these imperial conceptions of nationality.201 The propaganda efforts undertaken by the Portuguese from the 1950s onward, which translated into a process of euphemization of the pervasive racism in the colonial spaces, opened up a split between events in the colonial terrain and an official and persistent historical narrative based on the romanticized accounts of these African players’ sports narratives.
Before the participation of the Portuguese national team in the 1966 World Cup, journalists were already referring to a “Euro-African” game style, which was a vehicle for political metaphors and cultural prejudices. Media narratives often registered the naturalization of an imperial motor habitus,202 the synthesis of a lusophone body created by the Portuguese gest. The style of play was included as part of a discourse of propaganda and control that will have had its identitarian effects, shaping the imagination of the population both in the colonial territories and in the metropolis. The bodily movements of the national team players expressed, from this point of view, a singular identity, distinct from any other national football style. Vítor Santos, a journalist for A bola, a metropolitan sports newspaper, emphasized the influence of the “‘technical touch’ executed by the players from tropical and subtropical areas” in the “lusophone football ‘model’”: “the result of this miraculous mix of a natural technique, relaxed and swinging, typical of tropical and subtropical players, with the methodical preparation conducive to seriousness and to the achievement of an ideal performance, which is the product of the studiousness that, in some way, defines ‘northern people’ from this Old continent with a long history and tradition.”203 The discourse was similar, in many ways, to Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalist narrative, here adapted to football. For Freyre, in the many pages devoted to the unique features of the bodily practices of the Brazilian players, football was the manifestation of a national identity, a non-European one, of course.204
African players’ performances in Portuguese teams also led to various political and nationalist metaphors.205 After Benfica won its second European Cup, the director of A bola, Silva Resende, a man linked to the Estado Novo regime, talked about the benefits of having African players, such as Eusébio and Coluna, playing for Portuguese teams. These players, who had the “feline appearance that sets colored men apart,” introduced to the “game an element that was new to the habits of a public that perhaps had not realized that Portugal, without losing its intrinsic nature, was a multiracial nation.”206
Sports and the Colonial Field of Power
The process of sportization promoted from the early twentieth century in Lourenço Marques reified the main dividing lines that traversed the colonial system: class practices, racial divisions, and gender inequalities. The colonial situation thus helped to structure a segregated sports sphere of activity. The dissemination of sports, essentially promoted through the practice and consumption of football, took place, to a large extent, outside the state’s direct action, through the initiative of the network of associations and clubs that created regular competitions. The relation between the state and the private sports dynamic was ambivalent and must be interpreted in the context of the ambiguous territory of indirect rule. The leaders of clubs and associations within the settler’s universe, especially among those that had more influence, came for the most part from the dominant colonial classes. These leaders used sports as an instrument of clientelist and patronage relations, which granted them local prominence and also gave them, in the sphere of commercial and industrial development, the means for managing workplace environments, which proved useful in terms of achieving social peace and economic productivity. Although under political control, clubs and associations fostered competitive sports that officially were thought to have no pedagogical purpose and that gathered crowds that were fed misguided conceptions of the role of sports. Given that they could not impose, all the way from Lisbon, the official project of physical practice, set up in the 1930s, the state ended up trying to use sports popular culture, promoted by a federated associativism organized across transnational networks, to cement a wide social domain, both in terms of a policy of social integration and for propaganda purposes, by means of the creation of imperial narratives. It was only in the last stage of the Portuguese dominion over Mozambique that sports was included within a belated social policy program driven by the state. Although theoretically relevant, the division between private sports and state sports, the latter promoted by the colonial power itself, has obvious limitations, as both had their political field of performance, sometimes complementary, other times contentious. Such tensions and conflicts steer us toward a more adequate interpretation of the state’s action, beyond its laws and discourses. Hence, the untimely concern with the integration of indígenas, in the 1950s, forced the state to attempt an opening of the sports field, more in line with the lusotropicalist propaganda than with the reality on the ground. It was only in 1959 that legislation was passed to end the split and racialized football organization in Lourenço Marques.
The project of social transformation and political tutelage that pervaded the regime’s physical education policies and that took the athlete’s body as the site for the reproduction of the social and political order, proved unable to structure the field of sports. In this context, the state tried to develop its model of indirect rule, much dependent on the dynamics of local society and on the strategies of several agents in the colonial terrain. While presenting dimensions of informality that were often not picked up in the documentation, this model adjusted to the political cycles and to the changing needs of social regulation felt by the colonial system, that explains for instance the relation between segregation and political overture. But this model was also forced to respond to the development of the sports field, which by creating a specific market based on spectatorship and professionalism brought about new problems of regulation. While recognizing that African associative elites could reinforce the indigenato rule (“integrated but separated”), from the late fifties onward it was crucial to reconfigure this framework so that the image of a multiracial community bound by lusophone culture could emerge. While the sports field seems to not have posed a direct threat to the regime’s stability, it would develop potentialities and powers of its own, appropriate for agents that used sports practices and consumption as a means of pursuing private interests, of expressing and enjoying themselves, a means to forming bonds and sociabilities, of reinforcing social identities and political causes. The emphasis on the instrumental uses of sports as creators of bonds can overlook the way in which sports can promote horizontal ties that nonetheless, for the most part, exclude women.
As conceived by the physical-education theorists of the Estado Novo, movements that could not be predetermined, either through the natural order of the world (the expression of a pastoral idealization) or through physical-education science (applied to a political and social utopia), were not useful. The unpredictability of athletes’ trajectories during a football match, with their inconstant movements, reflected a disordered society. The match’s events, its rhythm, exposed life’s irregularities. Craveirinha, as he observed the gestures of players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, was looking at a whole different scenario: the game revealed Africans’ creativity, intelligence, and culture. It proved that Africans were not “doomed” to practice a premodern “natural sport,” supposedly consistent with their civilizational state. In the informal neighborhood matches and in the more organized competitions, the heterodox movements of suburban players, in the context of a singular historical and social experience, challenged a totalitarian vision of the body. Far from the practical institutionalization of politically driven ideomotor movements, these football matches expressed a socially embedded practice as well as the emergence of a situated motor habitus defined by a malicious motor repertoire. Their interpretation demands, however, a return to the process of construction of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques and to the way in which football was integrated within the economy of local practices.
3
Football and the Moral Economy of the Lourenço Marques Suburbs
VISIONS OF THE SUBURBS
The suburbs of
