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Engaging with the Game

African Practitioners in the Colonies

He used to play football with his many brothers on the sandy grounds of the suburbs, from dawn until dusk. He reached the football fields at a run, running like someone fleeing from the police or from the misery snapping at his heels.

—Eduardo Galeano, celebrated Uruguayan journalist and writer, describing Eusébio’s childhood

The football of my time was played with a joy and a desire to show our skills as players. Today, this football doesn’t exist because economic interests come first.

—Abel Miglietti, who was born in Mozambique in 1946 and would eventually go on to play for a series of clubs in Portugal, including Benfica and Porto

Although it is, of course, impossible to pinpoint the first time an African in what would become Portuguese imperial territory kicked a soccer ball, or even something approximating one, it’s quite possible that she or he enjoyed it. If Africans in the colonies eagerly consumed metropolitan soccer happenings, they just as zealously played the sport, increasingly generating their own noteworthy footballing developments. Africans’ enthusiastic engagement with the game grew largely in parallel to the expansion of soccer within the European settler communities: these two groups of practitioners were segregated by the administrative policies that demarcated colonial spaces along racial lines. Following the introduction of soccer in Portugal’s African empire, decades would pass before the racial boundaries that divided these footballing worlds dissipated, enabling blacks and whites in the colonies to play against and with one another.

Well before this integrative process eroded these sporting barriers, Africans resourcefully formed their own clubs and associations, organizationally mimicking the Europeans-only leagues and adhering to the rules and regulations of the game as initially conveyed to them. However, they also developed their own “creolized” styles and dynamics of play. In this manner, and in many other ways, Africans appropriated the game—making it their own, filling it with new meanings, and infusing it with a performative dimension devoid of the European version of the sport. Later, though, as talented African players began to join traditionally whites-only clubs, to achieve success they would have to conform to the prevailing tactics and approaches advocated by the array of Portuguese coaches in the colonies. Local observers bemoaned the resultant disappearance of indigenous styles of play, as footballing panache became one of many casualties of the mounting emphasis on victory above all else.

In response to a range of external pressures and administrative calculations, the various governments in the Portuguese colonies eventually incorporated the African associations into the longer-established European leagues. In turn, the elite colonial clubs newly began recruiting large numbers of talented black and mestiço (mulatto) players. On these racially integrated squads, African footballers forged meaningful friendships across racial lines, united by their athletic acumen and common sporting cause. Yet, for all of their social and sporting success, players’ salaries remained nominal. In the absence of living wages for squad members, colonial soccer teams attracted skilled footballers by arranging for employment either directly with club patrons or through associated commercial networks. By engaging in remunerative work in mixed-race environments, players both contributed to household finances and sharpened their social integration skills. And, perhaps most importantly, they also developed labor strategies that many of them would subsequently apply in the metropole in creative and innovative ways to facilitate their long-term success, both on and away from the pitch.

This chapter examines the various ways that, over time, Africans in the colonies played the game—from the dusty neighborhood matches to the downtown leagues—and traces the social and economic impacts of this evolving engagement. Although indigenous practitioners formed “native” clubs and associations and some of these footballers eventually joined formerly Europeans-only clubs, Africans never stopped playing informally in seemingly every available space, reflecting the game’s steadily expanding popularity. In these modest sites, local cultural emphases and creativity blended with a rejective spirit to produce novel playing styles and approaches that proved remarkably durable in the bairros (neighborhoods) in which they were conceived and cultivated. Conversely, African players who ascended the tiers of colonial soccerdom were forced to abandon former modes in order to continue to realize footballing and, ultimately, financial success. This chapter examines their shifting engagement with the sport as soccer in the colonies steadily became something much more than just a game.

