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A Colonial Sport’s Field

THE development of a field of sports practices and consumptions in Lourenço Marques was shaped by the organization and evolution of a colonial power structure, replicating its forms of social closure. Simultaneously, however, the dissemination of sports created specific autonomies that had the power to defy existent structures of domination. The social and political role played by local sports associations and clubs, and the importance of emergent forms of urban popular culture in reinforcing identities, promoting new bonds, and backing individual and collective aspirations, were among the aspects that defined the introduction of modern sports in the colonial city.

LEISURE, FOOTBALL, AND THE BIRTH OF THE COLONIAL CITY

The construction of a penitentiary in 1782 was the first step toward the formation of Lourenço Marques’s fragile urban mesh.¹ The first settlers, arriving in 1825, laid out a disordered cluster of primary streets. A dynamic slave trade to Brazil developed in this period. In the same time frame, a small community of Indians from Daman and Diu was established. In 1850, Lourenço Marques had six hundred inhabitants, confined to the coastal area. Portuguese authorities were had to deal with local kingdoms and were closely watched by English fleets that oversaw the slave traffic. In 1875, Portugal won the right to govern Lourenço Marques Bay, which was being disputed by the British, after a decision by French president Marshal MacMahon, who was mediating the disagreement.

When it became a village, in 1876, Lourenço Marques already had a small administrative and commercial center. After the arrival, in 1877, of a public-works expedition led by engineer Joaquim José Machado (who later became governor of the territory), the process of draining the marshland surrounding the small urban area began, thus allowing the city’s expansion. In 1887, Lourenço Marques was incorporated as a city. An urban expansion plan, devised by engineer António Araújo, was approved in 1892. Resorting to military-engineering techniques, Araújo proposed the construction of an orthogonal urban structure, whose geometry reflected modern building methods. The colonial city’s growth led to a series of expropriations. In 1891 local populations were dislodged from the central area of Maxaquene and moved to the Mafalala, Munhuana, Hulene, and Chamanculo neighborhoods.² An outbreak of bubonic plague, which hit the city in 1907 and 1908, led to further social segmentation.³ The question of property established itself as one of the elements of the “illegality” of the colonial suburban space.⁴ A situation with wider contours, this “illegality” signaled, in Lourenço Marques, the exclusion of this population from the institutional spheres that handled administrative, judicial, and labor issues and that catered to the “civilized.” As early as 1890 the freehold concession to Africans was limited.⁵ According to the regulations on the ownership of urban plots of land approved by Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque in 1897, property owners had to prove their ownership in writing and to build a house within six months—a bureaucratic scheme that, together with the lack of capital, systematically excluded the indígenas.⁶ The regulations for the concession of state-owned land of 1918, in force until 1961, established a class of plots of land, reservations, for the exclusive use of the indígenas: they could occupy land but not own it.

The Lydenburg Road, which began to be built in 1871 and served as a connection to the Transvaal, became a focal point around which the suburbs organized themselves and grew. The inauguration of this road—named after Lydenburg, a region in Transvaal where gold seams were discovered in 1874—marked South Africa’s labor market’s influence on the growth of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques.⁷ The city’s outskirts, which also included the Malanga, Malhangalene, and São José de Lhanguene neighborhoods, were made up of roads and paths that recognized and respected local mobility needs.

In Lourenço Marques, where various types of spatial and social stratification coexisted, the main border was the one separating the so-called cement city from the suburbs, also called the caniço (lit., reed—the building material of most suburban houses). The circunvalação (ring) road, built in 1903, represented this line of demarcation both physically and symbolically. The urban structure imposed by Plano Araújo determined how the city would grow, something that is noticeable even in the early twenty-first century.

MAP 2.1. Lourenço Marques and its suburbs, 1907–8. This is one of the first representations to include both the cement city and its periphery. Source: Centro de Estudos Geográficos. Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território.

MAP 2.2. General plan of the city and harbor of Lourenço Marques, 1926. This map shows a more common representation of the cement city’s modern structure, considered by the colonial mind as the “proper city,” the one made by the Portuguese—the “civilized” city, with its rational design and geometry. Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

In 1971, Mozambican architect “Pancho” Guedes described the main characteristics of the caniço:

Every city and small town in Mozambique is surrounded by caniços. They are the towns’ out-buildings—the places where servants and laborers live. The word caniço means reed; in southern Mozambique reeds are the traditional building material most frequently used for walling and screens whenever they are available in the rural areas. . . . The caniços range from villages scattered around small towns, to vast slums and shanty towns made up of many quarters surrounding the larger towns and cities. In the small towns the caniços adjoin land where maize, manioc and other crops and fresh vegetables are grown. The sites they occupy are as close as possible to the town. Some are even located within the towns themselves, occupying land which has not been developed because it was low-lying and subject to flooding, or because of its irregular or steep configuration. In Lourenço Marques some of the caniços occupy the edges of an old lagoon; they are subject to floods and heavy rain, and are quite close to the main part of town.⁸

Coming from the countryside, a great portion of the population built their houses with traditional techniques, using tree trunks, branches, bamboo, grass, and various fibers and clays.⁹ Technologic innovation improved the quality of the housing. The poorer population and migrant workers occupied fragile huts, which were built with burlap bags and tin cans.¹⁰ This kind of construction was replaced by better-equipped houses. Near the end of the colonial period, when more than two hundred thousand people lived in the larger suburbs, most houses (88 percent) were rectangular, covered with zinc, “with reed or wattle walls, daubed or bare, or made of zinc or cement blocks, houses with yards surrounded by reeds with a kitchen porch, the bath fence and latrine and other rudimentary facilities.”¹¹ At the time, the masonry houses (a mere 6 percent) were owned by the local privileged class.

The city was the symbol of a new era of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Portugal’s sovereignty over the territory became clearer. The definition of borders, traced during the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and ratified in 1891, was a result of the balance of power that emerged out of the conflicts between the main colonial actors. Portugal’s role in this new stage of colonial expansion was inevitably hampered by its structural condition. During the 1890s, unable to effectively set up a local administrative apparatus, it surrendered a great deal of the Mozambican territory to large foreign capital companies (companhias majestáticas). Controlling native labor became the main colonial goal, something that was in line with a history of occupation that had been sustained by the commercialization and exploitation of slave labor.¹² A succession of labor codes (1892, 1899, 1911, and 1914) categorized the types of work to which Africans were subjected: forced, voluntary, correctional, due to vagrancy, due to law infringement. “Native” labor was regulated by institutions such as the Intendência dos Negócios Indígenas e Emigração (Superintendency of Native and Emigration Affairs), which worked in liaison with the governor general from 1903 onward and would, in 1907, become the Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas (Office of Native Affairs). A disciplinary control model flourished, enacted by laws imposing IDs, as well as residency, labor, and travel permits, upon native people.¹³ Failure to abide by these procedures brought the imposition of forced-labor regimes, locally known as chibalo.¹⁴ Chibalo sustained not only state initiatives but also private enterprises, both of which benefited from the political and economic protection of the power structure. These means of recruitment were used to engage factory workers as well as the great mass of domestic servants that worked in the city center. High-ranking colonizers soon criticized the large number of male African domestic servants in Lourenço Marques as a sign of economic underdevelopment, which demonstrated the Portuguese incapacity to exploit the African working force in a rational manner.¹⁵

FIGURE 2.1 Gorjão wharf and railway lines, Lourenço Marques. The photo provides evidence of the economic role that the city had in the regional economy, led by the industrial development of South Africa. Photos mainly by H. Graumann and I. Piedade Pó, void of copyright as collective work. Scan of original book from Memórias d’África e d’Oriente, Aveiro University. Source: Wikimedia.

Beginning in the 1870s, criticism directed against Portuguese liberal legislation’s¹⁶ notion of egalitarian assimilation reflected the need for the domination stage to come to be framed by new ideological, political, and legislative instruments. Based on a set of social-Darwinist principles, the control and categorization of the native population changed the indefinite category of selvagem (savage) to the more manageable indígena (native).¹⁷ The “civilizing mission,” which ideologically justified Portugal’s presence in Africa, was based on a set of laws that distinguished the rights and duties of the indígenas from those of the “civilized.” Portugal’s colonial regime also admitted the existence of a third category of individuals, known as assimilados (assimilated), those who, having proven their adaptation to European civilization and “Portuguese culture,” began to enjoy the rights of the “civilized.” In Mozambique the first law that defined who would be classified as an indígena was published in 1894 and aimed to regulate the application of penalties of compulsory labor in public works.¹⁸ In 1909 a decree regulating land concessions introduced the “color variable,” meaning nonwhite, as a feature of the definition of indígena.¹⁹ In 1917 an edict by Mozambique’s governor general passed into law the distinction between indígena (native), não indígena (nonnative), and assimilado (assimilated).²⁰ This edict established the prerequisites to obtain a document (alvará do assimilado) that would serve as proof of a new status. A less rigid version of this law was approved in 1927.²¹ Until 1961 the administrative management of the Lourenço Marques suburbs fell upon the traditional administrative authorities, divided into four hereditary ruling councils, turned into regedorias: São José (which included the areas of São José, Chamanculo, and Malanga), Munhuana (Munhuana and Zixaxa), Fumo (Fumo, Polana, Mavalane, Chitimela, and Infulene), and Malhangalene (Malhangalene, Mafalala, and Lagoas).

