Football and Colonialism. Nuno Domingos
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tours the metropolitan clubs made in Lourenco Marques, gradually reached the suburbs, becoming shared knowledge. As an element of an urban popular culture, football, an architect of bonds and identifications, broke, not arbitrarily, with the social closures that also constrained the dissemination of information in a divided urban area. In the actual practice of the game, however, things were different.
SPORTS AND STATE POLICIES: SEGREGATION, REGULATION, AND PROPAGANDA
The manner in which the colonial state and other colonial powers intervened directly in the process of sports dissemination and adoption in imperial contexts was addressed by research studies focusing the role of sports as an instrument of cultural domination, mostly inspired by the English colonial experience. The formation of a “cultural bond,” the result of an imperial socialization based on colonial culture, would have affected “indigenous cultures,” political relations, and the way in which the governed perceived the rulers and vice-versa.92 Sports were central to the curriculum that contributed to the formation of colonial cadres in English public schools. Their role was that of a school of character building and virile virtues. In the colonial milieu, they were introduced to the local elites through the school environment and religious missions; sports became an instrument of socialization and domestication of bodies and contributed to a growing hegemonic domination.93 This perspective, underpinned by the principles of indirect rule, is in line with the study of hegemonic forms of domination, discipline, and regulation of bodies and minds that permeated the cultural venture of colonialism and that complemented the forms of economic, political, religious, and military power.94
In Lourenço Marques this association between colonial policies and colonial culture was far from being linear. State intervention in the realm of sports was internally diverse and had to respond to distinct demands that sometimes were contradictory. Moreover, state institutions were not able to control the social effects of associative sports, especially when organized sports began to develop a specific market based on spectatorship and labor protoprofessionalism.
The participation of suburban players in the downtown championship depended on the clubs’ boards’ decisions and the AFLM’s policy. The number of nonwhite athletes playing in this competition was, until the end of the 1950s, minimal. The downtown transfer market, sustained by the growing influx of settlers, rarely involved suburban players.95 Some footballers, however, managed to achieve this promotion. In 1938, Vicente, from Beira-Mar, and Américo, from João Albasini, started playing for Desportivo’s team.96 In 1941, O brado africano wrote that Laquino had embraced a professional career and would be earning between MZE 40 and MZE 50 per match.97 According to the newspaper, this was a deplorable situation: “What has African neighborhood football come to, when you play for money and not for the love of the sport.”98 Desportivo and 1.o de Maio were the first clubs to open their doors to nonwhite players.99 According to Mário Wilson,
In a somewhat racist context there was the Associação de Futebol de Lourenço Marques, where racial mixture was rare. Racial mixture only took place within the elite, the privileged. Every now and again a person of color appeared. There was racism . . . there was a period where the possibility of mixture wasn’t even there, even if the door was not closed shut. Then there were guys who played on both sides, but only those that belonged to the two races, to the mixed races . . . there would be one or two that stood out from the pack, but they were few and far between. That was the way of things in Desportivo, in Ferroviário, in Sporting. I don’t know if it was written down or anything, but that’s the way it was. I recall that it was common for some to be pushed out, not because of their football performances but because it just wouldn’t do. . . . I played in the elite championship, I came from one of the privileged families, the Wilsons.
The possibility of African teams playing alongside downtown teams was not even considered before the Second World War. In 1943, Joaquim Augusto Correia, also known to his readers as Jack, a Portuguese settler writing for O brado africano, started a campaign for the inclusion of Beira-Mar in downtown competitions.100 Shortly after this initiative, O brado africano announced his dismissal, following an AFLM communication accusing him of writing “articles that are inconvenient to the sports cause and to the native policy followed by this nation’s government.”101 O brado africano protested102 several times the fact that the few black and mestiço players playing downtown were excluded from the teams representing the city, something that happened whenever they traveled to South Africa or when they received South African teams.103 The dispute, in defense of the positions of the local mestiço petite bourgeoisie, often challenged the regime’s assimilationist rhetoric.104 From the 1950s, the journalist and poet José Craveirinha, writing for O brado africano and Notícias, regularly defended the right of African players to play in the downtown league. Black athletes’ performances, especially North American ones, from the achievements of Jesse Owens in Berlin to the idolized Joe Louis, revealed the value of the “race” despised by the European.105 Praising these athletes was a way of demonstrating, within the general frame of the debate on the value of races, the political importance of “black pride.”106 Sport was an effective arena of contestation. For most of inhabitants of the cement city, the universe of suburban football was an unknown reality, merely another piece of a spatial puzzle drawn by prejudice and stereotype.
The Legitimation of State Discrimination
As can be seen clearly from the epic description of the development of physical education in the territory of Mozambique in the 1920s that Ismael Mário Jorge presented at the 1931 Paris Colonial Congress, the state fostered the separation between educational and associative sport, exclusive to settlers and “assimilated,” and the disciplinary practices indígenas were subjected to, as part of their integration into Portuguese military structures and schools. The Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal Indígenas (Natives’ Political, Civil, and Criminal Statute) did not grant the indígenas any political rights within European institutions.107 Further, the 1933 Reforma Administrativa Ultramarina (Overseas Administrative Reform) barred them from forming administrative corporations. These normative resolutions also excluded indígenas from the right to form associations, including sporting associations. The Carta Orgânica do Ultramar (Overseas Organic Charter), approved in 1929,108 and the RAU gave the colonial administration powers to oversee associations’ activities, to approve statutes, budgets, and administrative bodies, and, if necessary, to put an end to them.109 This supervision was exercised by the Direcção dos Serviços de Administração Civil (DSAC, Head Office of Civil Administration Services), which devoted part of its services to the Agremiações Regionais de Recreio, Defesa, Desporto e Estudo (Regional Leisure, Defense, Sports, and Study Associations). Each sports club had a file in the DSAC. While indígenas were not permitted to lead associations, their participation in the activities of some African clubs, as members and athletes, meant that the clubs came under the supervision of the Direcção dos Serviços dos Negócios Indígenas (Head Office of Native Affairs), equally represented by a section devoted to Agremiações Regionais de Recreio, Defesa, Desporto e Estudo (Regional Leisure, Defense, Sports, and Study Organizations).110 The DSAC and DSNI launched enquiries into some African clubs, whenever they suspected a possible foreign involvement, which was testament to the degree of political control exerted over the field of sport. Later, the Serviços de Centralização e Coordenação da Informação de Moçambique (SCCIM, Mozambique Office for the Centralization and Coordination of Information), created in 1961 by the Overseas Ministry but directed by the local governor, increased the surveillance over associations and sports clubs.111
In 1930 the charter that organized the indígena education system in Mozambique, dividing it into “rudimentary,” “professional” and “normal” teaching—the latter dedicated to the training of teachers—included the discipline of physical education.112 However, when the Mocidade Portuguesa de Mozambique (MP; Portuguese Youth of Mozambique), the first institution devoted to the promotion and regulation of sports activities in the territory, was created in 1939, it was directed exclusively at the “civilized” population. A premilitary youth organization, Mozambique’s Mocidade Portuguesa, modeled on the metropolitan Mocidade Portuguesa—which