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Foundations

The Introduction and Consumption of Soccer in Lusophone Africa

In Mozambique, I saw Belenenses [a Lisbon-based club] when they came. I also saw Académica [a Coimbra-based club] when they came to play in the Portuguese Cup. . . . In Africa, we saw Portuguese football as something from another world. We didn’t have TV; we relied on radio. But the following day at school, or at work, when we discussed the result of the match we often said: “Did you see that play? Did you see that cross?” Others would say, “He was offside.” But we had only heard the match on the radio! We had passion for metropolitan football. . . . It was always a frenetic environment when Benfica, Porto, or Sporting [Portuguese clubs] came to Mozambique or Angola. . . . Angola had . . . better conditions, but the enthusiasm was great everywhere.

—Shéu Han, a Mozambican player who traveled to Portugal in 1970 to launch a career with Benfica and also participated on tours of the African colonies while a member of the club, 2014

Few Mozambican youth would go on to enjoy the type of decorated soccer career that Shéu did, but virtually all of them followed metropolitan football growing up in the colony, enthusiastically and imaginatively envisioning events unfolding on the distant pitches. The seeds of this durable sporting enthusiasm had been planted decades previously by an array of individuals wielding a range of motives, many of which overlapped. This mélange of football advocates included missionaries, soldiers, sailors, colonial administrators, corporate officials, and merchants. In the aftermath of Portugal’s consolidation of formal colonial control at the end of the nineteenth century, soccer was introduced into the series of oppressive, exploitative environments that made up the country’s African empire. These constituent settings featured institutionalized racism, segregation, and pervasive inequity. Yet, even in these unlikely sporting incubators, the game steadily took hold. Subsequently, newspapers, radio, and, eventually, television would transmit the latest metropolitan soccer developments to colonial populations—both African and European—who eagerly consumed this news and, just as Shéu and his colleagues did, endlessly discussed it. The sizable Portuguese settler populations in Angola and Mozambique fed this soccer fervor. Beyond rooting for their favorite clubs, colonists shared their soccer allegiances with indigenous residents, cultivating and influencing the latter’s loyalties. As African footballers began playing for Portuguese clubs, the dialectical connection between colonized subjects of empire and metropolitan football only intensified. These passions were periodically stoked when Portuguese clubs toured the colonies during the summer months, with both settler and indigenous fans flocking to watch their footballing heroes—especially those players who had been locally produced.

This chapter examines the introduction of football into Portugal’s African territories, its growing popularity in these stops, and the myriad ways that metropolitan football both deepened and broadened consumption of the sport in the empire. I begin with an overview of Portuguese imperialism in Africa, including consideration of the shifting colonial environments that indigenous residents daily negotiated. It was in these milieus that football would come to flourish, with local practitioners and fans responsible for the sport’s explosive growth. Finally, I examine the ways that various forms of popular media in Africa facilitated local allegiances to metropolitan clubs and, in general, heightened interest in the game in the colonies; the profound impact that African footballers who joined these squads had on local consumption; and the sporting, social, and political dimensions of Portuguese teams’ soccer tours to the African colonies.

The History of the Portuguese (Empire) in Africa

The Portuguese first reached the areas in Africa that would eventually constitute its empire on the continent in the 1400s. In many places on Africa’s western, southern, and eastern shores, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive and would subsequently parlay their navigational precocity to generate considerable wealth via a flourishing trade in gold and slaves, among other items. The waves of European commercial imitators that followed in Portugal’s footsteps quickly outpaced the Iberian originators of the commerce between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. Yet the various Portuguese outposts along Africa’s coasts endured, primarily as embarkation points for slaves headed across the Atlantic and also as dumping grounds for metropolitan exiles, known as degradados. Otherwise, these stations waned in importance and influence over time, languishing for centuries and yielding few tangible rewards for Lisbon.

As European nations contemplated and subsequently engaged in the violent invasion of Africa during the second half of the nineteenth century, Portugal was compelled to claim imperial space on the continent in order to preserve its overseas interests. Reflective of its severely eroded standing in Europe, Portugal predicated these territorial assertions on its history of commercial interaction in sub-Saharan Africa dating back to its initial forays some centuries earlier. Ultimately, internecine power politics and rivalries among the European heavyweights facilitated Portugal’s otherwise unlikely establishment of an empire in Africa. Consequently, the diminutive nation departed from the 1884–1885 conference in Berlin, at which the European imperial powers carved up Africa into colonial domains, with geographically incommensurate, yet formally recognized, claims to five territories: Angola, Mozambique, Guiné, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe.

In the aftermath of Berlin, Portugal strove to subjugate the indigenous populations resident within its imperial claims. Lisbon also began to actively colonize these territories, though primarily only in and around the torpid urban spaces that Portuguese merchants and a handful of intrepid settlers had established centuries earlier. It took the underfunded Portuguese military significantly longer to satisfy the requisite “pacification” of local populations that the Berlin accord stipulated than it did the more powerful European nations. Yet Portugal was eventually able to establish control, often relying on high-profile acts of terror to maintain order, which, in turn, facilitated the exploitation of local human and natural resources.

