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       Football and the Moral Economy of the Lourenço Marques Suburbs

      VISIONS OF THE SUBURBS

      The suburbs of the capital of Mozambique, where football was played from at least the early years of the twentieth century, were represented in various ways. The epic narratives of conquest, focused on the agency of the colonizer, did not take them as an object except as an informal space that was somewhere beyond the bounds of the real city and where African political structures, almost always thought of as the enemy, organized.¹ Later, the propagandistic and touristic lusotropicalism would represent the capital of Mozambique as a natural and cultural paradise. While for the most part the suburbs were overlooked in these representations, it sometimes appeared in the form of a folklorized space. In the same period, developmentalist economic discourse projected a modern and productive future for the city. However, unlike lusotropicalism, modernizing discourse was a response to a more pressing will to intervene, grounded in the old goal of economic exploitation, but now renewed by the science of productivity. The modernizing sectors, increasingly active in the colonial field of power, demanded a more qualified labor force, state investment, and a new social contract. While lusotropicalism imagined a culturally harmonious society managed by a mechanic solidarity, in the Durkheimian sense, the discourse of modernization deemed this organicity, supported by indigenato, unreliable. It was urgent, rather, to create other forms of social cohesion, grounded in a labor interdependence that could sidestep class or race consciousness. In this sense, the critical discourse of modernization, while it did not cross swords with the lusotropicalist façade, considered the suburb an unbalanced space that state planning should redress. The modernizing diagnostic, which was quite critical toward suburban society, in the end explained the origin of the problem in terms of a cultural adaptation, or lack thereof, to modernity. And yet the economic backwardness of the suburbs was the ground on which the local colonial field of power was built, to the benefit of a wide set of interests. The analysis of the dissemination of the game of football in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques allows us to generate an alternative representation of this peripheral space.

       Colonial Pastorals

      In 1971 a promotional book on Mozambique written by the colonial historian Oliveira Boléo and edited by the Agência Geral do Ultramar portrayed Lourenço Marques as

      a beautiful seaside city with wide avenues with plenty of trees, with beautiful gardens, hotels, theaters and cinemas, museums, monuments, viewpoints, bullfight arenas, swimming pools, fields for the practice of various sports, a hippodrome, libraries and archives, an international airport, in short, a modern cosmopolitan city, where black, white, yellow, and brown and mixed [mistos] mingle in the streets, always visited by numerous foreigners. . . . The public health, welfare, and school services are exemplary.²

      After the Angolan war broke out, in 1961, the Portuguese state reinforced the idyllic representation of colonial societies as a harmonious blend of progress and cultural diversity. From academic works to profusely illustrated touristic brochures, from the commission of films to the production of newsreels that were screened before commercial feature films in both the metropole and the colonies, a variety of media were used to publicize an African pastoral. Lourenço Marques was often represented in line within the frame of this benign version of colonialism.³ The publication, in 1966, in both Portuguese and English, of the autobiography of the great Mozambican player Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, in the wake of his extraordinary performances in the World Cup in England that same year, is an example of the wide variety of ways of producing this banal lusotropicalism. In its very first pages, we are introduced to a zealous, well-behaved African student, properly brought up by his mother, Elisa; he was a man who learned to play football in the humble, yet dignified, harmonious, colorful, exotic, and traditional environment of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques.⁴

      In 1968, Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques, a monograph about the city by colonial anthropologist António Rita-Ferreira, had painted a scenario that was strikingly different from these lusotropicalist pastorals. Mozambique’s capital was not a harmonious space. It was structurally divided, and existential insecurity defined the urban experience of the large periphery.⁵ According to this account, most suburban inhabitants lived with an uncertainty about remaining at their current address. The occupation of private lands, which they rented, exposed them to cursory evictions. Heavily policed and removed from easy access to civil courts, their means of protest seemed narrow. Besides the recurrent floods, which affected a large portion of the constructions in the periphery, in the reed world fires spread quickly and easily, started by candles, oil or petrol lamps, and bonfires.⁶ Other natural dangers, such as falling tree limbs lightning, or landslides, further increased the risk of this arduous everyday existence. Besides being exposed to natural disasters, the suburbs were also the laboratory for a host of human phenomena. According to the monograph’s author, the loosening of the grip once exerted by the family and the tribe⁷ explained the moral dissolution brought by prostitution, alcoholism, corruption, gambling, illegitimate offspring, crimes against property and persons, and the abandonment of one’s home and children.⁸ The suburban population was terrorized daily by gangs of criminals, most of them young: it was estimated that 80 to 90 percent of cases of crime prevention presented before the juvenile court involved African youngsters in the suburbs.⁹ Thefts and robbery of homes and shops, made easier by poor construction materials and the absence of public lighting, became commonplace, as did physical assaults.¹⁰ Given the absence of institutionalized means of punishment, public lynchings were common.¹¹

      Local diets, heavily based on the consumption of corn, sorghum, cassava, and sweet potato, encouraged malnutrition. The lack of vegetables and fruit meant a poorer diet when compared to rural consumption habits.¹² Only 13 percent of Rita-Fereira’s interviewees had three meals a day, 76 percent had two, and 11 percent ate only one; 83 percent claimed to eat less than they needed, and only 3 percent consumed at least a kilogram of meat in a week. The wage