Portugal’s colonial system, reliant on a supposedly evolutionist conception, did little to create the economic, educational, and social conditions that would make “assimilation” possible.²² The failure of the educational system in Mozambique, which served mostly as a rhetorical trope,²³ contrasted with the permanence of a colonial practice focused on the reproduction of a cheap working force. In Lourenço Marques, the social segmentation excluded indígenas from accessing cultural activities in the city; more broadly, it excluded them from any citizenship model set out by the colonial state.²⁴ The Portuguese colonial policy delineated from the late nineteenth century onward, exacerbating nationalistic and racist conceptions, endangered the position of the local petite bourgeoisie,²⁵ composed mostly of mestiços, who had achieved important positions within public administration and in commercial circuits from the beginning of the nineteenth century.²⁶ Facing greater colonial repression and stronger professional competition following the growing numbers of settlers, members of this petite bourgeoisie developed a political and social protest dynamic, assuming the defense of the rights of indígenas. The Grémio Africano de Lourenço Marques (GALM), created in 1908, became the institutionalized center of these protests; its basic principles were spelled out in publications such as O africano (est. 1908) and O brado africano (est. 1918). The group around the GALM, educated and culturally identified with European colonial society, had an active role in denouncing colonial abuses, thus fighting for citizens’ right to equality, especially indígena people’s access to education and the Portuguese language as crucial instruments for their social mobility.²⁷ Embracing the “African” cause, and influenced by the international Pan-Africanist movement, by metropolitan political associations, and by the South African political process, the GALM was very active until 1926.²⁸ This protest was made not along anticolonial lines but rather in the name of a more humane and modern economic colonialism in which, for instance, African labor would be better handled—housed in organized compounds and in well-designed suburban neighborhoods, protected from the harm caused by wine made easily available by the metropolitan producers—instead of being used in the development of South Africa’s mining industry. As the colonial system became more repressive, a certain African elite was able to confront the colonial administration’s policies in an increasingly euphemistic register, which in many instances took on an integrationist slant (e.g., “we also deserve to be part of the Portuguese nation”).

The military dictatorship established in Portugal in 1926, which gave way in 1933 to the Estado Novo regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar (r. 1932–68), set about updating the previous legal framework of domination. Even before the military coup of May 28, 1926, João Belo’s government issued the Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas de Angola e Mozambique (Political, Civil, and Criminal Statute of Angolan and Mozambican Natives), the original basis for the indigenato system,²⁹ fine-tuned in 1929, when the Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas (Native’s Political, Civil, and Criminal Statute) was approved. According to these statutes, civilizational status of the indígenas did not entitle them to constitutional rights, and they were thus subjected to a specific legal regime, based on their custom and usage, which the colonial administration would formalize. Portugal promised to gradually integrate indígenas through work and education. The diplomas they earned would complement the basic laws that defined the place occupied by the colonies within the Portuguese nation. The 1930 Acto Colonial (Colonial Act), as well as the 1933 Carta Orgânica do Império Colonial Português (Organic Charter of Portugal’s Colonial Empire), alongside the Reforma Administrativa Ultramarina (Overseas Administrative Reform), set up the centralizing policy imposed by the Portuguese state on its colonial domains. In 1928, reacting to the international pressure that arose after the publication of the Ross Report, in 1925, denouncing the continuation of compulsory forms of labor regimes in Portuguese colonial territories, the government approved the Código de Trabalho dos Indígenas das Colónias Portuguesas de África (Portuguese African Colonies’ Native Labor Code), which excluded forced labor.³⁰ However, various exception clauses foresaw the use of chibalo as a law enforcement method. The ambiguity of this law and the inoperativeness of any type of control allowed for the continuation of semi-enslavement practices by public and private interests, sustaining a weak production structure based on intensive labor practices.³¹ The 1929 Diploma Orgânico das Relações de Direito Privado entre Indígenas e Não Indígenas (Organic Diploma of Private Law Relations between Natives and Nonnatives) completed this legal framework. Placed outside the corporative order imposed by the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, which was extended to the colonies on 5 March 1937, the indígena had a specific labor status.³² He also benefited from a separate education. After the 1926 Estatuto Orgânico das Missões Católicas Portuguesas de África (Organic Statute of the Portuguese Catholic Missions in Africa) had recognized the role of the Catholic Church in the indígenas’ education, the Acordo Missionário (Missionary Agreement) of 1940 and the Estatuto Missionário (Missionary Statute), approved the following year, gave the church the de facto responsibility for setting up segregated schools. The educational role entrusted to the Catholic Church aimed at countering the “denationalizing” effect attributed to the influence of Protestant missions, which, from the end of the nineteenth century, as a reflex of South Africa’s influence,³³ were active in the Lourenço Marques region.³⁴

After the end of the Second World War, although at a hesitant pace at first, the indígena question was reframed, which explains the appearance of a euphemistic rhetoric in many official documents as well as in the general language we now find in the archives. The process of euphemization of the exercise of power reached its highest level in 1951, when the Portuguese government replaced the terms empire and colonies with overseas and overseas provinces. Portugal was uno e indivisível (one and indivisible). A few years later, the lusotropicalist theory devised by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre was a political legitimating tool, based on the principle of the exceptionality of Portuguese colonialism.³⁵ During this period, the regime was laying the groundwork for a new stage of economic exploitation of its African territories.³⁶ Still, the increasing state control over African labor, put in place by laws like the Regulamentos dos Serviçais Indígenas (Indígenas Servant’s Regulations) of 1944 and 1949, continued to foster the conditions for the formation of an institutionalized discriminatory society.³⁷ According to these regulations, which essentially aimed at regulating social life in urban spaces like Lourenço Marques, the indígena was generally defined as a servant whose urban existence was dependent on a labor activity that the state, through the Curadoria dos Negócios Indígenas (Native Affairs Curatorship), tried to discipline through fear, intimidation, and punishment. The coercive formation of a labor market imposed a certain moral economy in which paternalism and violence become the ground of a wide social contract.

The elaboration of the Planos de Fomento Económico (Economic Development Plans), which also served to accommodate private capital’s growing business interest, marked a new era of expansion.³⁸ As argued by Gervase Clarence-Smith, in spite of the discourse on Portugal’s civilizing mission, the Portuguese Third Empire in fact reinforced its economic vocation.³⁹ The state’s investment in infrastructure but also in the production of specialized knowledge, to face the multiplication of colonial science’s spheres of intervention, sought to accommodate the internationalization of Mozambique’s economy and the influx of capital, which was concentrated in large metropolitan economic groups and in foreign companies. Historian Adelino Torres defines the Portuguese strategy in Angola as a “second colonial pact.”⁴⁰ On the basis of the formation of an imperial economic space, Portugal tried to maintain sovereign control within a context of economic internationalization. In Lourenço Marques, during the late colonial period the economy became less dependent of South African demand, but colonial revenue captured by the taxation of the migrant workforce continued to be decisive for the equilibrium of the trade balance.⁴¹

Lourenço Marques was inhabited at the close of the 1970s by at least one hundred thousand Africans.⁴² This population grew at an average rate of twelve hundred individuals per year between 1940 and 1959, and sixty-five hundred per year between 1950 and 1960. After the end of the indigenato, with the slackening of restrictions to circulation and residence, entries increased.⁴³ Dependent on entering the symbolic space of “the cement” to survive, suburban dwellers built their own life territory, beyond the city’s social and racial dividing line, in the absence of state urban planning.