In order to justify the initial conquest and ensuing overrule, the Portuguese state fostered powerful notions of European cultural superiority and, correspondingly, African inferiority. These increasingly accepted “truths” were reinforced at every turn, thereby influencing racial sentiments and, attendantly, interracial interactions in both the metropole and the colonies. Isabel Castro Henriques has described this specious position as pure “mythology,” which not only condescended to Africans, but also portrayed Portugal as a victim of the other European imperial nations. Rival continental powers allegedly “had ‘illegitimate’ African appetites,” since, after all, the Portuguese had been the first Europeans to arrive in sub-Saharan Africa.¹ Henriques further contends that “this situation led to the reinforcement of ideas and prejudices that had already taken root in Portuguese society, in which the somatic, the Negro, and social, the slave, were articulated together to define the African.”²

Another measure that Lisbon took to legitimate and consolidate control in its African empire was to encourage metropolitan citizens to relocate to the colonies. Influxes of these (often destitute) settlers in the early twentieth century significantly altered the demographic and economic landscapes in the two colonies that received the overwhelming majority of these individuals: Angola and Mozambique. In the former, for example, the white population more than doubled from 1900 to 1920, from 9,198 to 20,700.³

In both of these settings, waves of incoming Portuguese rapidly displaced long-standing mestiço (mulatto) populations, newly occupying low-level positions in the colonial bureaucracies that members of the mixed-race communities had previously held. Prior to these Portuguese arrivals, mestiços had provided invaluable service in the strapped administrative apparatuses that featured in the empire. With Lisbon unable to allocate sufficient human resources to African outposts, Portuguese men had long miscegenated with local women—a combination of libido, human nature, and administrative necessity. As such, Lisbon tolerated this form of intercultural interaction, even if it didn’t actively encourage it. The case of former footballer Hilário, who was born in 1939 in Lourenço Marques to an ethnic Chopi mother and a Portuguese father, is exemplary of these types of scenarios. He explained that his mother “was one of those who have tattoos on the face and on the belly. It was a style that was very beautiful and she had luck with boyfriends. . . . My mother came from Manhiça to the city [roughly 100 kilometers separate Manhiça and Lourenço Marques]. . . . She was a very beautiful girl.”⁴ Indeed, it was from these mixed-race communities that many of the most prominent members of the community of footballing migrants, Hilário included, emerged.

With the overthrow in 1926 of the Republic of Portugal, a short-lived government that itself had come to power only after toppling the Portuguese monarchy in 1910, the colonies were increasingly eyed as sources of revenue rather than as spaces to develop. With the emergence of the corporatist, authoritarian Estado Novo in 1933, expenditures for the empire were slashed while Lisbon continued to squeeze whatever revenues it could from the territories. With the advent of the new regime, the relative fiscal and political autonomy that the colonies had enjoyed under the republic came to an abrupt end; power was increasingly centralized. As part of the broader political and economic calculus of the Estado Novo (1933–1974), the regime facilitated the relocation of thousands of Portuguese to the colonies, in part to rid the metropole of under- or unemployed members of the population, but also to stimulate the colonial economies, such that the settler communities in both Angola and Mozambique grew more than tenfold between 1930 and 1970.⁵

Providing a complementary ideophilosophical justification for overseas Portuguese settlement, in the early 1950s the Estado Novo regime formally embraced the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s concept of Lusotropicalism to further explicate the relationship between the Portuguese and the constituent peoples of the empire. Freyre theorized that the prevalence of mixed-race individuals in areas Portugal had colonized was attributable to a form of inherent racial and cultural tolerance that the Portuguese, as a people, uniquely embodied and exhibited. After initially distancing the Estado Novo from Lusotropicalismo on racialist grounds following its promulgation in the 1930s, António de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who durably ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968, eventually adopted it as official state ideology. Salazar invoked the theory to justify empire, even if the exploitative treatment of both blacks and mestiços in the colonies experientially undermined any veracity that the dubious concept might have contained.

Even as the regime self-righteously promoted Lusotropicalism to defend its perpetuation of empire, Portugal couldn’t prevent the “winds of change” from blowing across the continent, inaugurated by England’s decolonization of its Gold Coast colony (Ghana) in 1957. By the 1960s, these breezes had turned to gusts, with a steady succession of colonies transitioning to independent states. Yet, while the British, French, and Belgians all abandoned their African colonial projects, Portugal’s dictatorship clung ever more tightly to empire. In a bid to stress the indivisibility of the colonies and the metropole, in 1951 the regime recast these possessions as “overseas provinces,” signifying that they were as integral to Portugal as were the various regions of the metropole. This obstinacy and artifice did not, however, come without cost. With colonial empires rapidly disappearing, Portugal’s political stance was becoming increasingly anachronistic. Moreover, the global left, which by the 1960s also featured a large number of newly independent African states, was openly condemning Portugal for its resolute preservation of the empire and, more specifically, the racist policies in force in its colonies. Even staunch allies of Portugal, such as the United States, were privately imploring Lisbon to relax statutory controls in the empire. In another blow to the regime, the Indian army forcibly annexed the historic Portuguese colony of Goa on the western coast of the subcontinent in 1961; protestations were all the enfeebled Iberian state could muster.

The early 1960s constituted an ominous time for Portugal and its empire. In February 1961, the Angolan war for independence commenced, followed shortly thereafter by nationalist eruptions in Guiné (1963) and Mozambique (1964). These three conflicts would each rage for over a decade, with the Portuguese conceding the most territory in Guiné. With mounting numbers of Portuguese conscripts losing life or limb while fighting in the African bush, the increasingly unpopular wars were crippling an already teetering state. Finally, in 1974, a group of mid-level army officers, tapping the sentiments of the war-weary Portuguese citizenry, staged a largely bloodless coup that toppled the Estado Novo state and thereby ended the colonial conflicts almost immediately, paving the way for the independence of the African territories. Portugal’s colonial adventure on the continent had finally come to an end.

