families, the Wilsons.
The possibility of African teams playing alongside downtown teams was not even considered before the Second World War. In 1943, Joaquim Augusto Correia, also known to his readers as Jack, a Portuguese settler writing for O brado africano, started a campaign for the inclusion of Beira-Mar in downtown competitions.100 Shortly after this initiative, O brado africano announced his dismissal, following an AFLM communication accusing him of writing “articles that are inconvenient to the sports cause and to the native policy followed by this nation’s government.”101 O brado africano protested102 several times the fact that the few black and mestiço players playing downtown were excluded from the teams representing the city, something that happened whenever they traveled to South Africa or when they received South African teams.103 The dispute, in defense of the positions of the local mestiço petite bourgeoisie, often challenged the regime’s assimilationist rhetoric.104 From the 1950s, the journalist and poet José Craveirinha, writing for O brado africano and Notícias, regularly defended the right of African players to play in the downtown league. Black athletes’ performances, especially North American ones, from the achievements of Jesse Owens in Berlin to the idolized Joe Louis, revealed the value of the “race” despised by the European.105 Praising these athletes was a way of demonstrating, within the general frame of the debate on the value of races, the political importance of “black pride.”106 Sport was an effective arena of contestation. For most of inhabitants of the cement city, the universe of suburban football was an unknown reality, merely another piece of a spatial puzzle drawn by prejudice and stereotype.
The Legitimation of State Discrimination
As can be seen clearly from the epic description of the development of physical education in the territory of Mozambique in the 1920s that Ismael Mário Jorge presented at the 1931 Paris Colonial Congress, the state fostered the separation between educational and associative sport, exclusive to settlers and “assimilated,” and the disciplinary practices indígenas were subjected to, as part of their integration into Portuguese military structures and schools. The Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal Indígenas (Natives’ Political, Civil, and Criminal Statute) did not grant the indígenas any political rights within European institutions.107 Further, the 1933 Reforma Administrativa Ultramarina (Overseas Administrative Reform) barred them from forming administrative corporations. These normative resolutions also excluded indígenas from the right to form associations, including sporting associations. The Carta Orgânica do Ultramar (Overseas Organic Charter), approved in 1929,108 and the RAU gave the colonial administration powers to oversee associations’ activities, to approve statutes, budgets, and administrative bodies, and, if necessary, to put an end to them.109 This supervision was exercised by the Direcção dos Serviços de Administração Civil (DSAC, Head Office of Civil Administration Services), which devoted part of its services to the Agremiações Regionais de Recreio, Defesa, Desporto e Estudo (Regional Leisure, Defense, Sports, and Study Associations). Each sports club had a file in the DSAC. While indígenas were not permitted to lead associations, their participation in the activities of some African clubs, as members and athletes, meant that the clubs came under the supervision of the Direcção dos Serviços dos Negócios Indígenas (Head Office of Native Affairs), equally represented by a section devoted to Agremiações Regionais de Recreio, Defesa, Desporto e Estudo (Regional Leisure, Defense, Sports, and Study Organizations).110 The DSAC and DSNI launched enquiries into some African clubs, whenever they suspected a possible foreign involvement, which was testament to the degree of political control exerted over the field of sport. Later, the Serviços de Centralização e Coordenação da Informação de Moçambique (SCCIM, Mozambique Office for the Centralization and Coordination of Information), created in 1961 by the Overseas Ministry but directed by the local governor, increased the surveillance over associations and sports clubs.111
In 1930 the charter that organized the indígena education system in Mozambique, dividing it into “rudimentary,” “professional” and “normal” teaching—the latter dedicated to the training of teachers—included the discipline of physical education.112 However, when the Mocidade Portuguesa de Mozambique (MP; Portuguese Youth of Mozambique), the first institution devoted to the promotion and regulation of sports activities in the territory, was created in 1939, it was directed exclusively at the “civilized” population. A premilitary youth organization, Mozambique’s Mocidade Portuguesa, modeled on the metropolitan Mocidade Portuguesa—which in turn was inspired by the Italian fascist Balilla and the German Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth)—was created in 1936 by the Estado Novo within the scope of the Reforma da Educação Nacional (National Education Reform) carried out in that same year.113 The MP’s mission carried on the Estado Novo’s commitment, in line with previous concerns and policies, to the use of physical education as a means of moral, hygiene, and military education.114 During the 1930s, after a period in which the institutionalization of physical education was a slow and convoluted process,115 the regime thus pursued a Europe-wide movement of institutionalization of gymnastic models which, in their various configurations, responded to the pedagogic, hygienic, and premilitary needs of modern nation-states.116
The importance of physical education in the formation of colonial cadres, prominent in the French and, to an even greater degree, in the British cases, was also echoed, albeit more feebly, in Portugal.117 The Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (Lisbon Geographic Society) was one of the first Portuguese institutions to organize, in 1930, a physical education course aimed specifically at colonial cadres.
A Portuguese Body
The Estado Novo’s model of physical education was promoted as a push toward the “regeneration of the race.” This “race,” however, a national race framed by a sovereign state, did not include the African population, whose sports habits were considered to be “natural” and “pre-modern.” In the metropole the Estado Novo intervened in the sports practice of students and workers,118 and in 1940 it founded a training center similar to the civil and military specialized schools that had been established in several European countries119—the Instituto Nacional de Educação Física (INEF, National Institute of Physical Education)—and created an official structure that coordinated and supervised all sports activities organized outside state control: the Direcção Geral de Educação Física, Desportos e Saúde Escolar (DGEFDSE, General Office of Physical Education, Sports, and Scholastic Health). Control over sports associations was one dimension of a wider plan that sought to regulate the associative movement in Portugal.120 Trained in foreign schools, the men who established the theoretical and practical bases of the Portuguese model of physical education were military officers, such as the notable Celestino Marques Pereira and António Leal de Oliveira.121
During the Estado Novo regime, football matches were among the few mass public demonstrations taking place in Portugal. The national football league was created in 1934 and definitively institutionalized in 1938. Football was seen as an inadequate exercise by the state. In 1932, a decree was issued, within the Ministério da Instrução (Ministry of Instruction), the Direcção dos Serviços de Educação Física (Head Office of Physical Education Services), which considered sports games as the “antithesis of all education” and a vehicle to “physical deformation” and “moral perversion.” The high-school physical education regulation, approved in 1932, forbade “Anglo-Saxon sports and athletic games, and all competitions in general, namely football matches, as their educational value was nil and their dangers obvious.”122 Furthermore, football’s professionalizing tendency, which stimulated processes of social mobility, challenged an official corporative framework that was based on the principle that class relations should remain stable.123 The success of players from a working-class background, in an activity with a powerful media impact, sent the “wrong” message about the existing social organization.124
The official ideology of the body was also an ideology of the place occupied by gesture within