The concentration of workers in the cities, the adaptation to a life regulated by modern social institutions, the monetization of exchanges, and the loss of traditional bonds became causes of potential instability. In the African colonial context, considering the nature of the working masses, the problems arising out of the “social question” were grouped, by colonial policies’ theoreticians, under the term detribalization, a term that described the process of social, cultural, and economic adaptation to an urban and industrialized context. Although the “detribalized” indígenas did not enjoy the rights afforded to the “civilized,” living in a context that Brigitte Lacharte designates as “apartheid laissez-faire” they integrated the urban culture they had indeed built.⁴⁴ Sports practices and consumptions were part of this urban dynamic at least since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Leisure Practices in the Cement City

Within the framework of a system of social segregation, Lourenço Marques’s dynamic economic activity in the transition to the twentieth century placed Mozambique’s new capital at the center of the territory’s development, as a port of call for various economic interests, traders, workers, and numerous public and private activities, transforming the city into a cosmopolitan place where there was a permanent flux of people and goods. Among the various national groups living in the city, the British community stood out due to its power and influence.⁴⁵

As in many other regions of the world, the existence of a British community was decisive toward the introduction of sporting practices in Mozambique, namely in Lourenço Marques. Besides founding association-type clubs, such as the English Club (est. 1905), the British Club or the Caledonian Society (1919), British people set up their own sports clubs, such as the Lourenço Marques Athletic Club (1908). They also contributed toward the foundation of elite clubs, like the Lourenço Marques Lawn Tennis Club (1908), Club de Golf de Lourenço Marques (1918), or Club da Polana (1923). Part of the Portuguese colonial bourgeoisie of Lourenço Marques joined these sporting social circles. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the British Athletic Club was one of the main promoters of sports practice, especially football. Newspaper articles from this period suggest that football matches were part of a set of mundane activities and were meeting spaces for the colonial ruling classes, in which athletes could exhibit an amateur ethos.⁴⁶ The sophisticated sportsman, whose ethics and gestures represented the modern embodiment of a privileged condition, was also present in the colonial world. In many ways the European hunter in Mozambique was the forerunner of the local modern sportsman.⁴⁷ The expansion of sporting practices in the early twentieth century in Lourenço Marques followed the elective affinities of a “ruling class” composed of high-ranking state administration officials and the colonial bourgeoisie, both Portuguese and non-Portuguese, which explored the business opportunities opened up by an expanding regional economy.⁴⁸

FIGURE 2.2. The tennis courts in the Public Garden and the Clube da Polana golf course. Tennis courts and golf courses were spaces used by the local English elite, as well as by some Portuguese members of the city’s upper classes, to entertain themselves. These appropriated spaces were also conquered landscapes in which hegemonic social projects were singularly situated. Passive and barefoot African golf caddies were an expression of this project. Photos mainly by H. Graumann and I. Piedade Pó, void of copyright as collective work. Scan of original book from Memórias d’África e d’Oriente, Aveiro University. Source: Wikimedia.

Among the sports introduced in Lourenço Marques from the beginning of the century, football became the most widely practiced. One of the first records on sports activity in Mozambique, written in 1931 by a Portuguese army captain, Ismael Mário Jorge,⁴⁹ indicates that football matches were being organized as early as 1904.⁵⁰ The crews of ships anchored in Lourenço Marques often formed teams that challenged local groups. The growing number of settlers, some of whom had played the sport in the metropolis, contributed to the game’s development. At the beginning of the century, several clubs emerged, projects that, albeit brief, expressed a growing associative mindset.⁵¹

Football matches integrated a set of spectacles promoted by urban life—the leisure activities of a burgeoning community.⁵² Teatro Variéta, inaugurated in 1912, featured opera performances and cinema, and included a dance hall. In 1913 Teatro Gil Vicente opened with theatrical plays, but it also doubled as a cinema. By 1916, Lourenço Marques already had thirty bars and pubs.⁵³ The 1912 census of the city counted 13,353 inhabitants, including 5,324 Europeans, of which 1,299 were non-Portuguese. The city’s outskirts had 12,726 inhabitants.⁵⁴ During this period, public buildings, commercial establishments, leisure areas, banks, and hotels were built. The Polana Hotel, still the most sumptuous hotel in Maputo, was inaugurated in 1922 in the eastern part of the city, an almost deserted area whose grounds had been allotted to private investors.⁵⁵ There, before the hotel existed, the British community had built a field where football and nine-hole golf could be played.⁵⁶ Downtown, near the penitentiary, the English Club improvised a cricket field where members of Clube Indo-Português (a Goan association founded in 1921) also played.⁵⁷

Lourenço Marques grew from the coastal area, site of its initial urban street network, toward the interior. The vast majority of the native population, arriving in the city from the country, went only as far as the suburbs or, in fewer cases, impoverished transitional neighborhoods such as Alto Maé or Alto de Maxaquene.⁵⁸ Downtown and the central part of the city were dominated by commerce and administration. The industrial area was west of the city, bounded by the railway. Part of the working population was employed here, in the railway, port, national press, civil construction, tram, or metalwork industries. Each residential area reflected its inhabitants’ class, national origin, and ethnic differences. The European population concentrated in Ponta Vermelha and Polana, especially the ruling class. The Central neighborhood, more heterogeneous, mostly housed Indian traders.⁵⁹

The line tracing the beginning of the modern city was an avenue that cut across it, parallel to the coast, almost from one end to the other.⁶⁰ The football pitches of the most popular clubs in town were built along this avenue. These are the clubs that today still exist in Mozambique: Sporting de Lourenço Marques (est. 1920, presently Maxaquene), Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques (1921), and Clube Ferroviário (1924). Given their location, these clubs became known collectively as clubes da baixa (downtown teams). The hierarchy of the football game moved, from the top to the bottom of the pyramid, from downtown to the suburbs. 1.^o de Maio, a club founded in 1917 by a group of railway workers, completed the quartet that for a long period monopolized official competitions.⁶¹ Grupo Sportivo Indo-português (1921) was one of the more active participants in these early competitions and one of the chief promoters of cricket. Football’s growth in Lourenço Marques justified the creation, in 1923, of the Associação de Foot-Ball da Província de Mozambique, which in 1926 became the Associação de Futebol de Lourenço Marques (AFLM, Lourenço Marques Football Association), an institution affiliated with what was then known as the União Portuguesa de Futebol (Portuguese Football Union). The new association promoted “association football,” as stipulated in the rules of the International Board.⁶²

In 1924, in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, another football association was created, the Associação de Futebol Africana (African Football Association). Gathering a significant group of clubs, the AFA organized its own competitions, which became elements of a vigorous urban life growing on the outskirts of the city. The existence of two football associations exposed processes of discrimination also manifest in the distribution of football fans in the downtown stadium. Born in 1929, Mário Wilson, one of the first Mozambicans to play in the metropole, recalls that Africans “could watch the game but they had to be in a specific section for Africans . . . and, for those that were down-and-out, not even that was possible.”

These venues were only one among many urban spaces where a policy of social segregation was in place. Indígenas were barred from many areas of the cement city after certain hours: leisure spaces (beaches, cinemas, theaters, cafés, gardens), state institutions (administration, courts, the mail, schools, and hospitals), public transport (trains, trams), even its very streets.⁶³ Colonial racism affected not only the indígenas but also all people that had been subject to racialization in the capital, such as Chinese, Indians, and assimilated mestiços.⁶⁴

While tennis, sailing, and motorsports continued to be restricted to Lourenço Marques’s colonial bourgeoisie, football became more popular, though its expansion, albeit still limited, did not drive away Portugal’s colonial elite from the sports associative movement. Clube Ferroviário, although founded by a group of workers, was controlled by the heads of the railway administration. The directors of Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques, associated with the colonial military and police power, came from the various organs of the colonial administration.⁶⁵ Desportivo, founded on the initiative of civil servants and traders, was sponsored by local notables, becoming the most representative among those supported by the “old settlers.”⁶⁶ Sponsorship was prestigious to the clubs; likewise, the associations’ popularity improved the reputation of these local figures. The management of sports clubs by notables, such as industrialists, civil servants, traders, lawyers, and bankers, established itself in much the same way it had previously in other colonial contexts.⁶⁷ As the Portuguese associative movement grew in Lourenço Marques, English influence weakened.⁶⁸

Downtown Associations, Clubs, and Players

The formation of football clubs benefited from an associative dynamic, which arose in Lourenço Marques during the first decades of the century. This was particularly prominent in the period of the First Portuguese Republic (1910–26), when class associations, cooperatives, mutualist associations, savings banks, and other associations were created.⁶⁹ The associative network facilitated the social integration of settlers, many of them poor, having arrived in Africa without a penny to their name. The welfare and mutualist associations sought to socially integrate the urban populations. In a different and more impromptu manner, recreational and sports associations enabled the settlers to come into contact with organized personal networks, which often reproduced a metropolitan sense of belonging, especially, within this context, of a regional nature.⁷⁰ On the other hand, some sporting clubs became delegations of Portugal’s main football clubs. Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques was affiliated with Sport Lisboa e Benfica (est. 1904);⁷¹ Sporting de Lourenço Marques was affiliated with Sporting Clube de Portugal (1906). In the following decades, delegations of these clubs would spread throughout the territory.⁷²

Clube Ferroviário had a different origin. Formed in a period of intense labor unrest⁷³ among a group of railway workers, it was sponsored by the railway company, a powerful industrial enterprise whose expansion went hand in hand with the formation of a regional network sustained by South Africa’s economic growth. The company’s bureaucratic organization and the control it tried to exert over its employees’ spare time (among other things, by assembling a music band and setting up a library), turned Clube Ferroviário into an example of industrial paternalism, a way of managing the working force typical of contexts where relations of production are more developed. This type of management, common in Europe since the end of the nineteenth century,⁷⁴ was later employed in some regions of sub-Saharan Africa, mainly in South Africa’s industrialized areas.⁷⁵ Throughout the Portuguese colonial world, the use of sports as an instrument of labor management emerged across various contexts. Ferroviário, along with the network of delegations it founded throughout the territory, became the most precocious and relevant example of the relationship established between football clubs and public and private companies in Mozambique. Changes in the colonial economic infrastructure during the period following the Second World War strengthened the connection between sports practice and businesses’ labor policies framed by a private corporatism sponsored by the state.⁷⁶ In many ways the use of organized leisure as an instrument of social integration was pioneered by public and private companies and not directly by the central state.