Daily Life in Portugal’s African Colonies

Following the consolidation of control in Portugal’s imperial claims in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century and, in more resistive, “troublesome” spots in these territories in the early twentieth century, indigenous residents newly operated in environments marked by racial violence and exploitation. Consistent with other imperial European nations active in Africa, Portugal’s colonial project was predicated on racial and cultural superiority, cloaked in an altruistic “civilizing mission.” For African subjects, the key elements of this “mission” included the imposition of taxes, the implementation of forced labor schemes, and the daily threat of violence for any actual or perceived incompliance. Africans’ labor was vital for the generation of revenues, but the local populations otherwise constituted nothing more than burdens for a metropole that lacked the resources to develop its colonial possessions, though the realization of widespread social improvements was never a genuine objective for the regime anyway.

Over time, influxes of Portuguese settlers saw sleepy colonial outposts transformed into vibrant urban destinations, most profoundly in Angola and Mozambique. Consequently, the capital cities of Luanda and Lourenço Marques (Maputo), respectively, eventually featured “concrete” city centers populated exclusively by settlers, and concentric rings of suburbs in which black Africans, mestiços, and, complicating this otherwise steadfast racial configuration, poor white settlers resided, though the latter’s numbers were comparatively small. The residents of these hardscrabble suburban or peri-urban areas were typically impoverished and vulnerable, but far from destitute. Testimony from Hilário captures both the tenuousness and the resilience of life in the (Lourenço Marques) suburbs: “Poverty was normal. We had our houses of wood and zinc, we fed ourselves with flour and rice and fish and prawns. . . . There wasn’t so much misery that we would go hungry. No, we lived well within the possibilities that we had.”⁶ Urban centers in Portugal’s other African colonies, such as Bissau (the capital of Guinea-Bissau) and Praia (Cape Verde’s capital city), featured degrees of social and economic variance due to their smaller settler populations, but the racial conventions that prevailed in Angola and Mozambique similarly applied in these settings.

Following the overthrow of the Portuguese republic in 1926 and the implementation of Salazar’s authoritarian Estado Novo regime soon thereafter, the colonies became even more commercially friendly. Owing to a spate of new policies that reduced Africans to legally marginalized and (violently) exploitable colonial subjects, in rural areas settlers and private enterprises could newly access cheap, bound indigenous labor. Only by achieving assimilado (assimilated) status could Africans in the colonies escape existence as indígenas, a legal and social designation that rendered them extremely vulnerable. Yet the passage to formal assimilation was open to only a scant few. In 1950 in Angola, for example, only 1.38 percent of the over four million Africans and mestiços enjoyed this status, and if the latter are removed from the equation, that figure sinks to just 0.7 percent.⁷ The Estado Novo regime did little, if anything, to alter this social configuration until newly independent African nations elsewhere on the continent began to utilize the international bodies at their disposal, such as the United Nations and the International Labor Organization, to malign, disgrace, and increasingly isolate the resolute Portuguese state.

Begrudgingly, Lisbon reactively began revising its colonial policies. In the early 1960s, with the wars for independence under way, the regime dismantled the forced labor schemes in place and began allocating additional funds to extend (albeit skeletal) education and health-care infrastructures. Even if these decisions were politically motivated—calculated, though belated, efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of indigenous residents—Africans did, nonetheless, benefit. Indeed, as Domingos has argued, “The toning down of the social segregation mechanisms, especially after . . . 1961, created the conditions to speed up the dynamics of mobility that were already in place. The need for economic mobility demanded the end of political obstacles.”⁸ Yet Marcelo Bittencourt reminds us that despite these concessions, the politico-martial events of the 1960s “radicalized the Portuguese colonial authorities; the eyes and ears of the government agencies came to suspect any type of association . . . in which black and mestiços congregated.”⁹ As such, even as whites, blacks, and mestiços began mixing with greater fluidity, often within formerly segregated spaces, pervasive suspicion and tension engendered by the wars for independence marked the various colonial settings.

The Social Backgrounds of Footballers as Windows into Colonial Contexts

As the denouement of the Portuguese empire approached, the African footballers who would eventually relocate to the metropole were humbly being born and sired on soccer. Notwithstanding the divergent social and economic circumstances in which individual players were raised and the different decades in which they reached their formative footballing years, their experiences exemplarily illuminate daily life in an array of Portuguese colonial settings.

The majority of these future soccer stars grew up reasonably poor, even if some—and, in particular, mestiço players, owing to their Portuguese fathers—had somewhat more comfortable upbringings. Many mestiço footballers’ settler parents were employed in the colonial bureaucracies, which afforded them decent livings, though none of these families would have been considered elite. For example, Miguel Arcanjo, who grew up in Angola in the 1940s and would go on to play for FC Porto, had a Portuguese father who was employed in the colonial treasury, where he was apparently both “distinguished and admired.”¹⁰ Many of Arcanjo’s siblings would also go on to serve as public functionaries. Although being an assimilado or mestiço in the colonies did not preclude significant social and economic challenges, the social strata from which many of these players derived rendered their migration to Portugal more a form of geographical rather than social mobility, as they were moving from one reasonably advantaged environment to another.

