elements of that language and the embodied record of a specific historical process. Collective movements were not random. Expressing the existence of an order, an “interaction order,”69 the game was shaped by specific conventions and norms that were locally meaningful and defined a performative arena: a “space of stylistic possibles.”70 The cells of these interactions were the gestures and movements that defined the players’ “motor repertoire,” their bodily techniques, in the sense Marcel Mauss lent to this term.71 The moral and practical meanings inscribed in these movements are the gateway for the study of Lourenço Marques’s singular suburban social contract under Portuguese rule.
MAP 1.2. Metropolitan Portugal and the Portuguese colonial empire (used in classrooms), 1934. Manuel Pinto de Sousa, Porto: Livraria Escolar “Progredior.” Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
GENDERED PERSPECTIVES, METHODOLOGY, AND CHRONOLOGIES
The present research was based on archival work, both in Portugal and in Mozambique, on newspapers and magazines of the period and a set of interviews with some of the protagonists of the time, key elements to retrieve a sense of the dynamics of the game of football as it was practiced in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques. To the important descriptions of the history of football in these parts and in this period, these accounts have added information that sheds light on some of the features of the sports performances. This book aims to look at a historical process through the lens of a particular activity and, more generally, through the experience of suburban inhabitants, so as to offer a perspective that is mostly absent from the archival documents and written sources.
This partial view of the historical process can certainly be found in the “colonial archive,” even if it often reveals lines of fracture within the Portuguese power structure. Out of these conflicts and the ramification of interests around the state and its institutions there emerged a variety of viewpoints on the city’s peripheral spaces and on their populations. However, from the “African side,” by which I refer to the press in particular, the suburbs were still represented all too narrowly. In the way they critically described Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, newspapers such as O africano and O brado africano are indeed rare and precious historiographical sources. And yet, while their accounts do bring to the surface some of the dynamics of the historical processes in the capital of Mozambique, their analyses play down, and even exclude, other processes and points of view, namely of those that did not share the social status of this African elite, or their economic position, their religious beliefs, or their status vis-à-vis the state. One of the challenges of the present book was to avoid drawing a general portrait of the suburban experience through the gaze of these individuals, diverse and contradictory as it was. It could not fail to take into account their singular experience as an important historiographical source, but at the same time it also needed to avoid magnifying the information and interpretations they offer us.
The gathering of narratives on the local sports scene and on the itineraries of suburban football players was an attempt to remedy the near-absence of accounts of life on the edges of the city. Mostly provided by players with stable sports careers, these accounts do not faithfully represent the diversity of suburban experiences throughout the period under study. Be that as it may, their words help us identify dominant practices and norms that were expressed, first and foremost, by means of a specific style of football play. This style then functions as a laboratory that opens onto a wider field of analysis of the conditions in which the colonial periphery developed. In retrieving a sense of this suburban life it was also important to include the data produced by the colonial regime’s own institutions, namely the monograph of the colonial cadre António Rita-Ferreira (Os africanos de Lourenço Marques, 1968). When placed in the context of its production, which implies a critical distance from its intents and conclusions, these data yield information that ensures a richer frame for understanding the urban situation in the capital of Mozambique.
The local society portrayed by the game of football was almost exclusively composed of men. While in many ways suburban men shared with suburban women a similar urban experience, framed by the unstable local social contract that we wish to survey, the game was primarily a dimension of the masculine experience, adaptation, and performance. As one would expect, football’s local institutionalization reinforced gender discrimination, as sports clubs were structurally unequal. Recent work by Jeanne Marie Penvenne on female workers in cashew factories in Lourenço Marques between 1945 and 1975, published when this book was nearly completed, examines the gendered perspectives of the urbanization process.72 Addressing the same spatial context, Penvenne lifts the veil from the dramatic living conditions of the population of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques and thus retrieves the working and urban experience of these female workers, by bringing them into the fold of historical narratives—of the proletariat, of migratory processes—from which they had been excluded; she reveals the singularity of their survival strategies and how adaptation to an urban environment was bound by prior conditions for which the city was a space of struggle and transformation.
Informal women’s matches did take place in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, but football, maybe alongside boxing, was the ultimate frontier in terms of gender discrimination in sports. Football clubs, both in the suburbs and in affluent, all-white cement city, did not have female teams, though there was an active women participation in other sports activities. In the suburbs the mestiço elites promoted gymnastics for women, as well as athletics and basketball teams, later on. Women’s participation in sports was also influenced by the way in which gender discrimination translated into the Portuguese official sports’ policies. In the metropole the creation of the Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (Feminine Portuguese Youth), in 1937, institutionalized a sexual separation and a distinction between the types of exercises appropriate for each sex.73 The same categorizations were present in school syllabuses. Both in gymnasiums and outdoors, classes for men and women were separated. Physical education should provide men with “opportunities to assert a virile personality in displays of disciplined energy, loyal competition and the sublimation of fighting instincts,” and lead women “to a fertile family life,”74 as women needed to be “protected from the great muscular and masculinizing efforts of athletics, a feminine aberration that went against this sex’s sensitiveness and woman’s natural role as a future mother and educator.”75 School syllabuses marked this distinction between the woman, seen both as mother and educator, whose physical activities expressed control over the domestic realm, and the athletic man, ready to defend the nation. The development of sports beyond the sphere of the state in Lourenço Marques took place within the frame of such gendered official conceptions, which were deeply rooted in the Portuguese colonial system, namely in the indigenato system.76
The central argument of this book is that the game of football in Lourenço Marques, by absorbing the main traits of the local colonial society, became an embodied representation of a historical experience. The appropriation of a modern activity, as a performative practice but also as a medium of everyday relationships and a ground for the creation of social networks, offers a unique point of view on the formation of a system of colonial power with distinctive features, thus revealing, at the same time, the way in which individuals reproduced and transformed the system. This representation of local life runs counter to the culturalist and exotic visions of the periphery promoted by the regime’s propaganda, but also counter to modernizing views that, by diagnosing the suburbs as an urban pathology, explained their misery through the self-exclusion of Africans.
The relation between football and colonialism in the capital of Mozambique, between the game’s embodied language and the structures of colonial domination, became crystallized through a process of dissemination and institutionalization that I attempt to describe in chapters 2 and 3. Appropriated by a variety of urban populations, the game organized itself along the