AFLM teams, the sources of the spectacularization of football in the colonial city center, were mostly composed of settlers and other European players, though class ties enabled some players from old native families, namely mestiços, to play in the downtown championship. When the young Guilherme Cabaço (b. 1919), a settler who at the time was starting what was to be a long-lasting career in the colonial civil service, joined Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques, in 1926, the black and white of the team’s official shirt represented for him the two worlds that existed Mozambique. In the 1920s and 1930s, this old colonial civil servant reported, Desportivo had white and nonwhite athletes, mostly mestiços, such as the Bento brothers. Except for Sporting de Lourenço Marques, where only white players played, “in the other teams people mixed.” This “mix,” however, happened within the strict confines of a circle of interests close to the local “ruling class.” 1.^o de Maio, further removed from this circle of relations, was, as he recalls, a “club for workmen and suburban people.”

During its first decades in Lourenço Marques, the spectacle of football within European society never ceased to be a class-bound practice. The search for talented players, however, granted opportunities to some settlers from lower social groups, who arrived in town and gradually integrated into the professional labor system, as workmen, especially in the railway, but also in small commerce and the civil service. Football’s transformation into a competitive public spectacle, which promotes rivalries, led the clubs to look for the best players. This phenomenon, already noticeable in the 1930s, led to the gradual formation of a market.⁷⁷ The football player would secure his own status; he was admired for his performative abilities and for the fact that he represented a socially identifiable collective, linked to neighborhood communal experience, for instance, against opposing collectives.

The continuous arrival of Portuguese settlers heightened the social differences within the European population, as the administration and labor market became more specialized. In 1930 the settler population was 17,842; 27,438 in 1940; 48,213 in 1950; and 97,245 in 1960.⁷⁸ In 1974, a year before Mozambique’s independence, this population reached two hundred thousand people.⁷⁹ Sports associations, accompanying the city’s growth, were organized in the neighborhoods, establishing an umbilical connection with these places of sociability. As such, clubs like Malhangalene, a settler neighborhood previously inhabited by the native population, and Clube do Alto Maé emerged, founded in 1934 and 1937, respectively. In the 1950s and 1960s, other neighborhood clubs appeared, such as Carreira de Tiro, in 1950, and Clube de Futebol o “Central,” in 1951.⁸⁰ In the following decades, others followed the same pattern, with clubs always representing a sense of social and spatial belonging.⁸¹ The activities of small sports associations allowed for the simultaneous reinforcement of close regional networks and the introduction of their members into larger networks of relations, which operated as a mechanism of social integration. Despite the differences between the small clubs and the powerful downtown teams, which was also an indicator of the social stratification among the settlers, the sports movement in the cement city, even after the political overture in the sixties, was mostly a way to reify the European origin of its members; as a locus of sociabilities the clubs were agents of what Dane Kennedy identifies as “islands of white.”⁸²

According to Cabaço, football, in its first decades, expressed—through the effort of those who founded the clubs, organized matches, and erected pitches—the heroism of the pioneers who built the city. As he recalls, the actual match ball, in that era of conquest, served as a metaphor for the hardships of this period:

It was terrible, pure agony, because it was made of leather and inside it had a piece of rubber that had to be air-pumped, and at the opening was a leather string. We thought twice before heading the ball. When you headed it, you lost some of the skin on your forehead. The string was prominent and it was horrible, even for goalkeepers. If the ball came sideways and the guy touched it with his hand, he lost most of his skin. Not today; nowadays it’s more like a toy, like those small rubber balls I used to play with at home.

Football as Urban Spectacle

In the first decades of the century, football became one of the most popular organized leisure activities in Lourenco Marques. Clubs promoted themselves through meeting and sharing centers, spaces of communitarian mobilization and organization. Practice pitches, which were originally very precarious, regularly hosted the first competitions. Newspapers began to follow the game more closely, reporting on the main matches. In 1922 the first specialized newspaper, A semana desportiva, was published, lasting only one year and briefly returning in 1932. In 1938, Eco dos sports was the first sports newspaper to succeed, becoming an important instrument for the dissemination of the game as well as a standard-bearer for the sports community’s demands before the state.⁸³ Newspapers were a fundamental means of promoting the game. The press turned rivalries into copy and into the raw material for readers’ identification and imagination. Football press narratives were a particular dimension of what Benedict Anderson calls “print capitalism.”⁸⁴ Football’s presence in the newspapers, marked by the calendar of the competitions, was like a never-ending soap opera, which the reader followed passionately. The organization of the first Mozambican football championship, in 1956, one of the first public events to gather representatives from the various Mozambican provinces, was made possible, above all, through the persistent work of the local sports press.⁸⁵

Prime media moments were those in which a selection of Lourenço Marques’s best players, from the AFLM, played against visiting teams representing other regions, particularly South African teams, such as Northern Transvaal and Southern Transvaal, but also metropolitan, English and Brazilian teams, as well as teams from other countries.⁸⁶ Visits from the metropolis, quite common after the 1940s, also served to renew national ties and had a festive, nostalgic component: they provided opportunities for settlers to demonstrate their vitality before representatives of the empire’s ruling center.⁸⁷ This was all the more significant since these matches featured the so-called Lourenço Marques home-born team, a group composed exclusively of players born in Mozambique, the sons of settlers.

A source of local pride, sports often served as a ground for making demands, and a vehicle for an autonomous consciousness that, although limited in scale, occasionally translated into proto-autonomist positions.⁸⁸ The most persistent demand was perhaps that of taking part in competitions that included representatives of all Portuguese territories, from which the settler clubs were excluded, a demand voiced not only through the press⁸⁹ but also through official interventions and institutional relations.⁹⁰

After newspapers, radio would also play a decisive role in promoting the game. In March 1934, the defeat of Portugal’s national football team by its Spanish counterpart in Madrid was broadcast by Estação Emissora do Grémio dos Radiófilos, through loudspeakers placed in the head office of one of the most important local newspapers, Notícias. This broadcast, a novelty in the city, took place “before a huge crowd.”⁹¹ The match report reached Lourenço Marques with a two-minute delay, which was close to nothing for people who were used to getting the news several days later, in the newspapers. This technological novelty inaugurated a different relation with football, in which a new kind of mediation enabled the fan to accompany and imagine a distant event in real time through an oral report that could be shared. Following a match no longer depended on going to the stadium. The broadcast was also a social event. Technological evolution would bring about the gradual privatization of radio reception, something that never stopped broadcasts from becoming an opportunity for meeting in the public space, not just in the cement city, but also in the suburbs.

Over a relatively short time, football ceased to be an activity experienced by a small number of individuals; it became a regular and public display organized by clubs and followed by large groups of fans. Club identification grew and expanded. The game became a source for the creation of a specific stock of knowledge, a generator of local narratives that were then reproduced through daily interactions. Even though football practice in the cement city was mostly confined to a white universe of relations, as a type of knowledge mediated by popular culture it could be much more widely disseminated. This allowed for its expansion beyond the line of social segregation and into the suburbs of Mozambique’s capital. But this did not happen merely with the information that came from the downtown competitions. A narrative of metropolitan football, promoted by the settlers, by the media, and by the various 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 in turn was inspired by the Italian fascist Balilla and the German Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth)—was created in 1936 by the Estado Novo within the scope of the Reforma da Educação Nacional (National Education Reform) carried out in that same year.¹¹³ The MP’s mission carried on the Estado Novo’s commitment, in line with previous concerns and policies, to the use of physical education as a means of moral, hygiene, and military education.¹¹⁴ During the 1930s, after a period in which the institutionalization of physical education was a slow and convoluted process,¹¹⁵ the regime thus pursued a Europe-wide movement of institutionalization of gymnastic models which, in their various configurations, responded to the pedagogic, hygienic, and premilitary needs of modern nation-states.¹¹⁶

The importance of physical education in the formation of colonial cadres, prominent in the French and, to an even greater degree, in the British cases, was also echoed, albeit more feebly, in Portugal.¹¹⁷ The Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (Lisbon Geographic Society) was one of the first Portuguese institutions to organize, in 1930, a physical education course aimed specifically at colonial cadres.

