Manase Kudzai Chiweshe, ed. Football, Gambling, and Everyday Life in Zimbabwe. New York: Routledge, 2024. 150 pp. $153.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781032578866.

In this work edited by Manase Kudzai Chiweshe, the focus is on football betting in Zimbabwe, a country that, due to a large economic crisis in the 2000s, has around 80% of its population either unemployed or with short-term economic activities (a fact mentioned by several authors in this anthology).Betting encompasses, to many Zimbabweans, a glim hope of achieving significant financial gains.It is, however, not only in the hope of achieving a profit from placing a bet on football matches, but rather on the many aspects involved within gambling, that this work shows its true force and relevance.In the first chapter, the editor provides an interesting overview of how betting in football has become a relevant economic and social aspect in the country, due to a combination of economic despair, male sociability, the relevance of transnational fandoms (mostly of Premier League clubs from England), and a young population that is heavily connected to the internet, while also focusing on how betting has been a part of Zimbabwean history since its days as a British colony.In the next chapter, the same writer tries to understand how the youth of Harare turn to betting due to a lack of other economical possibilities.In this chapter, however, Chiweshe adopts a rather moralistic view of his subjects, without engaging in a deeper analysis of the choices taken by his informants.By claiming that "African people have historically been superstitious" (29), the term superstitious is used in ways that would be more fitting of a travel journal from an Anglican priest in the nineteenth century, than a scholar in the twentyfirst century.This becomes even more marked due to the author mentioning how some of his informants would turn to religion in order to achieve positive results, and then not offering any sort of analysis of the religious system being articulated by his informants.It is not that the author needs to share the beliefs of his informants but, rather, that he should have tried to interpret them in a more holistic manner.In the third chapter, Choto turns his analysis to the female experience in a field that is mostly masculine.The majority of the informants mentioned throughout the book are male, as women are mentioned mostly as exceptions to the rule, as betting parlours are widely perceived as masculine activities.By using decolonial feminism, Choto (34-35) situates the women who, in spite of the social limitations within their own society due to their gender, utilize several strategies in order to partake in this sociability that is mostly socially sanctioned for them.