Elsewhere on the socioeconomic spectrum, Armando Manhiça, who was raised in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques in the 1950s and would eventually play in Portugal for Sporting Lisbon and FC Porto, had a much more modest upbringing. The sixth child in his family, his father worked in a factory, earning a salary that was “not large,” while from the age of four Manhiça helped his mother carry, deliver, and sell fish in the city’s popular Xipamanine market.¹¹

Irrespective of the divergences in the socioeconomic statuses of players’ families, virtually all of these future footballers attended school for at least some period of time. Enrollment was at the insistence of their parents, who deemed formal education the key to future success. In fact, no matter how personally enamored the guardians may have been with football, most considered the game a threat to their sons’ studies and, therefore, an endeavor that could potentially derail the professional trajectories they envisioned for their children—a sentiment that was especially pronounced in relatively well-off families. For example, Shéu Han recalled that his father did not want him to “dribble away his life” playing soccer, and, as such, “it was very difficult to convince him to permit the aspiring footballer to pursue his ambitions.”¹² Shéu’s father, who was Chinese, instead wanted him to study to become an engineer. To this end, he sent Shéu to live with his maternal uncle and attend school in Beira, the second-largest city in Mozambique, hundreds of miles north of the small fishing village of Inhassoro, where the future Benfica star had been born.

Despite these parents’ best intentions for their children’s educations, familial financial expediencies could trump and, thus, truncate schooling careers, as was the case with Joaquim Adriano José da Conceição, who would go on to star for Portugal’s Vitória de Setúbal football club in the 1960s. Well before those later, more comfortable years, Conceição grew up in a Luanda bairro (neighborhood) in the 1950s, and the meager salaries his painter father and sewer mother earned, coupled with the presence of eleven children to feed, forced him to abandon his studies upon completing elementary school to take up work at a carpenter’s shop.¹³ For players raised in single-parent homes, this eventuality was even more unavoidable. As Vicente Lucas, who grew up in Lourenço Marques and lost his father when he was fourteen years old, explained, “We were semi-poor. My mother even sold rope. . . . I walked to school, but eventually stopped attending and went to work for a blacksmith. . . . We weren’t really happy in Mozambique because there were many children—four boys and four girls—and we had difficulties of various types.”¹⁴ For players like Lucas, continued schooling simply wasn’t economically viable.

Unfortunately, for players such as Lucas and Conceição, the intellectual and intercultural competency facilitated by extended schooling in the colonies helped migrant footballers integrate once in the metropole. Indeed, those players, typically from more privileged families, who were able to complete secondary school while in the colonies, and, even more significantly, those who opted to play their football for Académica, typically experienced even more facile transitions into metropolitan life. Of course, neither these scholar-athletes nor the parents who had mandated schooling in the colonies realistically envisioned this eventual social-athletic outcome. Nor did a parental emphasis on education necessarily generate enthusiasm for academics among these budding football stars; for most of the athletes, soccer, rather than school, motivated them.

For those players who were thrust into remunerative activities in the colonies, employment often featured a soccer connection, just as it would for those who opted to sign for CUF (Companhia União Fabril) once in the metropole. Oftentimes, clubs in the colonies were operated by, or at least had meaningful links to, commercial interests and would arrange employment with a private or state entity (e.g., the railroad) to attract talented footballers to their squads and, subsequently, to retain them. For example, Augusto Matine, who grew up in Lourenço Marques in the 1960s and played locally for Clube Central before going on to play for Benfica in Lisbon, recalled:

Sr. António, Central’s leader, came to me and asked me what I did. . . . I learned the trade of surveyor of measures in gas stations and of agrarian measures and taxi meters. . . . There were others who were placed elsewhere and learned to be mechanics. After one year, a year and a half, two years, we really started to earn some money in the places where we worked. We became part of the staff. I remember that I made 400 escudos a month and I could use this money to feed my family.

One of Central’s directors had a factory called the Companhia Industrial da Matola, which made various types of pasta and cookies. At the end of the month, he gave me a rancho: ten kilograms of sugar, ten kilograms of rice, two soap bars, milk, butter, cookies, and some money for my mother. If I received 400 [escudos], I would give 300 to my mother and keep 100. That was to protect myself. If my brothers asked me for something, they wouldn’t lack anything. This was how I lived. I grew as a man and as a respected football player because I worked for it.¹⁵

Footballers of European descent who made the jump from the colonies to the metropole typically enjoyed more comfortable, if still modest, upbringings. For example, Alberto da Costa Pereira, who grew up in the 1940s in Nacala and Nampula, in the far northern reaches of Mozambique, before going on to star as a goalkeeper for Benfica and the Portuguese national team, was a “total sportsman”—a basketball player, an accomplished sailor, and a record holder in the shot put. He also, in his free time, hunted rabbits, impalas, and other antelopes.¹⁶ As a child, Pereira was inspired by magazines such as Stadium, which arrived in Mozambique from Portugal, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, and occasionally featured African track stars, including Tomás Paquete, Matos Fernandes, and Espírito Santo, each of whom hailed from the Lusophone territories.¹⁷ His father worked for the railroad, so the family didn’t figure among the colonial elites. Yet the nature and wide range of leisure activities in which he engaged certainly differentiated his childhood experiences from those of the majority of African and mestiço players during their formative years in the colonies.

The Introduction of Football in the Colonies

It was into the colonial environments outlined above that a variety of individuals, including soldiers, missionaries, merchants, administrators, educators, corporate officials, and, eventually, settlers (especially as their numbers increased over time) introduced the game of football. This process of dissemination was highly uneven but generally commenced in port cities, such as Bissau, Luanda, and Lourenço Marques, in the late nineteenth century. The game subsequently traveled along overland routes and, eventually, railroads and other thoroughfares, such that it had widely penetrated the interior by the 1920s. Despite the game’s notable diffusion, though, the process of introducing it was largely unsystematic, lacking any type of formality or organization. Only much later would colonial authorities deem the sport useful to maintaining control and, thus, try to supervise this process of propagation. In the meantime, the game was introduced wherever and whenever European practitioners were active and felt compelled to share the rules, conventions, and strategies of the sport with Africans.