A Portuguese Body

The Estado Novo’s model of physical education was promoted as a push toward the “regeneration of the race.” This “race,” however, a national race framed by a sovereign state, did not include the African population, whose sports habits were considered to be “natural” and “pre-modern.” In the metropole the Estado Novo intervened in the sports practice of students and workers,¹¹⁸ and in 1940 it founded a training center similar to the civil and military specialized schools that had been established in several European countries¹¹⁹—the Instituto Nacional de Educação Física (INEF, National Institute of Physical Education)—and created an official structure that coordinated and supervised all sports activities organized outside state control: the Direcção Geral de Educação Física, Desportos e Saúde Escolar (DGEFDSE, General Office of Physical Education, Sports, and Scholastic Health). Control over sports associations was one dimension of a wider plan that sought to regulate the associative movement in Portugal.¹²⁰ Trained in foreign schools, the men who established the theoretical and practical bases of the Portuguese model of physical education were military officers, such as the notable Celestino Marques Pereira and António Leal de Oliveira.¹²¹

During the Estado Novo regime, football matches were among the few mass public demonstrations taking place in Portugal. The national football league was created in 1934 and definitively institutionalized in 1938. Football was seen as an inadequate exercise by the state. In 1932, a decree was issued, within the Ministério da Instrução (Ministry of Instruction), the Direcção dos Serviços de Educação Física (Head Office of Physical Education Services), which considered sports games as the “antithesis of all education” and a vehicle to “physical deformation” and “moral perversion.” The high-school physical education regulation, approved in 1932, forbade “Anglo-Saxon sports and athletic games, and all competitions in general, namely football matches, as their educational value was nil and their dangers obvious.”¹²² Furthermore, football’s professionalizing tendency, which stimulated processes of social mobility, challenged an official corporative framework that was based on the principle that class relations should remain stable.¹²³ The success of players from a working-class background, in an activity with a powerful media impact, sent the “wrong” message about the existing social organization.¹²⁴

The official ideology of the body was also an ideology of the place occupied by gesture within everyday social life, which was clear from the critical commentaries, emblematic of this model of physical education, on the modern city and the habits that thrived in it. Physical education, a scientific and rational discipline, contributed to the return of “bodily naturalness” and regulated the individual’s adjustment to his new social milieu.¹²⁵ This science measured and systematized movement on the basis of knowledge about mechanical and physiological principles. But as movements were triggered by emotions, physical exercises should be “executed in line with established norms and intentions . . . in harmony with other means of moral and intellectual education.”¹²⁶ The emotions that trigger movement, according to Leal de Oliveira, should be the result of the “existence of morality, religion, education, and civilization.”¹²⁷ This Portuguese model of physical exercise was sustained by moral principles that synthesized Christian thought, Latin historical heritage, and modern corporative ideas.¹²⁸

The Portuguese researchers in physical education wanted to develop a strategy that could sustain the application of a state model.¹²⁹ If in a premodern context this physical activity, although instinctive, was part of a natural order, in the artificial environment of an industrialized city, the socializing framework underpinning these impulses was artificial. Modern physical education needed to control such “inherited and involuntary motor techniques,” and “innate reflex movements.”¹³⁰ For this rationalization process to be effective, body movements would have to be predetermined, in view of the “intellectual and perhaps moral meaning of a conscious goal.”¹³¹ For Leal de Oliveira, the concept of ideomotor stood for predetermined movements: “Movements springing directly from an idea are called ideomotor movements, an idea that is integrated within an instinctive tendency that, in turn, mobilizes and articulates reflex actions.”¹³² Every deliberate movement was ideomotor. Its execution was “conditioned by a power or personal will, which provides reflexive consciousness along with the faculty to execute the movement or not, and in a specific way.”¹³³ Bodies whose movements did not correspond to a predetermined impulse were considered potentially harmful: “noneducated impulses,” responsible for heterodox and impure gestures, should be eliminated.¹³⁴

The movements deemed adequate for preparing the bodies of the Portuguese were those of the Swedish gymnastics method.¹³⁵ Segmented movements were fundamental (suspension, support, balancing, walking, running, rising, and transporting movements, as well as throwing and jumping). Cadenced movements, quite common in gymnastics, “facilitated collective work because rhythm represented an order, a natural discipline conducive to the harmony and concordance of partial efforts and to their union.”¹³⁶ The idea of cadenced rhythm, of ordering, was common to numerous educational practices during the Estado Novo, namely those that involved the use of music.¹³⁷ Natural exercises such as “walking, running, climbing, balancing, throwing, rising, carrying, swimming” were, by definition, useful and correct, “when executed in a manner that preceded any changes brought about by civilization.”¹³⁸ Symmetry was the basic feature of the exercises prescribed by this gymnastics method. On the contrary, according to Leal de Oliveira, asymmetrical exercises could hardly become a habit because they “require the dissociation of symmetrical coordination fixed by habit. Human attention has to divide itself between the two homologous parts of the body, through which corresponding impulses and ideas immediately follow in the mind.”¹³⁹ In his view, the dissociation of attention, the possibility of choice and the confusion between ideas were perverse qualities and led to an ill-defined body. Leal de Oliveira pointed out that a movement’s aesthetics rested on its usefulness, adding that “rectilinear movements,” typical of gymnastics, “express calm and determination,” whereas “curvilinear movements,” present, for instance, in sports such as football, reflected “indecisiveness.”¹⁴⁰

The careful tailoring of each movement to the age and sex of the participant was one of the basic principles of the Ling method. The creation of the Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (Feminine Portuguese Youth), in 1937, institutionalized a sexual separation and distinction between the types of exercises appropriate for each sex.¹⁴¹ Thanks to the ability to categorize students according to a specific biotype, the kinds of movements more appropriate for each individual would be determined, thereby improving physical performances, correcting the bodies’ postures, preventing illnesses, and guiding youths in their professional life.¹⁴² A specific training space was necessary for the proper teaching of this orthodoxy of movement. The modern gymnasium, which since the late nineteenth century had gradually become more common in Europe, represented the space where the relationship between teacher and student could be regulated through a set of norms and hierarchies. It was a closed domain, measured and organized according to the intersection of straight lines. By taking individuals out of their social environment, this domain became a laboratory of bodies and ways of being and acting, argued Leal de Oliveira.¹⁴³ The socializing function of this kind of total institution,¹⁴⁴ inspired by the Greek gymnasium, had been adapted to modern times. According to the first commissioner of the Mocidade Portuguesa, Francisco Nobre Guedes, inspired by Pierre de Coubertin’s ideas, “You must protect the gymnasium from the twofold danger represented by the proximity of school and sports society. Both, were they to penetrate its walls, would lead it astray from its objective and neutralize its main action.”¹⁴⁵ The chaotic city, where football thrived, was described in 1928 by António Faria de Vasconcelos, a psychologist and educator, in a text where the purifying benefits of the Ling method were praised: “We need only look at our own life, its zigzags and jerking curves, its haphazard rhythms, a fleeting flame of will and work, sometimes ablaze, sometimes slumberous, shifting from enthusiasm to despondency at a stroke, a life, in short, lacking spirit, balance, control, and discipline.”¹⁴⁶

FIGURE 2.3. Sketch of a modern gymnasium. Author: Ana Estevens. Source: Adapted from Celestino Marques Pereira, A educação física na Suécia, 163.

MAP 2.3. Plan of the city of Lourenço Marques, 1929. There are obvious similarities between the structure of the modern gymnasium shown in Pereira’s 1939 original sketch and the principles behind the geometric layout of Lourenço Marques’s cement city. In a way, both these spaces were conceived as modern, confined, and organized spaces where life is produced. Caminhos de Ferro de Lourenço Marques. Source Wikimedia.

Movements molded by unregulated spatial contexts, such as sports associations, football grounds, and school playgrounds, had a negative impact on the teaching of symmetry.¹⁴⁷ Schoolteachers were also to take part in this control of space by monitoring breaks between classes, on the playground, to “avoid excesses and deviations in children’s spontaneous activity,” especially in the course of “very dynamic games.”¹⁴⁸ More dubious, from an educational point of view, were the movements executed in spaces such as football pitches, where players competed, in a more or less institutionalized way, before an audience. The football field had proven to be an unregulated space, not easily controlled by the state.¹⁴⁹

The practical implementation of this model did not depend solely on the actions of state institutions vis-à-vis state-sponsored activities but also on their ability to regulate sports activities promoted by private associations, to change their principles, and to convert them into instruments of a “proper education.” The moral principles once prevalent in amateur sports matches had been corrupted by the growing popularity of those activities. For the Portuguese physical education theorists, body movements associated with popular games such as football reflected an urban space that was unhealthy, unpredictable, prone to conflict, hesitant, filled with disordered actions: daily movements executed by individuals who left the steady pace of country life for the uncertain rhythm of the city; individuals who lived in insalubrious houses and attended subversive associations and spaces where politics were discussed. The structural problem of sports games, according to Marques Pereira, rested in the acknowledgment that the movements they generate have a “utilitarian purpose,” an “ill-defined” trajectory, and are asymmetrical.¹⁵⁰ This utilitarian purpose was connected with their competitive nature. Individual movements, syncretic (and synthetic), were driven by the intent to beat the opponent. Because sports games were interactive, specific gestures could not be predetermined, nor could they become the rational outcome of an ideomotor principle, as defined by Leal de Oliveira. The game’s structure relied on immediate experience and empirical knowledge, which meant that its technical progression emerged out of an “experimental basis.”¹⁵¹ A product of a school of vices, outside the scope of state pedagogy, this alternative motor habitus did not fit into the project of a respectable citizen, educated by a nationalist school, the Catholic Church, and the corporative system.