Playing the Game: Informal Engagements

It appears that football was initially introduced in Portugal’s African colonies sometime during the end of the nineteenth century. Regardless of the exact date, by the early twentieth century, the sport had gained significant traction. In Mozambique, for example, by 1904 matches were already being organized, while local teams were apparently challenging the crews of ships docked at Lourenço Marques.¹ In explaining Africans’ initial receptiveness toward the game, scholars have emphasized the strong relationships and linkages between soccer and precolonial martial and athletic traditions, especially those that featured a ritualized space in which to perform.² John Bale and Joe Sang have argued that these indigenous customs and associated notions of masculinity constituted the “soil into which the seeds of European sport would later be planted.”³ In the Lusophone African context, precolonial traditions and competitions of this nature helped fuel soccer’s initial appeal, as well as its eventual widespread popularity. In the following section, I examine the ways that African practitioners began engaging with the sport and trace these fundamental, often rudimentary, forms of participation over time.

Peladas and Makeshift Balls

In the Global North, images abound of barefoot Africans kicking around improvised spherical objects on uneven patches of dusty land bookended by makeshift goals. Although these images are somewhat misleading—formal soccer venues of all sizes can be found throughout the continent—virtually every one of today’s elite African footballers learned the sport by playing on exactly the types of scruffy pitches that fill Western imaginations. Not surprisingly, African practitioners in Portugal’s colonies commenced their engagement with the sport in similar fashion, often playing without a proper ball, or even shoes, as they partook in pickup games, or peladas.⁴ Into the waning decades of Portugal’s empire, these austere conditions persisted; indeed, each and every footballer who was talented enough to play in the metropole initially developed his skills in these humble spaces.

Unable to afford proper soccer balls, participants in neighborhood peladas instead fashioned makeshift balls from whatever materials were available: rags, socks, women’s stockings, and even the innards of animals. According to Calton Banze, who grew up in the Chamanculo neighborhood of Lourenço Marques in the 1960s, “We had to make the balls. Socks, rags, plastic, elastic—these were the materials we used. And I shouldn’t forget the stomach of an ox, which was already a ball. I also remember a tennis ball that somebody brought, already too old to use for tennis any longer. We also used inner tubes stolen from bicycles.”⁵ Although players continued to craft these improvised balls through the end of the colonial period, and beyond, in the 1960s, a rubber company headquartered in the Mozambican capital introduced the Facobol. This development improved the quality of innumerable neighborhood contests; yet, for most practitioners, the cost, though minimal, of the revolutionary ball rendered it out of reach. As such, the rubber Facobol quickly became a status symbol, separating those players with sufficient means, however limited, from those for whom the purchase of even this reasonably priced item was cost-prohibitive.

If African footballers weren’t discouraged by the lack of a proper ball, the absence of athletic footwear—or shoes of any sort—similarly did little to temper their enthusiasm. Because footwear was not historically customary in many African communities, this apparent problem was, in fact, not an issue at all. But over time, as colonial fashion influenced local sartorial styles, the practice of wearing shoes became increasingly widespread, especially in cities, the loci of soccer engagement and development. Still, neighborhood football remained an almost universally shoeless endeavor. Even when games in the bairros were better organized and local teams were formed, players rarely donned footwear. As Eusébio recalled in 2004: “It is normal in Africa, even today, for the kids to play barefoot in their neighborhood teams. When we played for our local team, we never had boots or shoes.”⁶

White players who lived and played in the neighborhoods similarly participated in these sans-shoes affairs, though not always for exactly the same reasons. According to Ernesto Baltazar, a white Mozambican hailing from a poor family who grew up playing alongside Eusébio and other future talents deriving from the colony, “We [Eusébio and I] played soccer barefoot. I had sneakers, but if I arrived home with dirty sneakers, I was in trouble. In the beginning, I removed the sneakers and played with socks. My socks were dirty and pierced; my mother ordered me to wash them. After that she would beat me. After that I realized that there was no chance; otherwise, I would have been beaten every day. So I played barefoot, too.”⁷

Playing Spaces: “Infinite Horizons”

