Different Faces of Colonialism: Sport in Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea

Abstract Despite a common trajectory, sport has taken significantly different forms in Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea. These differences provide a glimpse into both the plasticity of sport as a phenomenon and the specificities of colonial processes, even more remarkable in this case, given that both contexts involve the same colonizer: Portugal. This study focuses on the different ways in which representations of sport were constructed in Cape Verde and in Portuguese Guinea during the colonial period. The debate centres on two themes: (a) the political uses of sport by metropolitan interests and (b) the political uses of sport by local interests.