Scholars have debated to what ends Europeans introduced football to local residents and, attendantly, the efficacy of their designs. Some have examined the hegemonic motivations behind the introduction of soccer, while others, conversely, have considered how Africans frustrated these intentions, embracing the game but actively rejecting the elements of inculcation hidden in this alleged sporting “Trojan horse.” Irrespective of the divergent interpretive angles, it’s important to note that not all Europeans shared the same objectives related to the introduction of football to Africans. For example, unlike Portuguese soldiers who may have introduced soccer simply to generate indigenous competitors, missionaries championed the sport as part of a broader emphasis on “muscular” Christianity. Meanwhile, the colonial state was more interested in the game’s potential to subdue, distract, reinforce racial hierarchy, generate respect for authority, and minimize what colonial social engineers perceived to be an unproductive use of leisure time by indigenous residents. As such, the state encouraged soccer as a “civilizing” endeavor for African populations as part of its wider efforts to use physical education to control the bodies of the colonized masses. As Domingos has argued regarding soccer in the Lusophone African context, the games themselves were “instruments of socialization, infusing discipline . . . respect for hierarchies and rituals.”¹⁸ In this capacity, football was undoubtedly more than just a game. And the associated methods and intended lessons were far more important than the game itself.¹⁹ Although football’s efficacy as a tool to maintain social control is disputable, the sport unquestionably constituted a key component in Portugal’s cultural imperialism campaign, an important pillar in the broader process of empire.

Finally, it is important to note that in many instances, and especially in the early decades of colonial control in Portugal’s territories, Africans themselves were responsible for introducing the game. This phenomenon was most frequently associated with Mozambique and, to a lesser extent, Angola, due to their proximity to and economic links with South Africa, the site of the first recorded football matches on the continent. Regarding Mozambique, the incessant streams of migrant laborers were exposed to the game, and subsequently brought that knowledge back with them following stints in the South African mines. As Patrick Harries and others have argued, strong cultural, social, and economic connections existed between urban South Africa and Lourenço Marques, as well as along the overland routes to and from the mines.²⁰ Migrant Mozambican mine workers cultivated and daily reinforced these links, with football figuring centrally in this transnational exchange of leisure habits.

The Consumption of Football in the Colonies: “Diseased” for Portuguese Clubs

Shortly after the introduction of football in the colonies, Africans began dribbling, passing, and shooting just about any spherical object they could fashion or find. Yet the engagement with the sport was not limited to practicing and playing. Both practitioners and fans contributed to the popularity of the sport by eagerly consuming soccer developments from the metropole and rapidly forming allegiances to—or, as some avid followers referred to this phenomenon: “becoming diseased for”—the major Portuguese clubs. Indeed, while the distance between the dusty pitches in Africa and the verdant fields in the metropole was both literally and figuratively immense, newspapers, radio, and, eventually, television daily delivered Portuguese soccer matches and news to the continent, effectively reducing the expanse.

Initially, the media accounts were primarily consumed by European colonists, who had packed up their metropolitan club loyalties and brought them to the colonies. This sporting fealty enabled settlers to retain important cultural connections to the metropole and also facilitated entry into social networks in the colonies that revolved around football fandom. The example of the family of José Águas, who grew up in colonial Angola and would eventually go on to star for Benfica, is illustrative of the durability and pervasiveness of sporting devotions within Portuguese settler communities. According to his profile in a 1956 issue of Ídolos, “He was always a Benfica supporter, as he came from a family of ‘benfiquistas’ [ardent Benfica supporters]. He knew the names and the characteristics of all the players, heard the reports, clipped the photos. When Benfica won the Taça Latina [in 1950], he was delirious with enthusiasm.”²¹ This type of football fidelity reigned in mixed-race households as well, given that virtually all of these domiciles featured Portuguese patriarchs. For example, the father of mestiço player Mário Torres was an avid supporter of Sporting Lisboa and tangibly expressed this allegiance in colonial Angola by founding two local affiliates of the metropolitan powerhouse: Sporting do Huambo, based in the colony’s second largest city; and Sporting de Vila Nova, located nearby.

If Portuguese settlers were the original consumers of metropolitan football in the colonies, Africans also began to develop metropolitan sporting allegiances, similarly gravitating toward the “big clubs”—the same outfits that most colonists supported. In fact, Africans’ club loyalties were often influenced by the Portuguese with whom they interacted, typically at their respective places of employment. An account by Ângelo Gomes da Silva, who played locally in Mozambique, is exemplary of the transference of footballing loyalties from Portuguese to African laborers. According to Silva, Africans and mestiços conversed with “co-workers who had come from the metropole and who supported particular clubs. So, when a Portuguese would ask which club an African supported and he didn’t have a response, the inquirer would retort, for example, ‘You don’t have a club? Then you have to support Sporting. . . . You are a man, why don’t you support a club? It must be Portugal’s Sporting.’”²² These implorations explicitly imposed Portuguese notions of masculinity upon local populations, either encouraging or even shaming Africans and mestiços into footballing allegiances.

Adherences of this nature also provided Africans a topic that they could safely discuss with Portuguese coworkers, transcending the racial divides that pervaded every colonial setting. Domingos has convincingly argued that at a range of worksites in the colonies, “football, acting as a repertoire of interaction, guaranteed a minimum common denominator for interactions between colonizers and colonized and served as a way to start conversation.”²³ Indeed, Augusto Matine recalled that he used to discuss football with coworkers during breaks and that Portuguese soccer news and events dominated these conversations: “People talked more about metropolitan football than our own. We started to have all kinds of information about football. As I read Benfica’s newspaper, I knew more about the club than some guys who were there [Portugal]. I devoured that newspaper to learn more about Benfica, about every sport. If I saw a magazine with things about Sporting I would also grab it and would not pass it to anyone before I finished it. Only then would I pass it to the next guy.”²⁴ Matine’s account underscores both the personal and the social importance of this type of sporting knowledge.