If proper balls and shoes of any type constituted lavish accessories, space in which to play was much more essential. Consequently, committed players found space wherever they could, even in the tightest areas. For example, according to Calton Banze regarding 1960s Lourenço Marques, “With the tennis ball and other balls, we played on the verandas of the houses. The verandas were about two meters wide and seven or eight meters long. We played two-versus-two or one-versus-one. . . . How many windows were broken! How many times we raced away to avoid being caught! And how many balls were ripped to shreds because they landed in the backyard of somebody who didn’t like football!”⁸ Of course, the greater the number of players, the larger the requisite space. Thankfully, for these enthusiastic youth, even the steady population growth that the colonial capitals and secondary cities experienced didn’t deprive practitioners of ample room for matches of all varieties. As António Joaquim Dinis, an Angolan who would eventually play for Sporting Lisboa, conveyed during a 1972 interview regarding this available recreational space: “Empty, wide lots, which we could use as our field, we had plenty of those. In this aspect, the kids of Luanda are happier than those in the metropole, because there are several empty spaces where they can entertain each other without the risk of breaking windows or suddenly having the police showing up.”⁹ Reminiscing about these open spaces, Shéu Han, who used to play on the beaches of Inhassora, on the Mozambican coast, before he began suiting up for Benfica in the 1970s, declared, “That’s where great champions such as Matateu, Eusébio, Mário Coluna, came from. They were all shaped by these infinite horizons, by the fascination for those great spaces.”¹⁰

Although African players nostalgically remembered the “infinite horizons,” many of them also soberly lamented the gradual disappearance of at least some of these spaces. Over time, urban development encroached upon many formally open plots. And later, the influxes of rural refugees fleeing the fighting generated by the wars for independence and the ensuing civil conflicts, which engulfed the newly independent Lusophone African states, further filled what remained of these spaces. During our interview, Hilário explained that

in Mozambique and especially in Lourenço Marques there were a lot of abandoned lots, so growing up we would play on these lots all around. . . . Another thing that is a difficulty for the current players—and the opposite helped us—was the amount of free space we had to play and exercise, and when the colonial and civil wars were happening everyone who was in the provinces [countryside] fled to the capital and they would build their little houses in the free spaces, so the capital got overpopulated and the spaces in which we had to play and have fun don’t exist anymore.¹¹

Former players also often cite the deleterious contemporary footballing implications that stem from these demographic and geographic shifts. According to Matine, “During the colonial period in Lourenço Marques, in the suburbs, there were a lot of empty fields where people used to play soccer. That’s not the reality nowadays, and that’s the reason that there is not a lot of talent coming out of African countries like there used to be. . . . Some of those fields are now markets, among other things, so it becomes very hard to find talent because you don’t teach soccer to an African; one just has to keep playing. We would play at school and then in those fields when we were out of school.”¹²

Beyond serving as physical spaces in which to kick a ball around, neighborhood pitches, informal as they might have been, also became centers of entertainment and socialization. Further, they bestowed on the communities surrounding the spaces a sense of identity that grew out of, and was shaped by, the action on the field. As footballers from one neighborhood battled against a squad from another, spectators took pride in the players representing their locality. And, as these identities cohered and hardened over time, soccer helped to further demarcate and differentiate individual neighborhoods. According to Hilário, “Football was tough because there were many rivalries, between districts. . . . The districts were a boundary. In order to enter Chamanculo I had to know people there. This did not mean I couldn’t go in, only that it was tougher. What defined the boundary was having been born there, having huts there, having a place to listen to music, talk about football, to form a team to play in another district.”¹³

A Dangerous Pastime? Finding Time to Play

Finding space to play football was unquestionably important, but so was finding time. As mentioned above, many parents, especially during the sport’s infancy in the colonies, saw little value in this activity and, thus, discouraged their sons from allocating too much time to play the game. However, as the sport gained both popularity and legitimacy, parents’ tolerance for the endeavor gradually grew. But guardians still typically deemed whatever schooling might have been available for their sons to have been significantly more important; meanwhile, for those families unable to afford an education for their sons and daughters, contributing to the family finances remained paramount. As such, children often had to engage with the game discreetly. Yet, just as kids the world over have done and continue to do, African youth also found time, even at the expense of more productive undertakings, to play and have fun.

