differences, namely those imposed by a colonialism of an increasingly racialist nature. Once disseminated and accessible, football was the ground for specific performances but also for the creation of associative structures that shaped urban identities that the state tried to organize, control, and use to its own advantage—not always successfully. In the city’s suburbs, where a particular social organization was imposed, the process of the game’s appropriation by the local populations forged a unique performance, a local style of play that had its own moral economy, plainly linked to the urban and labor policies of the colonial state and the key role these policies played in the formation of a suburban habitus.77
In chapter 4, I attempt an archaeology of this style of play and outline its main features, paying particular attention to the way in which football became a medium for negotiating the grounds for the construction of an informal social contract that could organize, however precariously, the life of those that lived in the periphery of the city. The descriptions by José Craveirinha of this malicious game, as well as the accounts of former suburban players, are the foundations for this archaeology of the local style of play. By retrieving the game’s language, the chapter proposes an alternative narrative of the suburbs, its structures, practices, and convivial norms, one that brushes against those accounts that idealized it, culturalized it, or reduced it to a social pathology. This effort of narrating the suburban life continues in chapter 5, now on the basis of an interpretation of the links between the game of football and a series of local traditions that were being adjusted to the colonial city environment, such as witchcraft and faith healing. Healers and witch doctors, just like the best interpreters of the local style of play, were the performers of these informal rights, aspirations, and desires, and their heroic feats were narrated in stories that have survived to this day.
This changing world had multiple points of contact with the outside world. For the local style of play, regardless of its unique traits, the rules of modern football remained a reference point, and the local game was far from impermeable to other ways of playing. The game was likewise appropriated by local fans, who brought football into their everyday lives, as an identitarian trait and a means of relating to a wider universe, as the game had spread throughout the globe. News of its practice in the metropole, in Europe, and across the world reached the suburbs. Chapters 6 and 7 address this process of transformation and the way the suburban populations, while constrained by the colonial system, connected and related to the world. An aspect of the ongoing negotiation of the suburban social contract, this process manifested itself in different ways. Chapter 6 exposes how the players that abandoned the suburban style of play so as to pursue a professional career felt the effects of that change in their very bodies, in the form of a self-conditioning, a disenchantment, as if they had let go of who they were. However, it was precisely under the sway of the modern game and its constraints that some suburban players began their professional and social mobility trajectories, by means of which they became key figures in the game and an inspiration to the populations of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques. Modern football had created its own space of stylistic possibilities, based on a specific use of time and space, with singular symbolic exchanges that shared traits with other modern activities, namely those that implied a complex division of labor. By rewarding the merit and talent of African players, modern football placed itself at the service of a desire for justice, but it also disrupted the local style.
It was also in the course of this process that football became an idiom of social contact. Through football, one also expressed the desire for a different social contract. In this demand, the game served as a foundation for the establishment of a particular public space, one structured by rules, rights, and opportunities. This universe opened up the possibility of belonging to worlds of signifying constellations and to spaces for the creation of commonalities, a practical and symbolic egalitarianism that offered instruments of public representation in a world where they were scarce. Chapter 7 aims to reveal how football played its part in the process of urbanization of suburban inhabitants on the basis of a singular phenomenology that converted knowledge into narratives embedded in an interactional everyday. Suburban fans’ admiration for Portuguese clubs, where some of the most distinguished local African players displayed their talent, is testimony to this appropriation of the possibilities afforded by the modern game and its competitions.
2
A Colonial Sport’s Field
THE development of a field of sports practices and consumptions in Lourenço Marques was shaped by the organization and evolution of a colonial power structure, replicating its forms of social closure. Simultaneously, however, the dissemination of sports created specific autonomies that had the power to defy existent structures of domination. The social and political role played by local sports associations and clubs, and the importance of emergent forms of urban popular culture in reinforcing identities, promoting new bonds, and backing individual and collective aspirations, were among the aspects that defined the introduction of modern sports in the colonial city.
LEISURE, FOOTBALL, AND THE BIRTH OF THE COLONIAL CITY
The construction of a penitentiary in 1782 was the first step toward the formation of Lourenço Marques’s fragile urban mesh.1 The first settlers, arriving in 1825, laid out a disordered cluster of primary streets. A dynamic slave trade to Brazil developed in this period. In the same time frame, a small community of Indians from Daman and Diu was established. In 1850, Lourenço Marques had six hundred inhabitants, confined to the coastal area. Portuguese authorities were had to deal with local kingdoms and were closely watched by English fleets that oversaw the slave traffic. In 1875, Portugal won the right to govern Lourenço Marques Bay, which was being disputed by the British, after a decision by French president Marshal MacMahon, who was mediating the disagreement.
When it became a village, in 1876, Lourenço Marques already had a small administrative and commercial center. After the arrival, in 1877, of a public-works expedition led by engineer Joaquim José Machado (who later became governor of the territory), the process of draining the marshland surrounding the small urban area began, thus allowing the city’s expansion. In 1887, Lourenço Marques was incorporated as a city. An urban expansion plan, devised by engineer António Araújo, was approved in 1892. Resorting to military-engineering techniques, Araújo proposed the construction of an orthogonal urban structure, whose geometry reflected modern building methods. The colonial city’s growth led to a series of expropriations. In 1891 local populations were dislodged from the central area of Maxaquene and moved to the Mafalala, Munhuana, Hulene, and Chamanculo neighborhoods.2 An outbreak of bubonic plague, which hit the city in 1907 and 1908, led to further social segmentation.3 The question of property established itself as one of the elements of the “illegality” of the colonial suburban space.4 A situation with wider contours, this “illegality” signaled, in Lourenço Marques, the exclusion of this population from the institutional spheres that handled administrative, judicial, and labor issues and that catered to the “civilized.” As early as 1890 the freehold concession to Africans was limited.5 According to the regulations on the ownership of urban plots of land approved by Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque in 1897, property owners had to prove their ownership in writing and to build a house within six months—a bureaucratic scheme that, together with the lack of capital, systematically excluded the indígenas.6 The regulations for the concession of state-owned land of 1918, in force until 1961, established a class of plots of land, reservations, for the exclusive use of the indígenas: they could occupy land but not own it.
The Lydenburg Road, which began to be built in 1871 and served as a connection to the Transvaal, became a focal
