state, at a time when the war effort was already eating up a great portion of the budget, to reduce direct investment in this area even further.182 Official reports from meetings taking place between 1959 and 1967 reveal that during this period a great deal of the CPEF’s work had to do with the resolution of problems related to federated competitions. One example is the validation of footballers’ transfers following requests from the respective clubs and associations.183 Although filtered by social and racial divides, the football market managed to create its own means of labor integration.
The disciplinary instrument, which aimed to regulate and impose a new logic on the activity of associative sports, namely football competitions, was held hostage by the actual system it strove to control. Failing as an agent that aimed to “produce” acceptable sports practices and consumptions, the state sought to regulate activities, oversee them, avoid political appropriations, and, as far as possible, to use the specific social power of associative sports to hold on to their control over the city’s populations.
In the metropolis, given the inability to curtail the popularity of football, a sport that led young people away from schools and workshops,184 the regime acknowledged, in the 1953 law that reformed “national physical education,” that sports associations promoted “a physical culture that, although lacking control and practice, had the virtue of uniting groups of people who enjoyed competition or exhibition. Here, they found a complement to an increasingly demanding social life.”185 In 1960 the Estado Novo recognized professionalism in football, cycling, and boxing186 so as to distinguish amateur sports, sponsored by state institutions, from professional sports, which were pedagogically and morally reprehensible.187 This law was extended to colonial territories in 1963,188 when it was already obvious that football had become, in cities such as Luanda or Lourenço Marques, a powerful social force.
Even though it was not considered a good practice by state specialists, in Mozambique’s capital, in the cement city, and in its suburbs, football mobilized young men and adults, practitioners, and spectators of a popular culture that established itself as a basis for ample sociability. The number of clubs and associations constantly increased, as did their total membership (table 2.3):
TABLE 2.3. Number of Mozambican sports associations and clubs and total membership, 1930–64
Source: Based on data from Anuário estatístico de Moçambique (1930–64)
Maintaining its criticism of the irrational and unedifying character of competitive games, the regime saw them from a different angle. Government experts considered now that football had an escapist effect; it created an arena for the manifestation of conflicts in a political context where the channels for public protest were virtually closed. In the colonial world these transformations are inseparable from the debate on the indígena question, as well as from imperial propaganda and urban social-management policies.189
During the 1960s the number of transfers, instigated by the rise in the number of settlers and by the end of the indigenato, reached an impressive tempo, although the state attempted to delimit this market.190 For example, it stipulated that athletes wanting to compete should have a minimum level of schooling.191 This policy prevented many players from competing. Despite such restrictive measures, football’s primacy—as a promoter of sports movements in Lourenço Marques, repeated in informal practices, and consumed as a dominant leisure activity—was imperious. Even if they were politically controlled, clubs and associations continued to promote an antipedagogic “movement policy” and became the key nuclei of football narratives deeply embedded in popular culture. The “game’s gestures” were replayed in the neighborhoods, in schools, on beaches, and in organized competitions, and then were echoed in the media, read, and listened to.
In the closing years of Portuguese power in Mozambique, the colonial state sought to use sports policies as a way to invert its role as the legitimating ground of a deeply hierarchical and racialized society. To that effect, a number of interrelated factors proved crucial: (1) the propagandistic exploitation of sports, (2) the implementation of social policies, particularly in the major cities, but also (3) the specific and relatively autonomous dynamics of a specialized field of physical education teaching and theorization that gradually abandoned the semimilitarized model of the MP in favor of a teaching system that, although integrated within the regime, had been subjected for some time to influences from more progressive traditions.192 It was only after 1967, when José Maria Noronha Feio, formerly a director at the Instituto Nacional de Educação Física (INEF) in Lisbon, was appointed leader of Mozambique’s CPEF, that sports policies, welfare, and urban-inclusion policies finally came together more efficiently. Noronha Feio managed to break with the semimilitarized practice of the MP, whose members still exerted influence on the CPEF.193 Regarding his action as a policymaker, Noronha Feio stated that his priority was organizing “educational recreational activities that promoted the gregarious spirit among the less-developed populations, in spheres such as hygiene, human relations, and land settlement.” This action, he continued, “represents one of this nation’s government’s greatest concerns—the integration of the populations.”194 Within the Portuguese state apparatus the need to integrate populations was rhetorically used by interest groups that had different opinions and pursued distinct objectives. Access to sport in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques became one of Noronha Feio’s main projects, integrated in a vast social intervention plan titled Plano de Beneficiência da Área Suburbana de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Suburban Area Improvement Plan).195 Noronha Feio would leave Moçambique in 1973, when he was elected director geral dos desportos (general director of sports). The “integration of the populations” thus became a discursive device that legitimated forms of intervention on the ground. The regime’s interest in integrating the populations, to avoid social and political upheaval and to stabilize an urban African labor force, generated the necessary conjunctural conditions for a handful of agents on the ground to initiate a policy of democratization of sports practices, which allowed the field of sports, which was structurally discriminatory, to open up to some degree.
Imperial Narratives
The attempts to instrumentalize sports for social and political management, presenting it as an example of social integration, were at odds with the discrimination that prevailed on the ground. While this situation persisted, a propagandistic imperial narrative that exploited the success of a few African athletes in the metropolis was developed. To a degree that would merit closer scrutiny, this discourse drew on the powerful penetration of the football narrative in a mediatized urban popular culture so as to invest in a wide-spectrum and widely disseminated lusotropicalist rhetoric, which became even more effective when mediated by the seemingly neutral prose of specialized media outlets.196 This situation revealed the need, among those who held key positions within the colonial field of power, to take into account the social influence of popular culture.
The presence of African players, the most prominent of whom came from Lourenço Marques, in popular metropolitan clubs, and in the national team promoted a “banal lusotropicalism” that was adopted by the Portuguese government, especially when the Benfica club of Eusébio and Coluna won the European Cup in 1961 and 1962,197 and when the national football team came third in the World Cup in 1966.198 The induction of Eusébio in the Portuguese army in 1963, widely reported by the media, and his participation in campaigns in support of Portuguese soldiers organized by the Movimento Nacional Feminino are only some of the examples of the political exploitation of the popularity generated by football.199 In the context of the war, the campaigns run by the Gabinete de Acção Psicossocial (Office of Psychosocial Action) were also built around the presence of a metropolitan football narrative among the African populations.200 Spurred on by a powerful associative impulse and supported by
