stadium before the final whistle. It was at this point that the police intervened, causing a veritable stampede. A wall of the building, which had not been renovated, collapsed and a gate collapsed on fans. Some were trampled to death in the stampede, but others were killed by poor infrastructure."16

Football is full of tragic stadium stories. In the testimonial of Jeanric Umande, we can remember the Heysel tragedy, killing more than 30 people. We remember Hillsborough in April 1989, Port-Saïd in February 2012, Kanjuruhan in October 2022.

The stands in the stadium are a place where identities gather, but also a place of loss, destruction, and ruin. The Tata Raphaël Stadium is a place of remembrance for the victims’ relatives, AS Vita supporters, and Congolese football.

The building and it’s modification through time combines a number of dimensions that express every colonial and postcolonial states of Congo. The naming, the actors that interact with them, and the preservation of the sites are possibilities to explore the stadium and how it projects new cultural identities.

The Tata Raphaël Stadium conveys politics, a sense of belonging, and the effect of loss through a colonial past well-rooted in Congolese football. The stadium has not ceased to reinvent itself with new appellations. It helps us understand how the Congolese authorities have sought to shape the nation from the time of the Belgian handcuffs to independence. Thinking through buildings such as football stadiums is a gateway that allows us to paint the picture of a society at the crossroads of personal histories and collective memory forever stained by colonialism. It raises questions about public spaces but also about monuments and the symbolization of the collective memory of a nation. Stadium unifies a nation that express their hopes and desire to escape the old colonial symbolization and shape new cultural and political identities.

The stadium through the witnessing of people but also through its meaning in social contexts, its colonial past, and resonance between the present and the past is in perpetual redefinition.

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