Regardless of the influence that some Portuguese exerted on indigenous residents as the latter formed their club loyalties, most Africans developed their particular soccer allegiances organically. Most often, these fidelities developed for the same reasons they always have: sporting success. As such, young boys in the colonies formed allegiances to the best Portuguese clubs, namely Sporting, FC Porto, Benfica, and Belenenses. Fans of all ages would often gather around to listen to someone read the latest news regarding the clubs, or, from the mid-1930s on, radio broadcasts in the colonies of metropolitan matches, which both facilitated and hastened this affective process.²⁵ Supporters often listened to games on transistor radios powered by car batteries—events that drew clusters of people huddled around the set, alternately elated or deflated according to the unfolding events. Matine, a Mozambican who would eventually play for Benfica in the 1960s, indicated:

Growing up, I wanted to be like Travassos, like Coluna. They were my idols. I saw them in the newspapers. . . . I was “diseased” for Benfica: I did not miss a single report in which Benfica appeared. My dad had a little radio, always tuned to Emissora Nacional, the metropolitan national radio. It was three o’clock in Portugal, five o’clock in Mozambique. We had finished everything, I had played in the morning in my district, had played on Saturday, and on Sunday I would listen to my club play. We lived as if we were watching the game. That disease still exists today. I knew every single Benfica player, the entire team, managers and all that. I was fortunate enough to have access to the club newspaper. There was a Portuguese man in Mozambique who owned a photography company and subscribed to Benfica’s newspaper. After reading it, he passed it on to me. Even if it was last week’s, I wanted to know everything that was going on with my club. There was that disease.²⁶

In response to newspaper accounts, radio broadcasts, and other sources of football information, countless neighborhood kids latched on to one of the major Portuguese clubs and imaginatively closed the space between them and the distant squads to which they had pledged their allegiance. For example, António Brassard, who would play for Académica in the 1960s, recalled that as a child, his bairro team was called the Águias Dourados, or Golden Eagles—the nickname of Benfica: “We even made the emblem with the eagle. Benfica really was the club of our dreams! We used to listen to the radio commentaries and we imagined we were playing with the stars of the team.”²⁷ By engaging with the major metropolitan clubs in a variety of creative ways, African fans were embracing a topic that could be endlessly discussed and debated among family, friends, coworkers, and even strangers.

Despite the demonstrated alacrity that characterized Africans’ engagement with metropolitan soccer, some scholars have questioned the organicity or benignity associated with the development of this keenness. For example, Paul Darby argues that “the extent to which Portuguese football was promoted by the Portuguese colonial authorities as culturally superior to the local game was further exemplified through the provision of radio broadcasts of Portuguese football. . . . These practices had resonance beyond football and they can be read as part of the broader drive to promote colonial hegemony.”²⁸ Yet, upon closer examination, Darby’s binary appears experientially spurious: colonial officials also “culturally” enjoyed “the local game,” which similarly featured a preponderance of Portuguese players. Moreover, as Domingos reminds us, settlers also had loyalties to local clubs, which were “axes of urban sociabilities, and identification with these clubs became a means of individual and collective recognition.”²⁹ Further, the football played in Portugal was of an indisputably higher quality, which itself offers an explanation for its popularity that is both plausible and innocuous. Former Rádio Clube de Moçambique announcer João de Sousa affirmed that when a metropolitan match began at the same time as a local game, the former was the one that was transmitted. This option, he indicated, was “justified on commercial grounds. This was the game more people wanted to hear.”³⁰ Finally, by failing to plumb Africans’ sporting sentiments, scholars risk ignoring the tastes, desires, and predilections of these football consumers; instead, indigenous fans are cast as unknowing, helpless victims of hegemonic pressures exerted by anonymous colonial officials such as those invoked above by Darby, or of some type of “false consciousness.” As Allen Guttmann has cogently argued, this dismissive conclusion related to culturally dominated groups’ enthusiastic engagement with sports is quite simply “not persuasive.”³¹

As outlined above, the local affiliate squads were, for a variety of reasons, less popular than their Portuguese parent clubs. Yet, by often featuring the same, or very similar, team names and virtually identical uniforms, local clubs provided Africans and Europeans a more proximate means of connecting with their more famous parent teams—a type of association by proxy. As Gary Armstrong has contended, the supporters of these local affiliates had “an implicit loyalty to their Portuguese namesakes.”³² However, for all of this local support and the umbilical links that many colonial clubs featured, as de Sousa indicated above, it was the parent clubs that consistently captured the auditory devotions and most stoked the sporting passions of both settlers and Africans alike in the Lusophone colonies.

