Football and Colonialism. Nuno Domingos
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MAP 1.1. Mozambique, 1903. Comissão de Cartografia. Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
A symbol of a new stage in Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, the growth of Lourenço Marques came to represent the advent of this process. Despite the unmistakable signs of fragile territorialization and lack of capital, knowledge, and human resources, in other words, the relative weakness of the state’s infrastructural power, in the sense used by Michael Mann,20 the projects developed in Portuguese colonial territories did not significantly contrast with the general trends that define European colonial rule in Africa, and with which they were connected. Portuguese colonialism was no exception.21 Lourenço Marques, which became Mozambique’s capital, replacing the former capital in the Island of Mozambique (Ilha de Moçambique) in 1898 (although legally only in 1906), had singular features. The new Mozambican capital, served by an important deep-water port, would become one of the axes of a regional economy nurtured by South Africa’s precocious industrialization, funded by British capital and based on gold and diamond prospecting. The train connection between Mozambique’s main cities and its neighboring regions, between Lourenço Marques and Transvaal Province and further north between Beira and Rhodesia, defined the city’s economic role, within the frame of a “transit and emigration economy” that characterized the southern Mozambique economic system.22 A focal point of commercial relations, Lourenço Marques became the center of one of the most important regional labor markets. The Portuguese government made several worker transfer agreements with its neighboring regions. These agreements were one of the main colonial sources of income. Each year, thousands of Africans were sent to South African mines. The migratory-work phenomenon affected the more underprivileged populations, especially those whose rural life structure was shaken by the “colonial encounter,” by tax exaction and compulsory labor.23 The transfer of workers to the Transvaal was negotiated under a monopolistic regime in exchange for the passage through the port of Lourenço Marques of a parcel of southern African imports and exports.
The construction of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques is inseparable from the colonial system’s need to reproduce the labor force necessary to sustain the city’s economic activities, but also, particularly in the first decades of modern urban formation, those of the flourishing South African regional industry. The Portuguese occupation removed the indígenas from the city center, pushing them to the periphery, where many others would join them from the countryside. Successive labor regulations punctuated the various stages in the formation of a symbolically differentiated space in Lourenço Marques, composed of more or less limited zones of interaction, subject to distinct rights and duties. Suburban dwellers, with no rights to land or to ownership of the houses they had built, were forced to rent them. The rental market in the suburbs drew the contours of a hierarchical space in which residents were distributed according to their possessions. A profitable business, the private exploitation of plots of land and houses persisted, stimulated by the lack of urban planning. As with much of the urban built space in Africa in the wake of nineteenth-century colonialism, in Lourenço Marques a large portion of the population inhabited a sprawling periphery, in the fragile condition of occupiers, at the mercy of all kinds of arbitrary acts.
The prevalent economic model in the Portuguese colonial system—mercantilist, barely industrialized, and lagging behind in the employment of capitalist processes24—prevented the local growth of an extensive proletariat,25 despite the increase in economic activity in the late colonial period, when the populations of settlers and Africans grew significantly. Although it was a modern colonial city, Lourenço Marques did not share some of the characteristics of other African cities, whose economic structure was built around large-scale industrial infrastructures. Many of the workers returning from the South African mines, and coming through Lourenço Marques, went back to their villages, a seasonal mobility that contributed to minimizing the effects of proletarianization.26 The labor insecurity of those who tried to settle in the city helped maintain close connections between the city and the countryside, the latter providing a last resource of social security, based on the extended family, in a context defined by the state’s feeble intervention.
The site of the reproduction of a cheap, disposable, and unskilled labor force, which the state regulated in a discretionary manner and where domestic servants made up a large portion of the population, the suburbs of Lourenço Marques showed the pattern of development of a servile society forced to adjust itself dramatically to modern structural processes. The institutions of the colonial state, ruled from 1926 by a metropolitan dictatorship,27 sought to shape this urban environment, adjusting their particular concerns to the evolving and at times contentious interests of the colonial forces. The constant struggles that traversed the colonial field of power help us interpret the singular development of the urban structure in Lourenço Marques and the role played by the state in this process.
LEISURE AND FOOTBALL IN THE COLONIAL CITY
Urban formations such as colonial cities—spaces of social interdependence enhanced by the various routes opened up by business, trade, services, the sprawling state apparatus, and the growing labor market—created the conditions for the development of the spectacle of football as part and parcel of urban popular culture.28 The expansion of sport in Africa, dependent on the colonial process as a whole, was the result of a dynamic of heterogeneous dissemination, often not reliant on the initiative and control of economic or state institutions. Even in English colonies, where the sway over cultural apparatuses was relatively more far reaching, sports dissemination did not quite follow a linear script. Football, for example, was not a part of the traditional elite games (cricket, polo, and even rugby, but also tennis, squash, or badminton) included in the curriculum of the colonial cadres educated at Cambridge or Oxford. As noted by Harold Perkin, footballs did not so much travel in the suitcases of diplomats, administrators, and missionaries as much as in the luggage of soldiers, small businessmen, railway workers, and teachers.29
Craveirinha’s articles reveal how the game was more spontaneously appropriated in the Lourenço Marques suburbs. He even suggests that the suburban player’s humor (“reflected in the way he enjoys the game, in the theatricality of his feints and dribbles, and in the expressions he employs to belittle the player who has just been tricked: ‘pysonho,’ ‘psyêtu,’ . . . onomatopoeic expressions that are only employed here”) was one of the features that distinguished it from other conceptions of the sports activity: “these colorful gatherings become inebriated with the practice of the sport but not with the latter’s role as an activity for physical improvement; they even appear oblivious to this restrictive concept.”30 According to his description, local leisure went against some of the characteristics that defined the sports movement of a nationalist, hygienist, and pedagogic (occasionally premilitary) nature that had begun to spread across Europe in the nineteenth century and took its mold from organized models of physical reinvigoration.31 The creation of physical education schools was also stimulated by the imperial expansion and by the need to form colonial cadres, but this ideology of the body was also present in the local colonial institutions, such as schools and military forces. In Mozambique many Africans were introduced to gymnastics through their compulsory insertion in Portuguese military companies.32
Research centered on leisure practices and consumptions has enabled us to understand how leisure and sport simultaneously define and defy the boundaries of colonial society.33 Monographic works by Phyllis Martin on colonial Brazzaville, Laura Fair on Zanzibar, Peter Alegi on South Africa, and Bea Vidacs on Cameroun34 have shown how much the study of sports practices and consumptions has to add to research on African colonial and postcolonial societies.35 These research works demonstrate how a modern practice, whose urban adaptation some authors associate with the influence of traditional practices,36 was adjusted to deeply stratified societies; how, in extremely segregated contexts, forms of modern popular culture, sometimes creatively interlinked with previous traditions, have generated urban bonds among subaltern populations;37 how, despite being the object of surveillance and political co-option by state institutions, religious and economic actors, sports associations promoted practices and consumptions, mobilized people and enabled