Although ambitious, this educational project was not very effective, especially when translated into the colonial context. Policies on the colonial ground highlighted the potential benefits of a control over sports associations, a cheaper and more effective form of ruling. Basic institutional structures of social life that provided a structure for social participation and identification, sports associations maintained an ambiguous statute: they could be loyal servants of indirect-rule policies but, when not properly surveilled, could turn into hubs of anticolonial resistance.

In Mozambique

In Mozambique the Mocidade Portuguesa became responsible for overseeing the statutes of all associations whose activities entailed youth participation.¹⁵² In 1942 a new decree integrated “within Mocidade Portuguesa’s educational centers all school associations, canteens, school funds, excursion funds, secondary school philanthropic funds or associations, professional schools, farming schools and agricultural management schools.”¹⁵³

The principle of exclusion inherent in the activity of the Mozambique MP persisted in the 1956 law for the reorganization of overseas sports activities, the first piece of legislation (drafted after a research mission¹⁵⁴) that sought to bring all sports practices, generally speaking, within the fold of the state. The 1956 law and the subsequent legislation that established Conselhos Provinciais de Educação Física (Provincial Boards of Physical Education) for each region, drew inspiration from DGEFDSE regulations: 63 percent of the content of the 1957 Mozambican law replicated this document.¹⁵⁵ The colonial legislation defended the use of private associations to promote the state model of physical education. Associations and clubs were expected to organize gymnastics classes, otherwise their athletes would be excluded from all competitions.¹⁵⁶ This law disapproved of sport-as-spectacle; competition was acceptable only when under the tutelage of the state.¹⁵⁷ The opinion issued by the Câmara Corporativa (Corporative Chamber),¹⁵⁸ and written by the prominent Portuguese physical education theoretician Celestino Marques Pereira, suggested the need for the state to swiftly find a frame for the problem of indígena sport:

The physical education of the indígena populations in the overseas provinces is a current problem that has a significant impact on the future and progress of these territories. The excellent results attained in previous efforts by some private and official entities indicates that a gradual resolution of the problem is likely. The câmara considers that this is a matter of great importance in the much wider issue of the indígena’s welfare and believes that various sports entities serving the economic life in the overseas provinces may contribute effectively to the resolution of the problem, if only the state, through its own organs, helps them with the necessary guidance, stimulus, and support.¹⁵⁹

The new Conselho Provincial de Educação Física de Mozambique (CPEF, Mozambique Provincial Council of Physical Education) was entrusted with the elaboration of “plans and solutions for the gradual integration of native gymnastic and sports activities in the current diploma’s regime.”¹⁶⁰ In the discussion that took place in the Conselho Legislativo (Legislative Council), Governor Gabriel Teixeira expressed the view that, despite the enthusiasm among indígena athletes, “even in the furthest corners of the bush,” there remained the “impossibility of, given their cultural state, [their] adaptation to the rules created by the civilized.”¹⁶¹ Although the law on the right of association published in May 1954 did not discriminate against indígenas, the fact that they did not possess any political rights contravened that legal disposition.

Managing Exclusion

In Lourenço Marques, the approval of the statutes of suburban football clubs by the colonial state—for the most part in the thirties—brought about a situation where official recognition was made along discriminatory lines: in local competitions, settlers’ clubs were separated from African clubs. Gradually, however, local authorities would adopt a policy of reaching out to populations discriminated against within the field of sport. This was a slow process defined by tensions and indecisions within the colonial state and its institutions, which were permeated by conflicts such as the one that opposed a metropolitan state struggling to demonstrate the nonracist character of Portuguese colonialism and a local settler community largely resistant to any such form of openness. The activities of the Mocidade Portuguesa, by excluding the indígena populations, and the resistance of a large portion of settlers and their elites to any political outreach, clashed with the goal of social integration, which was particularly pressing in urban contexts. The need to tailor a new official model of physical practice to the specific challenges that defined the period from the mid-1950s onward highlighted the state’s inability to impose its conception of a proper education of the body. The political effect of segregation preoccupied the colonial rulers; the case of sport was especially troubling because of its capacity to bring people together, to cement identities, and to raise consciousness. The postwar political scene, namely in terms of the multiplication of the processes of independence in Africa and the eruption of armed conflict in Angola in 1961, in Guinea-Bissau in 1963, and in Mozambique in 1964, called for other ways of addressing the indígena issue. Furthermore, the context of postwar economic modernization, albeit deficient, meant that the state framework had to be reconfigured with a view toward the stabilization of the African labor force. These structuring elements in the evolution of the colonial field of power spilled over into sports practices and consumptions.

In 1947 the Catholic Indo-Português club was integrated into the AFLM. The following year the Portuguese state allowed athletes’ transfers between the colonies and the metropolis.¹⁶² In 1949, the SNI’s leader, Captain Montanha, when answering a request by the Associação Africana de Inhambane, stated, “We have been recognizing for long that it is a good policy to support indígena associations, giving them all necessary help, with the main objective of creating an associative spirit among the indígena masses and, simultaneously, to take those associations to cooperate with the government’s colonizing and civilizing work. In my opinion, it is through this process that we will achieve a slow and useful assimilation.”¹⁶³

In 1952 the creation of a second division of the AFLM, composed mostly of a second line of settlers’ clubs, also included two teams organized by mestiços: Atlético de Lourenço Marques and Vasco da Gama. The fact that the latter club came from the AFA prompted a long debate within colonial institutions. The DSAC advised against the inclusion. They were afraid that the registration in the AFLM championship of a team composed almost entirely of “nonwhite” players could give way, through football’s actual competitive logic, to a public-order management problem.¹⁶⁴ The governor general, Gabriel Teixeira, on the contrary, supported the inclusion. Still, this openness was indeed an attempt to reach out to mestiço elites.¹⁶⁵ The new competition, besides having granted these clubs access to “downtown football,” stimulated the circulation of players between the AFA and the AFLM. The number of athletes that shifted from one association to the other was hardly meaningful, but their performances, on the one hand, and the fact that transfer virtually meant getting a job, on the other, raised football’s value as a vehicle of professional integration.¹⁶⁶ The establishment of a second division was also a response to the growing dissatisfaction among the boards and the supporters of a few settlers’ clubs, who felt discriminated against by the notables that ruled over local football. This aspect of integration highlights the fact that social management was not confined to the dichotomies indígena/civilized or white/nonwhite but stretched across an ever more complex class system.

The integrationist intentions behind the 1956 and 1957 colonial sports law contrasted with the persisting local discrimination. The percentage of black members at sports clubs and associations in Mozambique decreased over time (table 2.1):

TABLE 2.1. Percentage of black members and mestiço members at sports clubs and associations in Mozambique, 1935–58

Source: Based on data from Anuário estatístico de Moçambique (1935–58)

On the other hand, the percentage of mestiços was stable over time. If we take into account that membership in all sports clubs increased significantly, we can conclude that the growth of sports associativism in the central areas of Lourenço Marques excluded the black population.¹⁶⁷

During the discussion in the Conselho Legislativo on the creation of the Conselho Provincial de Educação Física (Provincial Council on Physical Education), the governor general of Mozambique pointed out that, although indígenas were not covered by the law, it was important to find solutions for their gradual integration within the sports field; this should be carried out with “a degree of flexibility, so as to allow for experimentation, trial, and error.”¹⁶⁸ The uncontrolled consequences of the football market, which help create new African heroes, would put this “policy of flexibility” to the test, more so even than the state itself.

In 1957, when African players such as Matateu and Coluna were already showcasing their skills in the metropolis, Carreira de Tiro, an AFLM club, asked the newly created Conselho Provincial de Educação Física (Provincial Council on Physical Education) for information regarding the registration of indígena players. The CPEF was faced with questions for which the law had no answer. Tacitly legitimated by the social-organization model, racism in sport became a public matter only when those discriminated against belonged to a small African petite bourgeoisie with access to newspapers. Carreira de Tiro’s request triggered a decision-making process¹⁶⁹ that revealed the nature of the strategies of euphemization that strove to conciliate persistent racist actions and policies with the new lusotropical face of Portuguese propaganda, as well as with the wider issue of urban social control.¹⁷⁰ Under the cover of a discursive façade, state agents acted strategically, seeking to balance a politically correct rhetoric with the existing interests among the settler community.