The histories of two players, João Santana and Armando Manhiça, illuminate particularly well the tension that a love for the game could generate between passionate children and unconvinced parents. The childhood and teen years in the 1940s and early 1950s of Santana, who grew up on Angola’s central coast and would go on to play for Benfica, are exemplary in this respect. Keen on football, but not on the career that his father had envisioned for him, Santana’s passion for the game generated friction between his parents and him. Eventually, he acquiesced and accepted a position at the nearby Cassequel sugar factory on the central Angolan coast. Predictably, relations with his parents improved almost immediately, and they, in turn, granted Santana permission to go to a local field after work to watch his football idols practicing and, every once in a while, to kick the ball around himself. Eventually, Santana caught the eye of the manager of the team sponsored by the sugar company, Sport Clube da Catumbela, and with his father’s consent he joined the squad and was accordingly excused from work each afternoon.

Meanwhile, in Mozambique, the case of Armando, who was born in 1943 in Chamanculo, a Maputo suburb, and who would eventually go on to play for Sporting Lisboa, similarly highlights this footballing passion and the attendant tension it could generate. Growing up in a poor family, at a young age he began helping his mother sell fish, but by as early as eight years old he had already begun stealing away to play soccer with other kids in an open space in front of the market. Moreover, on the way to or from a customer’s dwelling, he regularly snuck in some football; oftentimes, he utilized the basket he ought to have been using to deliver the fish as a goalpost! His passion for the game unfaltering, upon eventually starting school at age twelve Armando often skipped out on his education to play soccer, unbeknownst to his parents. Once caught, he was roundly punished and told he could never play football again. Chastened, he was never truant again, or even tardy. Nor, however, did he lose his passion for the game, and he quickly found ways to reincorporate soccer into his life, eventually playing each day after school, from 4:00 p.m. until the sun set.¹⁴

Football as Facilitator: Connections and Transcensions

The growth of neighborhood soccer produced novel ways for African players to interact and connect with one another. Players of different ages mixed, individuals with different professions and means battled with and against one another, younger siblings found even more ways to idolize their talented older siblings, status was generated and lost, and in some, albeit rare, cases, the sons of settler families would play alongside or against Africans. Commenting on this sporting and social miscellany, Matine recalled that these neighborhood matches featured, among others, “carpenters, masons, and various apprentices, some who ironed clothes in a family’s house, some who washed clothes in the suburb, in the river . . . some who were cotton pickers.”¹⁵ At other times, age rather than occupational discrepancies generated otherwise uncommon social/sporting partnerships. In the case of Matateu, it was during the 1930s in the streets of Minkadjuine, in Lourenço Marques, where he allegedly, “as a child, dreamed to be a player like Alberto, his older brother . . . and he always managed to enter the teams of the older boys during the lively and hotly disputed games along Zixaxa road.”¹⁶ Similarly, Matateu’s younger sibling, Vicente Lucas, looked up to his gifted older brother and would eventually follow in his footsteps to Belenenses and, ultimately, the Portuguese national team.

Regardless of the informality of the matches, the competition was often fierce and the skill on display in certain neighborhoods would eventually be considered “world class.” Commenting on the wealth of talent that derived from a single Maputo neighborhood, Vicente Lucas reminisced that “the neighborhood in Alto Mahé [in Maputo] could be considered a luxury [for us] at one time, because we were living at the feet of Coluna, Eusébio, and Hilário.”¹⁷ Abel Miglietti echoed Lucas’s sentiments: “I remember that when I was thirteen years old I played for a neighborhood team and I had as opponents Armando Manhiça, Eusébio, Carlitos, and my brother Justino, and many more who became famous because of football.”¹⁸ Apparently, this talent manifested itself at even earlier ages than thirteen. Indeed, according to a 1959 issue of Ídolos, “At the age of seven, barefoot, with sewn up shorts and ripped shirts, Hilário was the little idol of the group of his street. . . . Others always wanted him on their team.”¹⁹