Following the initial transfers of players from the colonies to the metropole in the 1940s, interest in Portuguese soccer enjoyed even greater support in Lusophone African stops. As African players began relocating to the metropole, news about Portugal’s Primeira Divisão (First Division) was of increasing interest to fans throughout the empire. For example, according to Ângelo Gomes da Silva, who played locally in Mozambique but never made the leap to Portugal, “Matateu’s transfer to Belenenses [a club located in greater Lisbon] in 1951 was the defining moment. . . . When the players started moving to Portugal and began to succeed there, we became really interested in Portuguese football.”³³ Matateu’s brother Vicente Lucas, who would himself go on to star for both Belenenses and the Portuguese national team, confirmed the enormity of his older brother’s relocation to and subsequent footballing success in Portugal: “When we came to know, through the newspapers, the extent of the success that he was having in Portugal it generated enormous happiness for everyone. I cut out the newspapers . . . with all of the commentary on the goals that he scored. There was much praise for him.”³⁴ Moreover, Augusto Matine indicated that because African footballers who transitioned to Portugal were newly seen as paragons by locals, the resultant adulation further intensified the consumption of metropolitan soccer in the colonies: “When I was playing in Portugal I was a role model for my friends here in Mozambique. All of them wanted to know what was happening with me, and I became a reference for them. But I said Matateu, Coluna, Eusébio, Manhiça, Valdmar, Rui Rodrigues, Mário Wilson; all these guys were references—not me. Everyone in Lourenço Marques knew that we [Africans] were in professional football. In every bairro there was an interest in knowing more about the Portuguese clubs where we were playing.”³⁵

So deep was the interest in, and affinity toward, the metropolitan clubs that the renowned Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes has revealed that these loyalties even generated empathy, if only temporarily, between otherwise mortal enemies. In describing his combat experiences in Angola as a conscript fighting for Portugal against the nationalist Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA; People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) guerrillas, he candidly admitted:

When Benfica was playing, we would aim our rotating rifles toward the bush and, consequently, there were no attacks. The war stopped. Even the MPLA was for Benfica. It was an extremely strange situation because it didn’t make sense that we were angry at people who were pulling for the same club as us. Benfica was, in fact, the best protector of [combatants during] the war. And nothing like this happened when Sporting or Porto were playing, which annoyed the more well-born captain and some junior officers. I even understand how you could shoot a supporter of Porto, but one from Benfica?³⁶

Summer Projects: Metropolitan Clubs’ African Tours

As early as the 1930s, and increasingly commonly from the 1940s on, metropolitan clubs toured the Portuguese colonies during the summer, following the conclusion of their domestic seasons. These tours were extremely popular, drawing both European and African fans to a series of exhibition matches. Although residents in the colonies could connect with their favorite metropolitan teams through local affiliate clubs and popular media, neither form of engagement rivaled witnessing “the real thing.” Eventually, African migrant footballers themselves served as promotional agents of the sport in the colonies, returning home with their respective touring metropolitan clubs to play in the matches against local squads.

Notwithstanding the eventual success and popularity of the tours, they began rather inauspiciously and not without a host of associated obstacles, many logistical. Indeed, prior to widespread air travel, these forays to the colonies necessitated maritime travel, which entailed weeks at sea just to reach, for example, Luanda from Lisbon, and additional time to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope to arrive at Lourenço Marques. With limited time for players to rest and rejuvenate during the summer months, this type of elongated travel was particularly onerous. Upon arrival in the colonies, metropolitan-based footballers also voiced their grievances related to the rudimentary playing conditions, namely the dirt pitches. The disagreeable nature of the tour experience at times colored the competitors’ interactions as well. As Bittencourt reveals, “Some of these sporting encounters in Angola (and presumably elsewhere, as well) were marked by altercations between players from Portuguese clubs and those from Angola, as happened with Acadêmica in 1938, Benfica in 1949, and C.U.F. in 1954.”³⁷ And it wasn’t always the African-based players who instigated these fisticuffs. According to Bittencourt, CUF players sparked the 1954 incident as, having just won the second division in Portugal, they were “bitter” after losing 6–1 to a team of Luanda-based footballers.³⁸

Although metropolitan clubs were always favored to triumph in these matches, they occasionally failed to play their part, as supposedly inferior, yet manifestly plucky, teams from the colonies periodically won and, just as CUF discovered, sometimes by wide margins. Metropolitan clubs were most vulnerable when they were matched up against teams composed of the most talented footballers from the colonial capitals, essentially local “all-star” squads, and especially when those squads featured players who would later go on to star in Portugal. Even when the typically racially diverse colonial teams didn’t win, though, they instilled local pride among both indigenous residents and settlers.³⁹ Indeed, Domingos has argued that these sporting visits constituted “instances in which the settler could demonstrate his vitality in front of a representative of the empire’s ruling center.”⁴⁰

The impetuses for these footballing jaunts varied, changed over time, and are still debated. What is irrefutable is that the tours were lucrative for the participating clubs, with the revenues on offer providing ample motivation (and explanation) for their realization. But the tours also appear to have featured a patriotic/political dimension, a way to reaffirm the links between the metropole and the empire, which collectively composed the multisited mundo português, or Portuguese world. Ana Santos, writing about Benfica’s tours throughout the empire, indicates that metropolitan media traveled with the club and filed multiple daily reports, thereby reinforcing the regime’s emphasis on political union. Santos further explains that upon arrival in the capitals of Angola and Mozambique, the club was regaled with the same honors that visiting heads of state received.⁴¹ The regime’s official recognition of such sporting forays was seemingly intended to confirm its mantra, and associated propaganda, that “Portugal is not a small country” (see fig. 1.1). Indeed, even if the Estado Novo neither engineered nor mandated the tours, Lisbon certainly condoned these constitutive examples of what Michael Billig has called “banal nationalism”—the seemingly insignificant, yet highly efficacious, everyday representations of the state that collectively cultivate a national, imagined sense of community.⁴²

Elsewhere, Lanfranchi and Taylor have unambiguously referred to these trips as “propaganda tours,” while Marcos Cardão has written extensively about their explicitly political objectives.⁴³ For example, in addition to providing local entertainment, Benfica’s tour of Portuguese Goa in 1960 was seemingly intended to remind indigenous subjects of their imperial connections and responsibilities. The presence of General Vassalo e Silva, the governor-general of the colony, at the associated events was undoubtedly intended to reinforce this message and to signal to neighboring India that Goa remained Portuguese territory. Yet, while the Indian brass may have been impressed by the football on display, they patently ignored the political overtones: just one year later, the Indian army successfully invaded Goa, quickly removing what Jawaharlal Nehru had described as “a pimple on the face of India.”