The skewed rhetoric of Fernando Olavo Gouveia da Veiga (the CPEF’s president) as he strove to sum up the problem and produce doctrine, can be seen as a metaphor for Portugal’s colonial policy during this period. Racist policies were not inscribed in the law, since it did not distinguish between indígena and nonindígena players. The decision to employ them was left to the clubs. In Lourenço Marques, some did. The CPEF’s president pointed out the possible political gains in “integrating the indígenas.” To delay integration would have “harmful effects . . . in more advanced indígena circles, as sport is one of the main vehicles of passion, something that isn’t always easily controllable.” In line with the international image the country was trying to promote, discrimination was “contrary to the higher principles of our constitution, all the more so since it goes against our mentality and governing practices, guided by integration and assimilation principles.” Integration should not, however, upset “nonindígena circles,” which would only “reluctantly accept the random registration of indígenas as players for our own clubs and associations.” To reconcile the deep-seated local racism with the need to create laws that enabled the integration of indígenas, their sporting participation was legalized, although it was left “to the clubs’ judgment” the possibility of blocking the indígenas’ access, by invoking sports and associative internal regulations. This solution would be, the CPEF’s head concludes, “a demonstration, even within the international field, of a real indígena integration policy employed in our social system.” In a note in this same document, the SNI’s acting director agrees with the registration of certain elements, but adds that the registration of teams composed exclusively by indígenas should be studied with care.¹⁷¹

In 1959 the colonial administration decided to abolish the African Football Association,¹⁷² integrating some of its clubs in the AFLM’s third division, which had been created for this purpose.¹⁷³ In the same year, African clubs had to remove from their statutes words that hinted at any type of racial discrimination, although terms like African had become commonplace and were employed consciously as a reaction to colonial racism.¹⁷⁴ This integration strove to put an end to various situations that gradually revealed the hypocrisy of the Portuguese assimilation system.¹⁷⁵ When, in 1959, the AFA clubs moved to AFLM’s third division, they did so under very specific circumstances. Matches were played in downtown pitches, which offered the best setting for the game, in the hours that remained free from matches involving clubs from the two upper divisions—in other words, almost always early in the morning. In the first year, the possibility of the third division’s champion moving to the upper division was not even considered. This situation would later be rectified.

Said Mogne, who started playing football in the AFA championship toward the end of 1940, made a link between these changes and transformations in the political situation:

The Associação Africana de Futebol was created with a specific intent, that of segregation. There was the Associação de Futebol Africana, on the one hand, and the Federação de Futebol de Lourenço Marques, on the other. There was no common ground between them. When the “smoke” of independence began to rise up then there was an effort toward approximation . . . and the idea emerged of, one way or the other, merging the two clubs. Those that had the good fortune of being integrated survived. . . . The question arises because of existing political pressure. There had to be a coming together because separation in the AFA was a racial issue.

In the 1960s, official statistics indicated a greater degree of inclusion of nonwhite members in Mozambican sports clubs and associations. Between 1959 and 1964 the number of black members of sports clubs and associations increased across the territory (table 2.2):

TABLE 2.2. Percentage of black members and mestiço members of sports clubs and associations in Mozambique and Lourenço Marques, 1959–64

Source: Based on data from Anuário estatístico de Moçambique (1959–64)

It is likely that these statistics included African clubs that had not been previously surveyed. The inclusion of their members in these figures puts the notion of openness in perspective.

THE INEFFICIENCY OF THE PHYSICAL EDUCATION MODEL

Even when it came to the segment of the population included in its activities—that is to say, the nonindígena population—Mocidade Portuguesa proved largely inoperative. Reports sent by its Comissariado Colonial (Colonial Commissariat) to the governor general between 1949 and 1951 reveal a difficult situation, characterized by an inability to act outside district capitals¹⁷⁶ and by a permanent lack of funds, material, and employees.¹⁷⁷ MP had to recruit specialized civilian teachers, even though these teachers and technicians often declined the post since they would earn less than what they received from the clubs.¹⁷⁸ The development of official sports policies in the final period of Portuguese domination, given the lack of direct investment, depended on the income generated through sports competitions, such as the football championships. Part of the budget of Mozambique’s CPEF came from the Fundo de Expansão Desportiva (Sports Expansion Fund), whose revenue was gathered by collecting 5 percent of sports competitions’ ticket sales.¹⁷⁹ In 1966 the introduction of a sports betting competition in the territory, Totobola,¹⁸⁰ raised the funds that would be channeled to sports.¹⁸¹ This led the state, at a time when the war effort was already eating up a great portion of the budget, to reduce direct investment in this area even further.¹⁸² Official reports from meetings taking place between 1959 and 1967 reveal that during this period a great deal of the CPEF’s work had to do with the resolution of problems related to federated competitions. One example is the validation of footballers’ transfers following requests from the respective clubs and associations.¹⁸³ Although filtered by social and racial divides, the football market managed to create its own means of labor integration.

The disciplinary instrument, which aimed to regulate and impose a new logic on the activity of associative sports, namely football competitions, was held hostage by the actual system it strove to control. Failing as an agent that aimed to “produce” acceptable sports practices and consumptions, the state sought to regulate activities, oversee them, avoid political appropriations, and, as far as possible, to use the specific social power of associative sports to hold on to their control over the city’s populations.

In the metropolis, given the inability to curtail the popularity of football, a sport that led young people away from schools and workshops,¹⁸⁴ the regime acknowledged, in the 1953 law that reformed “national physical education,” that sports associations promoted “a physical culture that, although lacking control and practice, had the virtue of uniting groups of people who enjoyed competition or exhibition. Here, they found a complement to an increasingly demanding social life.”¹⁸⁵ In 1960 the Estado Novo recognized professionalism in football, cycling, and boxing¹⁸⁶ so as to distinguish amateur sports, sponsored by state institutions, from professional sports, which were pedagogically and morally reprehensible.¹⁸⁷ This law was extended to colonial territories in 1963,¹⁸⁸ when it was already obvious that football had become, in cities such as Luanda or Lourenço Marques, a powerful social force.

Even though it was not considered a good practice by state specialists, in Mozambique’s capital, in the cement city, and in its suburbs, football mobilized young men and adults, practitioners, and spectators of a popular culture that established itself as a basis for ample sociability. The number of clubs and associations constantly increased, as did their total membership (table 2.3):

TABLE 2.3. Number of Mozambican sports associations and clubs and total membership, 1930–64

Source: Based on data from Anuário estatístico de Moçambique (1930–64)

Maintaining its criticism of the irrational and unedifying character of competitive games, the regime saw them from a different angle. Government experts considered now that football had an escapist effect; it created an arena for the manifestation of conflicts in a political context where the channels for public protest were virtually closed. In the colonial world these transformations are inseparable from the debate on the indígena question, as well as from imperial propaganda and urban social-management policies.¹⁸⁹

During the 1960s the number of transfers, instigated by the rise in the number of settlers and by the end of the indigenato, reached an impressive tempo, although the state attempted to delimit this market.¹⁹⁰ For example, it stipulated that athletes wanting to compete should have a minimum level of schooling.¹⁹¹ This policy prevented many players from competing. Despite such restrictive measures, football’s primacy—as a promoter of sports movements in Lourenço Marques, repeated in informal practices, and consumed as a dominant leisure activity—was imperious. Even if they were politically controlled, clubs and associations continued to promote an antipedagogic “movement policy” and became the key nuclei of football narratives deeply embedded in popular culture. The “game’s gestures” were replayed in the neighborhoods, in schools, on beaches, and in organized competitions, and then were echoed in the media, read, and listened to.

In the closing years of Portuguese power in Mozambique, the colonial state sought to use sports policies as a way to invert its role as the legitimating ground of a deeply hierarchical and racialized society. To that effect, a number of interrelated factors proved crucial: (1) the propagandistic exploitation of sports, (2) the implementation of social policies, particularly in the major cities, but also (3) the specific and relatively autonomous dynamics of a specialized field of physical education teaching and theorization that gradually abandoned the semimilitarized model of the MP in favor of a teaching system that, although integrated within the regime, had been subjected for some time to influences from more progressive traditions.¹⁹² It was only after 1967, when José Maria Noronha Feio, formerly a director at the Instituto Nacional de Educação Física (INEF) in Lisbon, was appointed leader of Mozambique’s CPEF, that sports policies, welfare, and urban-inclusion policies finally came together more efficiently. Noronha Feio managed to break with the semimilitarized practice of the MP, whose members still exerted influence on the CPEF.¹⁹³ Regarding his action as a policymaker, Noronha Feio stated that his priority was organizing “educational recreational activities that promoted the gregarious spirit among the less-developed populations, in spheres such as hygiene, human relations, and land settlement.” This action, he continued, “represents one of this nation’s government’s greatest concerns—the integration of the populations.”¹⁹⁴ Within the Portuguese state apparatus the need to integrate populations was rhetorically used by interest groups that had different opinions and pursued distinct objectives. Access to sport in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques became one of Noronha Feio’s main projects, integrated in a vast social intervention plan titled Plano de Beneficiência da Área Suburbana de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Suburban Area Improvement Plan).¹⁹⁵ Noronha Feio would leave Moçambique in 1973, when he was elected director geral dos desportos (general director of sports). The “integration of the populations” thus became a discursive device that legitimated forms of intervention on the ground. The regime’s interest in integrating the populations, to avoid social and political upheaval and to stabilize an urban African labor force, generated the necessary conjunctural conditions for a handful of agents on the ground to initiate a policy of democratization of sports practices, which allowed the field of sports, which was structurally discriminatory, to open up to some degree.

