Football and Colonialism. Nuno Domingos
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the diversity of suburban experiences throughout the period under study. Be that as it may, their words help us identify dominant practices and norms that were expressed, first and foremost, by means of a specific style of football play. This style then functions as a laboratory that opens onto a wider field of analysis of the conditions in which the colonial periphery developed. In retrieving a sense of this suburban life it was also important to include the data produced by the colonial regime’s own institutions, namely the monograph of the colonial cadre António Rita-Ferreira (Os africanos de Lourenço Marques, 1968). When placed in the context of its production, which implies a critical distance from its intents and conclusions, these data yield information that ensures a richer frame for understanding the urban situation in the capital of Mozambique.
The local society portrayed by the game of football was almost exclusively composed of men. While in many ways suburban men shared with suburban women a similar urban experience, framed by the unstable local social contract that we wish to survey, the game was primarily a dimension of the masculine experience, adaptation, and performance. As one would expect, football’s local institutionalization reinforced gender discrimination, as sports clubs were structurally unequal. Recent work by Jeanne Marie Penvenne on female workers in cashew factories in Lourenço Marques between 1945 and 1975, published when this book was nearly completed, examines the gendered perspectives of the urbanization process.72 Addressing the same spatial context, Penvenne lifts the veil from the dramatic living conditions of the population of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques and thus retrieves the working and urban experience of these female workers, by bringing them into the fold of historical narratives—of the proletariat, of migratory processes—from which they had been excluded; she reveals the singularity of their survival strategies and how adaptation to an urban environment was bound by prior conditions for which the city was a space of struggle and transformation.
Informal women’s matches did take place in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, but football, maybe alongside boxing, was the ultimate frontier in terms of gender discrimination in sports. Football clubs, both in the suburbs and in affluent, all-white cement city, did not have female teams, though there was an active women participation in other sports activities. In the suburbs the mestiço elites promoted gymnastics for women, as well as athletics and basketball teams, later on. Women’s participation in sports was also influenced by the way in which gender discrimination translated into the Portuguese official sports’ policies. In the metropole the creation of the Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (Feminine Portuguese Youth), in 1937, institutionalized a sexual separation and a distinction between the types of exercises appropriate for each sex.73 The same categorizations were present in school syllabuses. Both in gymnasiums and outdoors, classes for men and women were separated. Physical education should provide men with “opportunities to assert a virile personality in displays of disciplined energy, loyal competition and the sublimation of fighting instincts,” and lead women “to a fertile family life,”74 as women needed to be “protected from the great muscular and masculinizing efforts of athletics, a feminine aberration that went against this sex’s sensitiveness and woman’s natural role as a future mother and educator.”75 School syllabuses marked this distinction between the woman, seen both as mother and educator, whose physical activities expressed control over the domestic realm, and the athletic man, ready to defend the nation. The development of sports beyond the sphere of the state in Lourenço Marques took place within the frame of such gendered official conceptions, which were deeply rooted in the Portuguese colonial system, namely in the indigenato system.76
The central argument of this book is that the game of football in Lourenço Marques, by absorbing the main traits of the local colonial society, became an embodied representation of a historical experience. The appropriation of a modern activity, as a performative practice but also as a medium of everyday relationships and a ground for the creation of social networks, offers a unique point of view on the formation of a system of colonial power with distinctive features, thus revealing, at the same time, the way in which individuals reproduced and transformed the system. This representation of local life runs counter to the culturalist and exotic visions of the periphery promoted by the regime’s propaganda, but also counter to modernizing views that, by diagnosing the suburbs as an urban pathology, explained their misery through the self-exclusion of Africans.
The relation between football and colonialism in the capital of Mozambique, between the game’s embodied language and the structures of colonial domination, became crystallized through a process of dissemination and institutionalization that I attempt to describe in chapters 2 and 3. Appropriated by a variety of urban populations, the game organized itself along the lines of, and indeed reproduced, existing social differences, namely those imposed by a colonialism of an increasingly racialist nature. Once disseminated and accessible, football was the ground for specific performances but also for the creation of associative structures that shaped urban identities that the state tried to organize, control, and use to its own advantage—not always successfully. In the city’s suburbs, where a particular social organization was imposed, the process of the game’s appropriation by the local populations forged a unique performance, a local style of play that had its own moral economy, plainly linked to the urban and labor policies of the colonial state and the key role these policies played in the formation of a suburban habitus.77
In chapter 4, I attempt an archaeology of this style of play and outline its main features, paying particular attention to the way in which football became a medium for negotiating the grounds for the construction of an informal social contract that could organize, however precariously, the life of those that lived in the periphery of the city. The descriptions by José Craveirinha of this malicious game, as well as the accounts of former suburban players, are the foundations for this archaeology of the local style of play. By retrieving the game’s language, the chapter proposes an alternative narrative of the suburbs, its structures, practices, and convivial norms, one that brushes against those accounts that idealized it, culturalized it, or reduced it to a social pathology. This effort of narrating the suburban life continues in chapter 5, now on the basis of an interpretation of the links between the game of football and a series of local traditions that were being adjusted to the colonial city environment, such as witchcraft and faith healing. Healers and witch doctors, just like the best interpreters of the local style of play, were the performers of these informal rights, aspirations, and desires, and their heroic feats were narrated in stories that have survived to this day.
This changing world had multiple points of contact with the outside world. For the local style of play, regardless of its unique traits, the rules of modern football remained a reference point, and the local game was far from impermeable to other ways of playing. The game was likewise appropriated by local fans, who brought football into their everyday lives, as an identitarian trait and a means of relating to a wider universe, as the game had spread throughout the globe. News of its practice in the metropole, in Europe, and across the world reached the suburbs. Chapters 6 and 7 address this process of transformation and the way the suburban populations, while constrained by the colonial system, connected and related to the world. An aspect of the ongoing negotiation of the suburban social contract, this process manifested itself in different ways. Chapter 6 exposes how the players that abandoned the suburban style of play so as to pursue a professional career felt the effects of that change in their very bodies, in the form of a self-conditioning, a disenchantment, as if they had let go of who they were. However, it was precisely under the sway of the modern game and its constraints that some suburban players began their professional and social mobility trajectories, by means of which they became key figures in the game and an inspiration to the populations of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques. Modern football had created its own space of stylistic possibilities, based on a specific use of time and space, with singular symbolic exchanges that shared traits with other modern activities,