social segregation was in place. Indígenas were barred from many areas of the cement city after certain hours: leisure spaces (beaches, cinemas, theaters, cafés, gardens), state institutions (administration, courts, the mail, schools, and hospitals), public transport (trains, trams), even its very streets.63 Colonial racism affected not only the indígenas but also all people that had been subject to racialization in the capital, such as Chinese, Indians, and assimilated mestiços.64
While tennis, sailing, and motorsports continued to be restricted to Lourenço Marques’s colonial bourgeoisie, football became more popular, though its expansion, albeit still limited, did not drive away Portugal’s colonial elite from the sports associative movement. Clube Ferroviário, although founded by a group of workers, was controlled by the heads of the railway administration. The directors of Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques, associated with the colonial military and police power, came from the various organs of the colonial administration.65 Desportivo, founded on the initiative of civil servants and traders, was sponsored by local notables, becoming the most representative among those supported by the “old settlers.”66 Sponsorship was prestigious to the clubs; likewise, the associations’ popularity improved the reputation of these local figures. The management of sports clubs by notables, such as industrialists, civil servants, traders, lawyers, and bankers, established itself in much the same way it had previously in other colonial contexts.67 As the Portuguese associative movement grew in Lourenço Marques, English influence weakened.68
Downtown Associations, Clubs, and Players
The formation of football clubs benefited from an associative dynamic, which arose in Lourenço Marques during the first decades of the century. This was particularly prominent in the period of the First Portuguese Republic (1910–26), when class associations, cooperatives, mutualist associations, savings banks, and other associations were created.69 The associative network facilitated the social integration of settlers, many of them poor, having arrived in Africa without a penny to their name. The welfare and mutualist associations sought to socially integrate the urban populations. In a different and more impromptu manner, recreational and sports associations enabled the settlers to come into contact with organized personal networks, which often reproduced a metropolitan sense of belonging, especially, within this context, of a regional nature.70 On the other hand, some sporting clubs became delegations of Portugal’s main football clubs. Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques was affiliated with Sport Lisboa e Benfica (est. 1904);71 Sporting de Lourenço Marques was affiliated with Sporting Clube de Portugal (1906). In the following decades, delegations of these clubs would spread throughout the territory.72
Clube Ferroviário had a different origin. Formed in a period of intense labor unrest73 among a group of railway workers, it was sponsored by the railway company, a powerful industrial enterprise whose expansion went hand in hand with the formation of a regional network sustained by South Africa’s economic growth. The company’s bureaucratic organization and the control it tried to exert over its employees’ spare time (among other things, by assembling a music band and setting up a library), turned Clube Ferroviário into an example of industrial paternalism, a way of managing the working force typical of contexts where relations of production are more developed. This type of management, common in Europe since the end of the nineteenth century,74 was later employed in some regions of sub-Saharan Africa, mainly in South Africa’s industrialized areas.75 Throughout the Portuguese colonial world, the use of sports as an instrument of labor management emerged across various contexts. Ferroviário, along with the network of delegations it founded throughout the territory, became the most precocious and relevant example of the relationship established between football clubs and public and private companies in Mozambique. Changes in the colonial economic infrastructure during the period following the Second World War strengthened the connection between sports practice and businesses’ labor policies framed by a private corporatism sponsored by the state.76 In many ways the use of organized leisure as an instrument of social integration was pioneered by public and private companies and not directly by the central state.
AFLM teams, the sources of the spectacularization of football in the colonial city center, were mostly composed of settlers and other European players, though class ties enabled some players from old native families, namely mestiços, to play in the downtown championship. When the young Guilherme Cabaço (b. 1919), a settler who at the time was starting what was to be a long-lasting career in the colonial civil service, joined Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques, in 1926, the black and white of the team’s official shirt represented for him the two worlds that existed Mozambique. In the 1920s and 1930s, this old colonial civil servant reported, Desportivo had white and nonwhite athletes, mostly mestiços, such as the Bento brothers. Except for Sporting de Lourenço Marques, where only white players played, “in the other teams people mixed.” This “mix,” however, happened within the strict confines of a circle of interests close to the local “ruling class.” 1.o de Maio, further removed from this circle of relations, was, as he recalls, a “club for workmen and suburban people.”
During its first decades in Lourenço Marques, the spectacle of football within European society never ceased to be a class-bound practice. The search for talented players, however, granted opportunities to some settlers from lower social groups, who arrived in town and gradually integrated into the professional labor system, as workmen, especially in the railway, but also in small commerce and the civil service. Football’s transformation into a competitive public spectacle, which promotes rivalries, led the clubs to look for the best players. This phenomenon, already noticeable in the 1930s, led to the gradual formation of a market.77 The football player would secure his own status; he was admired for his performative abilities and for the fact that he represented a socially identifiable collective, linked to neighborhood communal experience, for instance, against opposing collectives.
The continuous arrival of Portuguese settlers heightened the social differences within the European population, as the administration and labor market became more specialized. In 1930 the settler population was 17,842; 27,438 in 1940; 48,213 in 1950; and 97,245 in 1960.78 In 1974, a year before Mozambique’s independence, this population reached two hundred thousand people.79 Sports associations, accompanying the city’s growth, were organized in the neighborhoods, establishing an umbilical connection with these places of sociability. As such, clubs like Malhangalene, a settler neighborhood previously inhabited by the native population, and Clube do Alto Maé emerged, founded in 1934 and 1937, respectively. In the 1950s and 1960s, other neighborhood clubs appeared, such as Carreira de Tiro, in 1950, and Clube de Futebol o “Central,” in 1951.80 In the following decades, others followed the same pattern, with clubs always representing a sense of social and spatial belonging.81 The activities of small sports associations allowed for the simultaneous reinforcement of close regional networks and the introduction of their members into larger networks of relations, which operated as a mechanism of social integration. Despite the differences between the small clubs and the powerful downtown teams, which was also an indicator of the social stratification among the settlers, the sports movement in the cement city, even after the political overture in the sixties, was mostly a way to reify the European origin of its members; as a locus of sociabilities the clubs were agents of what Dane Kennedy identifies as “islands of white.”82
According to Cabaço, football, in its first decades, expressed—through the effort of those who founded the clubs, organized matches, and erected pitches—the heroism of the pioneers who built the city. As he recalls, the actual match ball, in that era of conquest, served as a metaphor for the hardships of this period:
It was terrible, pure agony, because it was made of leather and inside it had a piece of rubber that had to be air-pumped, and at the opening was a leather string. We thought twice before heading the ball. When you headed it, you lost some of the skin on your forehead. The string was prominent and it was horrible, even for goalkeepers. If the ball came sideways and the guy touched it with his hand, he lost most of his skin. Not today; nowadays