If local practitioners connected with other players through neighborhood matches, their limitless imaginations and aspirations connected them to global soccerdom, thereby linking what Domingos has described as otherwise disparate “football narratives.”²⁰ The names of the local teams that young players formed evinced these creative connections. For example, Hilário started out playing for a neighborhood team named Arsenal, in obvious imitation of the famous London-based club. Apparently, one of the local club’s founders had seen a clip of an Arsenal match during the intermission of a film at a local cinema; the neighborhood team even did the best they could to don red jerseys for matches so as to dutifully maintain tonal consistency with the English outfit. Hilário rendered plausibility to the alleged origins of this appellative replication: “In Mafalala, news from Europe arrived to us, in the bairro. . . . There was news. In the intervals of films, for example, there were bulletins . . . and information circulated.”²¹ But these emulative connections weren’t limited to European football teams. For example, clubs featuring the names Botafogo, Vasco da Gama, and Flamengo were also formed in the Portuguese colonies, in reverence to these three renowned Brazilian squads. And, perhaps most famously in this bilateral vein, in the 1950s Eusébio and a collection of other teenage players from his neighborhood formed Os Brasileiros de Mafalala (the Brazilians of Mafalala). According to Baltazar, a Mozambican footballer of Portuguese descent who played with Eusébio on Os Brasileiros, the inspiration for the formation of the club was as follows: “In that time, many Brazilian teams came to play in Lourenço Marques. Teams like Portuguesa de Santos, Portuguesa de Desportos, and Ferroviário. They had artistic football. We liked that type of football, and that was why our team became ‘Os Brasileiros de Mafalala.’”²² Individual Brazilian soccer stars also impressed young African players in Portugal’s colonies. For example, Nuro Americano recalled, “We received news about Brazil[ian] football via the radio. In fact, my idol was Gilmar, the Brazilian goalkeeper.”²³ Brazil’s triumph at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, which marked the debut of a seventeen-year-old Pelé on the world stage, further extended the legendary status and popularity of that footballing nation and its assortment of superstar players.

If neighborhood practitioners dreamed about foreign clubs in distant lands capturing the world’s most prestigious soccer trophies, the prizes on offer for winning local matches were much more modest and mundane. Although a great deal was at stake in these contests—reputation, pride, identity, and, eventually, an opportunity to showcase one’s talents for metropolitan football scouts—prizes reflected indigenous residents’ limited resources in these colonial milieus. The most common spoils was a can of cashew nuts or, later, as the cash economy took hold, small pots of money, which players collectively generated prior to kickoff. Mário Coluna, who spent his childhood in the 1940s playing in the Chamanculo district of Maputo, recalled, “When local teams challenged groups from other districts, we bet cans of cashew nuts and whoever won took the whole lot. In those times, there was no clock and whoever scored four goals first won.”²⁴ Rewards could, however, be more significant, or at least more varied. For example, Nuro Americano, who grew up playing on the island of Pemba off Mozambique’s northern coast, indicated that a bottle of rose syrup and five sardines were on offer for the victors of at least one match in which he participated.²⁵

African Organization: Leagues of Their Own

Although neighborhood matches were a mainstay of suburban life throughout the colonial period, African players and spectators also organized formal leagues of their own, modeled on the Europeans-only squads and leagues that Portuguese settlers had formed. Initially denied access to these associations, such as the Associação de Futebol Lourenço Marques (AFLM) in Mozambique, due to racially segregative policies in the colonies, Africans formed their own squads and leagues, thereby democratizing organized football. In Mozambique, beginning in the 1920s and ultimately formalized in 1934, African players organized (and were confined to) the Associação Africana de Futebol (AFA), composed of more than ten participating clubs. In Angola, a similar initiative gave birth to that colony’s African league, though the association in that setting featured only roughly half as many clubs, while the association in Portuguese Guiné was even more modest.²⁶

Portuguese colonial officials, unlike their French counterparts elsewhere in Africa, condoned these imitative leagues, deeming them innocuous and potentially even constructive. This type of replicative sporting development has prompted Richard Cashman to ask elsewhere, in regard to the growth of cricket in the West Indies: “Where does the promoting hand of the colonial master stop and where does the adapting and assimilating indigenous tradition start?”²⁷ In the Lusophone African context, it would be difficult to discern an exact transitional point between these two processes, as, in practice, they were complementary, overlapping, and flowed seamlessly into one another.

