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Football and the Narration of a Colonial Situation
JOSÉ CRAVEIRINHA’S ETHNOGRAPHY OF SUBURBAN FOOTBALL IN LOURENÇO MARQUES
In 1955, José Craveirinha, a prominent Mozambican mestiço poet and journalist,1 suggested that the distinctive performance of African players from the suburbs of Lourenço Marques revealed a form of intelligence, an “extraordinary and limitless . . . fantasy” of the indígena (native) population, which the poet attributed to its “acute sense of malice.” Malice, usually associated with grave and harmful actions springing from an evil source, was here given a positive spin, as intelligence or cunning.2
This was one among a series of articles that Craveirinha wrote that year in O brado africano3 on the kind of football played in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques. In another piece, he addressed the way in which suburban players adopted, adapted, and re-created the game, a European invention.4 “The indígena,” he emphasized, “is ready to adapt to new things but also to transform them or even discover them anew.”5
The use, in local football, of what he termed “witchcraft practices” was one of the most conspicuous manifestations of this process of adoption. Craveirinha highlighted the influence of “ancient taboos, beliefs, superstitions” in the local adoption of the game. These beliefs had a powerful effect on the players’ “reflex system.” For years in succession, Beira-Mar, a team from Chamanculo, a suburban neighborhood, won the local championship because, the poet claimed, “before the matches, their athletes drank a special tea at the president’s house and, at some point, several black-and-white crows would appear behind the opposing team’s goal, to indicate how many goals they would suffer.” “Black men and many mestiços,” the poet continued, “still entered the pitch with small ‘copper’coins inside their boots, and would rub certain ‘remedies’ on their knees beforehand in order to protect their bodies from the opponent’s sorcery.” Africans, he noted, “gladly accepted countless impositions and customs from a more advanced civilization but, at the same time, they held on to a series of traditional practices that reflected their ‘worldview.’” The interpretation of this topic led the poet to issue a challenge: “these manifestations demand a vast study, which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography.”6
As in so many other places, the urbanization process in Lourenço Marques transformed both individuals and groups. In the city, one acquired practical skills but also began to perceive and imagine the world differently. In the capital of Mozambique, this modern phenomenon was shaped by colonialism, and more specifically by the colonial projects that marked this space under Portuguese rule. The development of sporting practices and forms of consumption in Lourenço Marques was underpinned by this colonial situation.7 From the first decades of the twentieth century onward, both in the center of the “European city” and in the African suburbs, from children’s matches taking place in any random plot of land to the more organized competitions, from matches of an informal nature among friends to those following the model of an official competition, football established itself as a dynamic element among emergent leisure practices, and made its mark as a communitarian spectacle. Here, as elsewhere around the world, by becoming a public event, the game no longer had a meaningful existence for the players on the pitch only. Performance was now shared with an audience, with those that witnessed the spectacle in situ as well as with those that gathered information on it through other, indirect, means, either personal interactions or specific channels such as the media. Sports like football were thus transfigured into a medium of everyday individual and collective identification, a secular religion of sorts, a universal language.8 In those contexts where football became a competitive spectacle, performed for an audience, the effect of competition and of the growing pressure exerted by fans converted football into a “serious” activity, in contrast with the typical image of a “disinterested” amateur practice.9
The values and practices shared and praised by football players and public in the Lourenço Marques suburbs, and above all the predominant faculty of malice, will serve as a starting point for an inquiry into the specific nature of colonial domination in Lourenço Marques and the particular culture it fostered. The situated study of players’ bodies gives rise to a singular representation of the colonial process. This representation is in stark contrast to the pastoral genre that gave voice to the interests at play within the field of colonial power. In the Lourenço Marques imagined by colonial propaganda, its suburbs were either culturalized or, quite simply, omitted. The city was also conceived by modernizing projects that, from the 1950s onward, were concerned with the way in which the African labor force had been reproducing.
The nature and evolution of the colonial field of power in the capital of Mozambique can be perceived through the way in which the Portuguese state and other agents—local interest groups, companies, religious organizations, nations, and international institutions—conceived the city’s suburbs and their populations. The adoption of football in the periphery ran parallel with the struggles for the definition of a suburban social contract. Framed by the indirect rule that characterized the indigenato system, and under the thumb of a predatory state, this social contract was geared toward fulfilling the need for the reproduction of the suburban labor force and maintaining the order and racial hierarchy that regulated the relation between the colonizers and the colonized.10 The existence of a local football dynamic in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques was partially a response to a segregation policy led by the state institutions and translated into the network of sport associations. Sports practices and consumptions were part and parcel of a broader, radically uneven process of exchange, which affected the living conditions of Mozambican populations and their specific adaptation to the environment of the city.
In this work, the malice described by José Craveirinha is not treated as an idiosyncratic trait of culturally framed individuals. The point, rather, is to interpret it as but one aspect of an informal social contract that emerged on the outskirts of Lourenço Marques and that was sustained by the unsettled routines of its inhabitants. In this sense, malice is not an element of a prescriptive notion of “culture” or “identity.”11 Nor, for that matter, is it meant to stand for a form of “national agency,” so often invoked in the analysis of colonial experiences.12 The use of prescriptive identitarian projections is common in the analysis of sports performances. By absorbing external referents (of a national, ethnic, cultural, or political nature), the game style (Brazilian, African, English)13 naturalizes the very principles of which it is presumed to be a reflex: nation, race, identity, culture.14 As a feature of a suburban habitus, a malice was inscribed in individuals’ strategies and in the responses they gave to the strict conditions that constricted and confined them.
In this book, football performances, translated into a locally meaningful style of play, operate as a laboratory of bodies, senses, and worldviews through which one can offer a representation of the local colonial society, of its structures of power and means of social reproduction, but also of the elements of transformation brought about by historical change and human aspirations.
The game, as a practice but also as a shared popular and mediatized culture, helped the population’s integration into networks of interdependence, not only those previously established through ethnic and geographic bonds, but also those shaped by other distinctly urban groups, and which may or may not have replicated those previous belongings: those that gathered in each neighborhood and those that emerged from work relations or the participation in association movements. Organized in the form of performances, played before a live audience, football contributed to the formation of a specific social stock of knowledge.15 Knowledge about football bred everyday encounters and interactions, cemented identities,