Following the outbreak of the struggles for independence in the African colonies, beginning in Angola in the initial months of 1961, the tours became undeniably political, with the participating clubs requiring no patriotic prodding. For example, in May 1961, less than five months after the outbreak of violence in Angola, Benfica offered to play a match in Luanda against a team of Angolans, with the receipts from the game going to “the victims of terrorism” in the colony.⁴⁴ Shortly thereafter, Benfica threw its support behind not only the civilian victims of the Angolan nationalists, but also the Portuguese armed forces, who had, in the meantime, commenced a brutal counterinsurgency campaign. The following summer, in 1962, Benfica toured both Angola and Mozambique, declaring in its official organ, O Benfica, that the club was bringing “the brilliance of its prestige and its metropolitan friendship to the Portuguese, who are fighting in Africa for the integrity and the continuation of the Pátria.”⁴⁵ As Cardão registers, “One of the stated objectives of this tour was to raise funds for the construction of a hospital for the recuperation of the soldiers of the Forças Armadas [Portuguese armed forces] who were engaged in combat in the African colonies.”⁴⁶

Figure 1.1. Replica propaganda map of the type regularly generated by the Portuguese regime during its reign.

Notwithstanding this political overtness, it is important to note that Portuguese clubs also traveled to other places in Africa (and South America), belying contentions that these tours were exclusively intended to deepen colonial control. Furthermore, clubs from all over Europe (as well as some from South America—most notably, Brazilian squads—and others from South Africa) also toured the Portuguese colonies, underscoring the fact that not every visit by a foreign club was intended to reinforce the links between the metropole and the empire.⁴⁷

Once Portuguese clubs began utilizing players from the colonies, the tours also provided opportunities for metropolitan team officials to identify, scout, and, in some cases, sign talented African-based footballers. For African hopefuls, the matches constituted occasions to showcase their skills in the hopes of making lasting impressions on prospective employers. One rather extraordinary example of this phenomenon occurred in Angola during Benfica’s summer 1960 tour. Already aware of the prodigious talents of José Águas, who played for Lusitano Lobito, Benfica officials indicated that they would be assessing the footballer’s skills during the scheduled matches, one of which was surprisingly won, 3–1, by a team of Lobito-based “all-stars,” with Águas tallying a brace against the famous Lisbon club. Exceptionally, the nineteen-year-old striker signed for and immediately joined Benfica as they proceeded onward to other stops on their African tour, and he would eventually go on to play thirteen more seasons for the club.

Irrespective of the particular motivations for these tours, or even the final scores of the constituent matches, they were immensely popular, granting adoring, football-frenzied fans in the colonies opportunities to witness their heroes perform at close range. For example, responding to my question regarding the turnouts for matches involving touring metropolitan clubs, Augusto Matine responded: “The stadiums were full. There was no [empty] space,” and, to a follow-up inquiry regarding the affordability of attending, Matine explained: “For the cost of living at the time, it was expensive. But, even though it was, people made sacrifices. . . . Normally, the people who used to go to football matches were those with good jobs, but even the poor would pay 20 escudos for a ticket.”⁴⁸ Similarly, Miguel Arcanjo, who grew up in Angola and would go on to become a fixture in central defense for FC Porto throughout the 1950s and into the first half of the 1960s, recalled that when the club toured the colony in the late 1940s (a tour that also included a visit to the neighboring Belgian Congo), throngs of local kids, including himself, chased after the vehicles that were carrying the visiting players, hoping to catch a glimpse of their sporting idols.⁴⁹ And in no way were the scenes that Arcanjo described anomalous. In the summer of 1955, for example, when Belenenses arrived in Luanda as part of a tour of Angola, residents flooded a neighborhood of the colonial capital to present the great Mozambican player Matateu with presents and even constructed a throne upon which they insisted the footballer sit.

. . .

The individuals who introduced football to the indigenous residents of Portugal’s African territories could not have foreseen how immensely popular the game would become. Beyond generating countless practitioners, the sport also attracted legions of fans. Over time, the ability to converse knowledgeably about local, metropolitan, and even global football developments facilitated entry into social networks in the colonies and constituted an important component of masculine identity. Newspapers, radio, and, later on, television catalyzed and both broadened and deepened the consumption of local and distant soccer-related events. Eventually, African emigrant footballers themselves helped to popularize the metropolitan version of the sport in the colonies not only via their athletic success, but also by returning to the continent on summer tours as sporting heroes—embodiments of African capability.

Long before some of these Lusophone African players became international footballing idols, indigenous engagement with the game in the colonies began much more discreetly, though with a mounting fervor that presaged future success. In the ensuing chapter, I explore this unassuming process as Africans began to practice and play the sport in settings throughout Portugal’s colonial empire. Shortly after they began kicking around a ball, Africans formed “native” clubs and leagues and developed new styles and approaches that substantively transformed the activity to which they had originally been exposed. With time, the skills of talented mestiço and black players were too great for organized clubs to forgo, even in the highly racialized colonial settings. Consequently, these talented footballers were invited to play in formerly whites-only leagues in Africa before eventually going on to play in the metropole and, for some, on the world’s grandest and most revered soccer stages.