In an effort to analyze this dynamic in the realm of cricket, scholars of the sport, including Fahad Mustafa and, perhaps most famously, C. L. R. James, as well as scholars of soccer, such as David Goldblatt, have interpreted the formation of indigenous associations—and, more abstractly, “traditions”—as “resistance” and “platforms for political struggle.”²⁸ Yet, in practice, there was no political struggle, explicitly or otherwise, that flowed out of this sporting process in the various Lusophone African settings, even if nationalist leaders, such as Amílcar Cabral in Guiné, recognized that sport could be used to mobilize his countrymen for the struggle against colonialism and even formed a club with this aim in mind in 1954 in the capital city of Bissau.²⁹ Regardless, it’s difficult to identify any tangible “platforms,” or roots, of contestation in these initiatives in the Lusophone colonies. Although many Africans who would go on to join the various nationalist movements initially played for the teams that composed these leagues and political discourse certainly circulated within these clubs, it would be misleading to characterize the squads or, more broadly, the associations, as loci of anticolonial sentiment. Eschewing the tendency among scholars of Africa’s past to locate “resistance” in seemingly every aspect of colonized life, I instead consider the indigenous leagues as intermediate stops at which African practitioners enjoyed the game and forged meaningful relationships with teammates, while the most gifted among them honed their skills to facilitate further sporting ascension. Indeed, it was to the constituent clubs of “native” associations that talented African players from neighborhoods throughout the colonies graduated. And it was at these same clubs that they would subsequently showcase their skills for scouts from the superior colonial leagues and, eventually, from the metropolitan teams.

The clubs that composed the African leagues in the colonies required from their players a level of commitment, a sporting discipline, and a sense of European-influenced formality, including mandatory jerseys and shoes, that were absent in the bairro peladas. In turn, these new behavioral and athletic emphases would serve players well as they continued to ascend the ranks of colonial soccerdom. But despite some novel elements of decorum, the football played in these leagues by and large continued to feature the improvisation and “creolization” that had been devised in neighborhood contests. Many European observers praised this indigenous approach to the game, while the oft-dancing, -drumming, and -singing African spectators both reveled in and further encouraged this style of play. Conversely, football traditionalists rejected this performative flair, deeming indigenous players to be, first and foremost, entertainers, rather than faithful disciples of the game. Ultimately, African players would have to curb these crowd-pleasing displays in favor of a more subdued, disciplined approach in order to continue their footballing ascension.

Imitative Leagues

The leagues formed by African patrons, coaches, and players resembled the Europeans-only leagues in their organizational structure but were, divergently, very poorly funded. Local elites, who were often, though not exclusively, assimilados (assimilateds), generally bankrolled the clubs and covered the leagues’ administrative expenses, though the players themselves typically derived from lower social strata.³⁰ Alegi has attributed the development of these leagues elsewhere in Africa to “wage-earning urban workers with some Western education—men with discretionary income and leisure time.” But his profile of these individuals as “dressed in jackets and trousers . . . secretarial workers . . . situated in a position of intermediary ambivalence,” would overstate the economic means and cultural outlook of many of the footballing entrepreneurs in the Lusophone African settings.³¹ For example, Hilário characterized these individuals in Mozambique as “guys who lived in the districts, in huts, shall we say, wooden and zinc houses, and worked in factories or petrol stations, in the quay or the railway.”³² Even if these players enjoyed only basic accommodations, though, they typically did have steady, if modestly compensated, employment in much-needed lines of work. For example, the founding members of Grupo Desportivo Beirense, a Mozambican AFA club, included a fish trader, two shopworkers, three drivers, seven attendants, one lifeguard, one dockworker, a collector, and five servants—each occupation important, but all poorly compensated.³³