The expansion of sport in Africa, dependent on the colonial process as a whole, was the result of a dynamic of heterogeneous dissemination, often not reliant on the initiative and control of economic or state institutions. Even in English colonies, where the sway over cultural apparatuses was relatively more far reaching, sports dissemination did not quite follow a linear script. Football, for example, was not a part of the traditional elite games (cricket, polo, and even rugby, but also tennis, squash, or badminton) included in the curriculum of the colonial cadres educated at Cambridge or Oxford. As noted by Harold Perkin, footballs did not so much travel in the suitcases of diplomats, administrators, and missionaries as much as in the luggage of soldiers, small businessmen, railway workers, and teachers.29
Craveirinha’s articles reveal how the game was more spontaneously appropriated in the Lourenço Marques suburbs. He even suggests that the suburban player’s humor (“reflected in the way he enjoys the game, in the theatricality of his feints and dribbles, and in the expressions he employs to belittle the player who has just been tricked: ‘pysonho,’ ‘psyêtu,’ . . . onomatopoeic expressions that are only employed here”) was one of the features that distinguished it from other conceptions of the sports activity: “these colorful gatherings become inebriated with the practice of the sport but not with the latter’s role as an activity for physical improvement; they even appear oblivious to this restrictive concept.”30 According to his description, local leisure went against some of the characteristics that defined the sports movement of a nationalist, hygienist, and pedagogic (occasionally premilitary) nature that had begun to spread across Europe in the nineteenth century and took its mold from organized models of physical reinvigoration.31 The creation of physical education schools was also stimulated by the imperial expansion and by the need to form colonial cadres, but this ideology of the body was also present in the local colonial institutions, such as schools and military forces. In Mozambique many Africans were introduced to gymnastics through their compulsory insertion in Portuguese military companies.32
Research centered on leisure practices and consumptions has enabled us to understand how leisure and sport simultaneously define and defy the boundaries of colonial society.33 Monographic works by Phyllis Martin on colonial Brazzaville, Laura Fair on Zanzibar, Peter Alegi on South Africa, and Bea Vidacs on Cameroun34 have shown how much the study of sports practices and consumptions has to add to research on African colonial and postcolonial societies.35 These research works demonstrate how a modern practice, whose urban adaptation some authors associate with the influence of traditional practices,36 was adjusted to deeply stratified societies; how, in extremely segregated contexts, forms of modern popular culture, sometimes creatively interlinked with previous traditions, have generated urban bonds among subaltern populations;37 how, despite being the object of surveillance and political co-option by state institutions, religious and economic actors, sports associations promoted practices and consumptions, mobilized people and enabled urban encounters and, in some cases, were even converted into sites of organized resistance; most important, how spectatorship and body practices, which are specific arenas of individual and collective struggles, become empirical grounds for the research of historical processes.38 Much like these studies, research into football in Lourenço Marques fits into analyses of colonial processes focused on recovering the strategies of subordinate groups as agents of their own history and on interpreting how they transformed and tested the existing structures of domination,39 even if their actions most of the time did not imply a project of organized and formal resistance.
FOOTBALL’S SPECIFICITY
The role played by football in the construction of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques was anchored in the game’s features as a form of popular culture. A particular social process transformed the players’ performances, the basic cells of a sports activity, into shared knowledge.40 Football knowledge (a player’s name, the memory of a certain special play, the list of scores) was managed according to the interactional situations individuals found themselves in.41 Through a singular process, a specific sporting capital was converted into social capital, given that the team, its victories and defeats, represented the individual in a variety of everyday situations. In the colonial city, leisure practices contributed to the development of these more or less widely spread “specific bodies of knowledge.”42 Individuals related to this knowledge according to their social position and trajectory and, in the case under analysis, along gender lines. Football in Lourenço Marques was mainly a performance by men, and for men’s consumption. For young African men the game was not only an athletic performance but also a means to achieving a certain status within a local urban environment that defied previously established hierarchies.
One of the most salient features of the process of accumulation of this specific knowledge was the way in which the information produced by the game, regardless of its scale, was organized by means of a narrative texture disputed by those who appropriated and transformed it.43 The recursive nature of football competitions ensures the temporal continuity of these “football narratives.”44 In Lourenço Marques, apart from informal neighborhood matches, which generated a grassroots knowledge, three institutionalized narratives with varying degrees of dissemination were prevalent, emerging out of three distinct competitions: the “European city” championship, the “African suburb” championship, and the metropolitan championship, covered by the local media. A dimension of “the presentation of self in everyday life,”45 club affiliation was the structuring element of local football narratives, the position from which individuals manage their football knowledge in the course of their social interactions.46 While allowing individuals to communicate and establish bonds, this specific knowledge became an “interaction repertoire.”47 During interactions individuals used their knowledge through rhetorical apparatuses—shared expressive techniques—creatively adjusting their dramaturgical agility to the social situations where they are involved: at school, at work, or in leisure relationships.48 The rhetorical use of narrative enabled the development of personal interpretations on a range of facts that in turn may be shared, or not, with others: teams and players’ histories, competition results, trophies.49
Sports identifications have become, in many instances, a means to express social struggles and frontiers, enhancing the strength of identities and occasionally generating radical breaks.50 Integrated within social relations defined by the existence of what Max Gluckman has called “multiplex ties,”51 sports narratives are able to operate as elements that reinforce the practical and identitarian frontiers of human groups organized according to specific ethnic, religious, class, or spatial bonds (a shared regional past, a new life in the urban neighborhoods), strengthening the self-identification of the group in a context of interaction with groups of different backgrounds in an urban space, for instance. In Lourenço Marques, where the development of sociabilities was conditioned by a system of domination inscribed in the urban space and in the existing social stratification, the circulation of knowledge, the acquisition of techniques, habits, and schemas for the interpretation of the surrounding world was subject to a variety of social enclosures and favored the development of belongings and identities, bonds activated to respond to a host of practical everyday issues.
However, football knowledge, as an interaction repertoire, also facilitated the creation of bonds against the background of nondysfunctional conflicts. In these cases, the conflict, as noted by Coser, was a means of recognizing difference and agreeing upon a relational lowest common denominator.52 Regardless of the capacity to cement previous identifications, sports narratives, woven into a growing popular culture, were able to assist in interactions between individuals that did not share any other filiation or even a social or spatial proximity other than that of belonging to a stratified urban community. This specific knowledge, then, helped the creation of what Mark Granovetter has termed “weak ties.”53 In the context of intense urbanization, where people of different backgrounds found themselves interacting with each other, the creation of a common knowledge and common ways of acting was a key principle of coexistence. These weak bonds were fragile but nonetheless essential bridges that allowed for interknowledge among
