and within the community, but it was also a means of communicating with the world. In the outskirts of colonial Lourenço Marques, football was a vehicle through which local inhabitants aspired to another material and symbolic existence, sport being one of the few fields where Africans could stand out in the frame of a colonial society. This desire for social mobility was reinforced when some black and, most all mestiço players started a professional trajectory that would eventually lead them to major metropolitan clubs. Among the latter are the well-known cases of Matateu, Mário Coluna, Hilário, and Eusébio. Thus, while an analysis of the players’ on-field choreography enables us to interpret the structures of a system of domination in the capital of Mozambique, the urban dissemination of football brings to the fore the extent to which the system was unstable and subject to pressure exerted by the desires and aspirations of its inhabitants.
LOURENÇO MARQUES
In the urban history of Africa, colonial cities like Lourenço Marques established themselves, since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as specific types of social organization.16 They were focal points in a network of transnational economic relations reliant on decisions made in the metropolitan political centers and in the international commodity markets. These urban colonial societies were regulated by a set of laws and institutions, and their development generally involved military occupation and the employment of coercive means; the implementation of an administrative apparatus; the enactment of laws regulating the rights, duties, and movement of the populations; and the establishment of a regime of economic exploitation, aimed at the reproduction of the labor force, which integrated African goods and workers in international networks of production and trade.17 Colonial cities distinguish themselves by their functional role within a set of commercial and productive relations, their political framework and degree of state intervention, their social and professional stratification, their demographic structure and ethnic composition. Part of a larger process of social transformation, each colonial city presented its own unique dynamics.18 As complex and creative spaces of exchange and mobility, colonial cities like Lourenço Marques were defined by processes of social and racial segmentation that led to the creation of segregated urban areas, each with a European center surrounded by African suburbs. After World War II, the African colonial city’s functional specialization went through a decisive shift, when the need for cheap raw materials and labor generated a demographic explosion.19 Many Africans were then introduced to the dynamics of a capitalist economy, becoming workers or servants, but also consumers, participants in a developing urban culture. Facing severe material and symbolic hardships, they went on to occupy a city they had built with their own hands. A site of linguistic, religious, and cultural reinvention, the city, through the specificity of its social and spatial relations, created new patterns of conflict and cooperation, new practices and worldviews.
MAP 1.1. Mozambique, 1903. Comissão de Cartografia. Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
A symbol of a new stage in Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, the growth of Lourenço Marques came to represent the advent of this process. Despite the unmistakable signs of fragile territorialization and lack of capital, knowledge, and human resources, in other words, the relative weakness of the state’s infrastructural power, in the sense used by Michael Mann,20 the projects developed in Portuguese colonial territories did not significantly contrast with the general trends that define European colonial rule in Africa, and with which they were connected. Portuguese colonialism was no exception.21 Lourenço Marques, which became Mozambique’s capital, replacing the former capital in the Island of Mozambique (Ilha de Moçambique) in 1898 (although legally only in 1906), had singular features. The new Mozambican capital, served by an important deep-water port, would become one of the axes of a regional economy nurtured by South Africa’s precocious industrialization, funded by British capital and based on gold and diamond prospecting. The train connection between Mozambique’s main cities and its neighboring regions, between Lourenço Marques and Transvaal Province and further north between Beira and Rhodesia, defined the city’s economic role, within the frame of a “transit and emigration economy” that characterized the southern Mozambique economic system.22 A focal point of commercial relations, Lourenço Marques became the center of one of the most important regional labor markets. The Portuguese government made several worker transfer agreements with its neighboring regions. These agreements were one of the main colonial sources of income. Each year, thousands of Africans were sent to South African mines. The migratory-work phenomenon affected the more underprivileged populations, especially those whose rural life structure was shaken by the “colonial encounter,” by tax exaction and compulsory labor.23 The transfer of workers to the Transvaal was negotiated under a monopolistic regime in exchange for the passage through the port of Lourenço Marques of a parcel of southern African imports and exports.
The construction of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques is inseparable from the colonial system’s need to reproduce the labor force necessary to sustain the city’s economic activities, but also, particularly in the first decades of modern urban formation, those of the flourishing South African regional industry. The Portuguese occupation removed the indígenas from the city center, pushing them to the periphery, where many others would join them from the countryside. Successive labor regulations punctuated the various stages in the formation of a symbolically differentiated space in Lourenço Marques, composed of more or less limited zones of interaction, subject to distinct rights and duties. Suburban dwellers, with no rights to land or to ownership of the houses they had built, were forced to rent them. The rental market in the suburbs drew the contours of a hierarchical space in which residents were distributed according to their possessions. A profitable business, the private exploitation of plots of land and houses persisted, stimulated by the lack of urban planning. As with much of the urban built space in Africa in the wake of nineteenth-century colonialism, in Lourenço Marques a large portion of the population inhabited a sprawling periphery, in the fragile condition of occupiers, at the mercy of all kinds of arbitrary acts.
The prevalent economic model in the Portuguese colonial system—mercantilist, barely industrialized, and lagging behind in the employment of capitalist processes24—prevented the local growth of an extensive proletariat,25 despite the increase in economic activity in the late colonial period, when the populations of settlers and Africans grew significantly. Although it was a modern colonial city, Lourenço Marques did not share some of the characteristics of other African cities, whose economic structure was built around large-scale industrial infrastructures. Many of the workers returning from the South African mines, and coming through Lourenço Marques, went back to their villages, a seasonal mobility that contributed to minimizing the effects of proletarianization.26 The labor insecurity of those who tried to settle in the city helped maintain close connections between the city and the countryside, the latter providing a last resource of social security, based on the extended family, in a context defined by the state’s feeble intervention.
The site of the reproduction of a cheap, disposable, and unskilled labor force, which the state regulated in a discretionary manner and where domestic servants made up a large portion of the population, the suburbs of Lourenço Marques showed the pattern of development of a servile society forced to adjust itself dramatically to modern structural processes. The institutions of the colonial state, ruled from 1926 by a metropolitan dictatorship,27 sought to shape this urban environment, adjusting their particular concerns to the evolving and at times contentious interests of the colonial forces. The constant struggles that traversed the colonial field of power help us interpret the singular development of the urban structure in Lourenço Marques and the role played by the state in this process.
LEISURE AND FOOTBALL IN THE COLONIAL CITY
Urban formations such as colonial cities—spaces of social interdependence enhanced by the various routes opened up by business, trade, services, the sprawling state apparatus, and the growing labor market—created the conditions for the development of
