to play with at home.
Football as Urban Spectacle
In the first decades of the century, football became one of the most popular organized leisure activities in Lourenco Marques. Clubs promoted themselves through meeting and sharing centers, spaces of communitarian mobilization and organization. Practice pitches, which were originally very precarious, regularly hosted the first competitions. Newspapers began to follow the game more closely, reporting on the main matches. In 1922 the first specialized newspaper, A semana desportiva, was published, lasting only one year and briefly returning in 1932. In 1938, Eco dos sports was the first sports newspaper to succeed, becoming an important instrument for the dissemination of the game as well as a standard-bearer for the sports community’s demands before the state.83 Newspapers were a fundamental means of promoting the game. The press turned rivalries into copy and into the raw material for readers’ identification and imagination. Football press narratives were a particular dimension of what Benedict Anderson calls “print capitalism.”84 Football’s presence in the newspapers, marked by the calendar of the competitions, was like a never-ending soap opera, which the reader followed passionately. The organization of the first Mozambican football championship, in 1956, one of the first public events to gather representatives from the various Mozambican provinces, was made possible, above all, through the persistent work of the local sports press.85
Prime media moments were those in which a selection of Lourenço Marques’s best players, from the AFLM, played against visiting teams representing other regions, particularly South African teams, such as Northern Transvaal and Southern Transvaal, but also metropolitan, English and Brazilian teams, as well as teams from other countries.86 Visits from the metropolis, quite common after the 1940s, also served to renew national ties and had a festive, nostalgic component: they provided opportunities for settlers to demonstrate their vitality before representatives of the empire’s ruling center.87 This was all the more significant since these matches featured the so-called Lourenço Marques home-born team, a group composed exclusively of players born in Mozambique, the sons of settlers.
A source of local pride, sports often served as a ground for making demands, and a vehicle for an autonomous consciousness that, although limited in scale, occasionally translated into proto-autonomist positions.88 The most persistent demand was perhaps that of taking part in competitions that included representatives of all Portuguese territories, from which the settler clubs were excluded, a demand voiced not only through the press89 but also through official interventions and institutional relations.90
After newspapers, radio would also play a decisive role in promoting the game. In March 1934, the defeat of Portugal’s national football team by its Spanish counterpart in Madrid was broadcast by Estação Emissora do Grémio dos Radiófilos, through loudspeakers placed in the head office of one of the most important local newspapers, Notícias. This broadcast, a novelty in the city, took place “before a huge crowd.”91 The match report reached Lourenço Marques with a two-minute delay, which was close to nothing for people who were used to getting the news several days later, in the newspapers. This technological novelty inaugurated a different relation with football, in which a new kind of mediation enabled the fan to accompany and imagine a distant event in real time through an oral report that could be shared. Following a match no longer depended on going to the stadium. The broadcast was also a social event. Technological evolution would bring about the gradual privatization of radio reception, something that never stopped broadcasts from becoming an opportunity for meeting in the public space, not just in the cement city, but also in the suburbs.
Over a relatively short time, football ceased to be an activity experienced by a small number of individuals; it became a regular and public display organized by clubs and followed by large groups of fans. Club identification grew and expanded. The game became a source for the creation of a specific stock of knowledge, a generator of local narratives that were then reproduced through daily interactions. Even though football practice in the cement city was mostly confined to a white universe of relations, as a type of knowledge mediated by popular culture it could be much more widely disseminated. This allowed for its expansion beyond the line of social segregation and into the suburbs of Mozambique’s capital. But this did not happen merely with the information that came from the downtown competitions. A narrative of metropolitan football, promoted by the settlers, by the media, and by the various tours the metropolitan clubs made in Lourenco Marques, gradually reached the suburbs, becoming shared knowledge. As an element of an urban popular culture, football, an architect of bonds and identifications, broke, not arbitrarily, with the social closures that also constrained the dissemination of information in a divided urban area. In the actual practice of the game, however, things were different.
SPORTS AND STATE POLICIES: SEGREGATION, REGULATION, AND PROPAGANDA
The manner in which the colonial state and other colonial powers intervened directly in the process of sports dissemination and adoption in imperial contexts was addressed by research studies focusing the role of sports as an instrument of cultural domination, mostly inspired by the English colonial experience. The formation of a “cultural bond,” the result of an imperial socialization based on colonial culture, would have affected “indigenous cultures,” political relations, and the way in which the governed perceived the rulers and vice-versa.92 Sports were central to the curriculum that contributed to the formation of colonial cadres in English public schools. Their role was that of a school of character building and virile virtues. In the colonial milieu, they were introduced to the local elites through the school environment and religious missions; sports became an instrument of socialization and domestication of bodies and contributed to a growing hegemonic domination.93 This perspective, underpinned by the principles of indirect rule, is in line with the study of hegemonic forms of domination, discipline, and regulation of bodies and minds that permeated the cultural venture of colonialism and that complemented the forms of economic, political, religious, and military power.94
In Lourenço Marques this association between colonial policies and colonial culture was far from being linear. State intervention in the realm of sports was internally diverse and had to respond to distinct demands that sometimes were contradictory. Moreover, state institutions were not able to control the social effects of associative sports, especially when organized sports began to develop a specific market based on spectatorship and labor protoprofessionalism.
The participation of suburban players in the downtown championship depended on the clubs’ boards’ decisions and the AFLM’s policy. The number of nonwhite athletes playing in this competition was, until the end of the 1950s, minimal. The downtown transfer market, sustained by the growing influx of settlers, rarely involved suburban players.95 Some footballers, however, managed to achieve this promotion. In 1938, Vicente, from Beira-Mar, and Américo, from João Albasini, started playing for Desportivo’s team.96 In 1941, O brado africano wrote that Laquino had embraced a professional career and would be earning between MZE 40 and MZE 50 per match.97 According to the newspaper, this was a deplorable situation: “What has African neighborhood football come to, when you play for money and not for the love of the sport.”98 Desportivo and 1.o de Maio were the first clubs to open their doors to nonwhite players.99 According to Mário Wilson,
In a somewhat racist context there was the Associação de Futebol de Lourenço Marques, where racial mixture was rare. Racial mixture only took place within the elite, the privileged. Every now and again a person of color appeared. There was racism . . . there was a period where the possibility of mixture wasn’t even there, even if the door was not closed shut. Then there were guys who played on both sides, but only those that belonged to the two races, to the mixed races . . . there would be one or two that stood out from the pack, but they were few and far between. That was the way of things in Desportivo, in Ferroviário, in Sporting. I don’t know if it was written down or anything, but that’s the way it was. I recall that it was common for some to be pushed
