a set of rules—travels unchanged from one social context to another. Like the arts, he shows us, football has been transformed by those who have played it in places like colonial Mozambique. But it is not the transformation of the game itself that most interests Domingos in this work. He is instead most interested in the “larger issues” of how the game of football did or did not transform those who played it in colonial Mozambique, as well as how they were or were not able to use the game to transform the world in which they lived.
What little has been written about sport in colonial contexts has tended to focus on its use as a tool of colonial power. By playing—or, being made to play—the games of the colonizer, it has been argued, the bodies of the colonized have been disciplined and their minds oriented toward new ideas such as “structured competition,” “fair play,” and “the rule of law.” Domingos’s work clearly shows that, to some extent, the Portuguese regime conceived of sport, including football, as a means of “civilizing” natives. But as Domingos demonstrates, this was not an entirely successful project. Urban Mozambicans played the game in ways that both expressed and reinforced their own ways of being in the world, even as they played it, in part, to transform themselves in attempts to gain greater access to a world that too often excluded them.
Domingos’s use of the writings of the protonationalist Mozambican journalist and poet José Craveirinha—who chronicled football in the “cane city” neighborhoods of Lourenço Marques—affords readers an intimate view of the minutiae of the game as it was played by working-class Africans, including the “littlest details” such as descriptive terms, physical gestures, and moral dispositions that animated players and spectators alike in the many “small places” in which they played. On rough makeshift pitches in the midst of the crowded, squalid urban villages that surrounded the “cement city,” humor, creativity, deception, and violence were part of the game, just as they were a part of everyday life for residents of these neighborhoods under colonial rule. Playing the game as they did, urban residents of these “mean streets” simultaneously submitted to the rules of the game and challenged them, while at once resisting colonial power and seeking to capture it. Domingos’s recognition and exploration of defining paradoxes like these gives foundation to an account of rich and subtle detail.
In these pages, football is not “just a game,” but instead the centerpiece of a vivid tableau whose subjects have heretofore remained underexplored. Accordingly, Domingos’s work not only provides missing pieces of the bigger pictures of Portuguese and Mozambican history, not to mention of the history of football, but also offers an exceptionally fine-grained perspective on the lived experience of colonialism in Mozambique—shedding comparative light on such experiences elsewhere—while alerting us to the many and often contradictory potentialities of sport to shape human subjectivities.
Harry G. West
Acknowledgments
The publication of this book concludes a process that had the crucial contribution of various individuals and institutions.
First of all, I would like to express my debt to the permanent, open, and rich dialogue I had with Harry G. West at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the School of Oriental and African Studies. I am also grateful to the late John D. Y. Peel, whose work was an important inspiration. At SOAS I would also like to thank my colleagues Paul Hansen, Mao Wada, Alex Verbeek, Mira Moshini, Robert McKenzie, and Dorota Szawarska.
I have benefited from the comments, amendments, and criticisms that I received from Deborah James and João de Pina Cabral during my Viva.
I am particularly grateful to Nelson Teixeira and Miguel Pinheiro for their support during the period I spent in Mozambique. In Maputo, I was fortunate to have the collaboration of Humberto Coimbra, Natu Harilal, Carolina Leia, Teresa Cruz e Silva, Aurélio Rocha, Renato Caldeira, and Fátima Mendonça. I am also grateful to the staff of the Historical Archive of Mozambique, the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Mozambique, and the Eduardo Mondlane University.
I would also like to thank the staff of the National Library of Lisbon and the Imprensa de Ciências Sociais of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, where the first version of this book was published in Portuguese.
The critical and attentive readings and the suggestions of Bárbara Direito, Frederico Ágoas, Inês Brasão, Isaura Domingos, Jorge Domingos, José Neves, and Rahul Kumar were decisive for the completion of my work.
Most important were the comments made by the manuscript’s reviewers and the editors of the Ohio University Press New African Histories series. I am especially grateful for Allen Isaacman’s encouragement. I want also to express my gratitude to the people who worked on the book’s production at the Press, and especially to Gillian Berchowitz and Nancy Basmajian.
The final version of this book owes a great deal to the skilled work of revision and translation of Miguel Cardoso. I wish also to thank the translation work done by João Paulo Oliveiro for the first version of this manuscipt.
Diogo Ramada Curto kindly persuaded me to research the Portuguese colonial experience abroad, and Salwa Castelo Branco also insisted that I should pursue that enterprise in London.
For many and diverse reasons I’m also grateful to Alfredo Margarido, Ana Estevens, Augusto Nascimento, Clara Cabral, Cláudia Castelo, Diana Costa-Felix, Eduardo Ascensão, Elisa Lopes da Silva, Elsa Peralta, Fernando Domingos, Isabel Pombo, Isadora Ataíde, João Fazenda, José Mapril, José Manuel Sobral, Luís Sá, Marcelo Bittencourt, Miguel Jerónimo, Nina Tiesler, Nuno Dias, Nuno Medeiros, Onésimo Teotónio de Almeida, Pancho Guedes, Paulo Catrica, Pedro Martins, Pedro Roxo, Raquel Borges, Rui Santos, Roberto Chichorro, Sofia Miranda, Tom Herre, Todd Cleveland, Victor Andrade Melo, and Victor Pereira.
This research was funded by a grant from the Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal).
Without the contribution of all the former players and coaches of Maputo I had the opportunity to meet, this research would not have been possible.
Abbreviations
| ACPEFM | Arquivo do Conselho Provincial de Educação Física de Moçambique (Archive of the Provincial Council of Physical Education of Mozambique) |
| AFA | Associação de Futebol Africana (African Football Association) |
| AFLM | Associação de Futebol de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Football Association) |
| AHM | Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (Historical Archive of Mozambique) |
| CPEF | Conselho Provincial de Educação Física de Mozambique (Mozambique Provincial Council on Physical Education) |
| CUF | Companhia União Fabril (Company Union Manufacturing) |
| DGEFDSE | Direcção Geral de Educação Física, Desportos e Saúde Escolar (General Office of Physical Education, Health, and School Sports) |
| DSAC | Direcção dos Serviços de Administração Civil (Head Office of Civil Administration Services) |
| DSNI | Direcção dos Serviços dos Negócios Índigenas (Head Office of Native Affairs) |
| FIFA | Federação Internacional de Futebol Associação (International Federation of Association Football) |
| FNAT | Federação Nacional para a Alegria no Trabalho (National Foundation for Joy at Work) |
| GALM | Grémio Africano de Lourenço Marques (African Guild of Lourenço Marques) |
| INEF | Instituto Nacional de Educação Física (National Institute of Physical Education) |
| PIDE | Polícia Internacional de Defesa do Estado (International and State Defense Police) |
| RAU | Reforma Administrativa Ultramarina (Overseas Administrative Reform) |
| SCCIM | Serviços de Centralização e Coordenação da Informação de Moçambique (Mozambique Office for the Centralization and
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