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