Imperial Narratives

The attempts to instrumentalize sports for social and political management, presenting it as an example of social integration, were at odds with the discrimination that prevailed on the ground. While this situation persisted, a propagandistic imperial narrative that exploited the success of a few African athletes in the metropolis was developed. To a degree that would merit closer scrutiny, this discourse drew on the powerful penetration of the football narrative in a mediatized urban popular culture so as to invest in a wide-spectrum and widely disseminated lusotropicalist rhetoric, which became even more effective when mediated by the seemingly neutral prose of specialized media outlets.¹⁹⁶ This situation revealed the need, among those who held key positions within the colonial field of power, to take into account the social influence of popular culture.

The presence of African players, the most prominent of whom came from Lourenço Marques, in popular metropolitan clubs, and in the national team promoted a “banal lusotropicalism” that was adopted by the Portuguese government, especially when the Benfica club of Eusébio and Coluna won the European Cup in 1961 and 1962,¹⁹⁷ and when the national football team came third in the World Cup in 1966.¹⁹⁸ The induction of Eusébio in the Portuguese army in 1963, widely reported by the media, and his participation in campaigns in support of Portuguese soldiers organized by the Movimento Nacional Feminino are only some of the examples of the political exploitation of the popularity generated by football.¹⁹⁹ In the context of the war, the campaigns run by the Gabinete de Acção Psicossocial (Office of Psychosocial Action) were also built around the presence of a metropolitan football narrative among the African populations.²⁰⁰ Spurred on by a powerful associative impulse and supported by the local authorities, the various tours of Portuguese clubs to the colonies reinforced these imperial conceptions of nationality.²⁰¹ The propaganda efforts undertaken by the Portuguese from the 1950s onward, which translated into a process of euphemization of the pervasive racism in the colonial spaces, opened up a split between events in the colonial terrain and an official and persistent historical narrative based on the romanticized accounts of these African players’ sports narratives.

Before the participation of the Portuguese national team in the 1966 World Cup, journalists were already referring to a “Euro-African” game style, which was a vehicle for political metaphors and cultural prejudices. Media narratives often registered the naturalization of an imperial motor habitus,²⁰² the synthesis of a lusophone body created by the Portuguese gest. The style of play was included as part of a discourse of propaganda and control that will have had its identitarian effects, shaping the imagination of the population both in the colonial territories and in the metropolis. The bodily movements of the national team players expressed, from this point of view, a singular identity, distinct from any other national football style. Vítor Santos, a journalist for A bola, a metropolitan sports newspaper, emphasized the influence of the “‘technical touch’ executed by the players from tropical and subtropical areas” in the “lusophone football ‘model’”: “the result of this miraculous mix of a natural technique, relaxed and swinging, typical of tropical and subtropical players, with the methodical preparation conducive to seriousness and to the achievement of an ideal performance, which is the product of the studiousness that, in some way, defines ‘northern people’ from this Old continent with a long history and tradition.”²⁰³ The discourse was similar, in many ways, to Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalist narrative, here adapted to football. For Freyre, in the many pages devoted to the unique features of the bodily practices of the Brazilian players, football was the manifestation of a national identity, a non-European one, of course.²⁰⁴

African players’ performances in Portuguese teams also led to various political and nationalist metaphors.²⁰⁵ After Benfica won its second European Cup, the director of A bola, Silva Resende, a man linked to the Estado Novo regime, talked about the benefits of having African players, such as Eusébio and Coluna, playing for Portuguese teams. These players, who had the “feline appearance that sets colored men apart,” introduced to the “game an element that was new to the habits of a public that perhaps had not realized that Portugal, without losing its intrinsic nature, was a multiracial nation.”²⁰⁶

Sports and the Colonial Field of Power

The process of sportization promoted from the early twentieth century in Lourenço Marques reified the main dividing lines that traversed the colonial system: class practices, racial divisions, and gender inequalities. The colonial situation thus helped to structure a segregated sports sphere of activity. The dissemination of sports, essentially promoted through the practice and consumption of football, took place, to a large extent, outside the state’s direct action, through the initiative of the network of associations and clubs that created regular competitions. The relation between the state and the private sports dynamic was ambivalent and must be interpreted in the context of the ambiguous territory of indirect rule. The leaders of clubs and associations within the settler’s universe, especially among those that had more influence, came for the most part from the dominant colonial classes. These leaders used sports as an instrument of clientelist and patronage relations, which granted them local prominence and also gave them, in the sphere of commercial and industrial development, the means for managing workplace environments, which proved useful in terms of achieving social peace and economic productivity. Although under political control, clubs and associations fostered competitive sports that officially were thought to have no pedagogical purpose and that gathered crowds that were fed misguided conceptions of the role of sports. Given that they could not impose, all the way from Lisbon, the official project of physical practice, set up in the 1930s, the state ended up trying to use sports popular culture, promoted by a federated associativism organized across transnational networks, to cement a wide social domain, both in terms of a policy of social integration and for propaganda purposes, by means of the creation of imperial narratives. It was only in the last stage of the Portuguese dominion over Mozambique that sports was included within a belated social policy program driven by the state. Although theoretically relevant, the division between private sports and state sports, the latter promoted by the colonial power itself, has obvious limitations, as both had their political field of performance, sometimes complementary, other times contentious. Such tensions and conflicts steer us toward a more adequate interpretation of the state’s action, beyond its laws and discourses. Hence, the untimely concern with the integration of indígenas, in the 1950s, forced the state to attempt an opening of the sports field, more in line with the lusotropicalist propaganda than with the reality on the ground. It was only in 1959 that legislation was passed to end the split and racialized football organization in Lourenço Marques.

The project of social transformation and political tutelage that pervaded the regime’s physical education policies and that took the athlete’s body as the site for the reproduction of the social and political order, proved unable to structure the field of sports. In this context, the state tried to develop its model of indirect rule, much dependent on the dynamics of local society and on the strategies of several agents in the colonial terrain. While presenting dimensions of informality that were often not picked up in the documentation, this model adjusted to the political cycles and to the changing needs of social regulation felt by the colonial system, that explains for instance the relation between segregation and political overture. But this model was also forced to respond to the development of the sports field, which by creating a specific market based on spectatorship and professionalism brought about new problems of regulation. While recognizing that African associative elites could reinforce the indigenato rule (“integrated but separated”), from the late fifties onward it was crucial to reconfigure this framework so that the image of a multiracial community bound by lusophone culture could emerge. While the sports field seems to not have posed a direct threat to the regime’s stability, it would develop potentialities and powers of its own, appropriate for agents that used sports practices and consumption as a means of pursuing private interests, of expressing and enjoying themselves, a means to forming bonds and sociabilities, of reinforcing social identities and political causes. The emphasis on the instrumental uses of sports as creators of bonds can overlook the way in which sports can promote horizontal ties that nonetheless, for the most part, exclude women.

As conceived by the physical-education theorists of the Estado Novo, movements that could not be predetermined, either through the natural order of the world (the expression of a pastoral idealization) or through physical-education science (applied to a political and social utopia), were not useful. The unpredictability of athletes’ trajectories during a football match, with their inconstant movements, reflected a disordered society. The match’s events, its rhythm, exposed life’s irregularities. Craveirinha, as he observed the gestures of players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, was looking at a whole different scenario: the game revealed Africans’ creativity, intelligence, and culture. It proved that Africans were not “doomed” to practice a premodern “natural sport,” supposedly consistent with their civilizational state. In the informal neighborhood matches and in the more organized competitions, the heterodox movements of suburban players, in the context of a singular historical and social experience, challenged a totalitarian vision of the body. Far from the practical institutionalization of politically driven ideomotor movements, these football matches expressed a socially embedded practice as well as the emergence of a situated motor habitus defined by a malicious motor repertoire. Their interpretation demands, however, a return to the process of construction of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques and to the way in which football was integrated within the economy of local practices.