regime did little, if anything, to alter this social configuration until newly independent African nations elsewhere on the continent began to utilize the international bodies at their disposal, such as the United Nations and the International Labor Organization, to malign, disgrace, and increasingly isolate the resolute Portuguese state.
Begrudgingly, Lisbon reactively began revising its colonial policies. In the early 1960s, with the wars for independence under way, the regime dismantled the forced labor schemes in place and began allocating additional funds to extend (albeit skeletal) education and health-care infrastructures. Even if these decisions were politically motivated—calculated, though belated, efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of indigenous residents—Africans did, nonetheless, benefit. Indeed, as Domingos has argued, “The toning down of the social segregation mechanisms, especially after . . . 1961, created the conditions to speed up the dynamics of mobility that were already in place. The need for economic mobility demanded the end of political obstacles.”8 Yet Marcelo Bittencourt reminds us that despite these concessions, the politico-martial events of the 1960s “radicalized the Portuguese colonial authorities; the eyes and ears of the government agencies came to suspect any type of association . . . in which black and mestiços congregated.”9 As such, even as whites, blacks, and mestiços began mixing with greater fluidity, often within formerly segregated spaces, pervasive suspicion and tension engendered by the wars for independence marked the various colonial settings.
The Social Backgrounds of Footballers as Windows into Colonial Contexts
As the denouement of the Portuguese empire approached, the African footballers who would eventually relocate to the metropole were humbly being born and sired on soccer. Notwithstanding the divergent social and economic circumstances in which individual players were raised and the different decades in which they reached their formative footballing years, their experiences exemplarily illuminate daily life in an array of Portuguese colonial settings.
The majority of these future soccer stars grew up reasonably poor, even if some—and, in particular, mestiço players, owing to their Portuguese fathers—had somewhat more comfortable upbringings. Many mestiço footballers’ settler parents were employed in the colonial bureaucracies, which afforded them decent livings, though none of these families would have been considered elite. For example, Miguel Arcanjo, who grew up in Angola in the 1940s and would go on to play for FC Porto, had a Portuguese father who was employed in the colonial treasury, where he was apparently both “distinguished and admired.”10 Many of Arcanjo’s siblings would also go on to serve as public functionaries. Although being an assimilado or mestiço in the colonies did not preclude significant social and economic challenges, the social strata from which many of these players derived rendered their migration to Portugal more a form of geographical rather than social mobility, as they were moving from one reasonably advantaged environment to another.
Elsewhere on the socioeconomic spectrum, Armando Manhiça, who was raised in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques in the 1950s and would eventually play in Portugal for Sporting Lisbon and FC Porto, had a much more modest upbringing. The sixth child in his family, his father worked in a factory, earning a salary that was “not large,” while from the age of four Manhiça helped his mother carry, deliver, and sell fish in the city’s popular Xipamanine market.11
Irrespective of the divergences in the socioeconomic statuses of players’ families, virtually all of these future footballers attended school for at least some period of time. Enrollment was at the insistence of their parents, who deemed formal education the key to future success. In fact, no matter how personally enamored the guardians may have been with football, most considered the game a threat to their sons’ studies and, therefore, an endeavor that could potentially derail the professional trajectories they envisioned for their children—a sentiment that was especially pronounced in relatively well-off families. For example, Shéu Han recalled that his father did not want him to “dribble away his life” playing soccer, and, as such, “it was very difficult to convince him to permit the aspiring footballer to pursue his ambitions.”12 Shéu’s father, who was Chinese, instead wanted him to study to become an engineer. To this end, he sent Shéu to live with his maternal uncle and attend school in Beira, the second-largest city in Mozambique, hundreds of miles north of the small fishing village of Inhassoro, where the future Benfica star had been born.
Despite these parents’ best intentions for their children’s educations, familial financial expediencies could trump and, thus, truncate schooling careers, as was the case with Joaquim Adriano José da Conceição, who would go on to star for Portugal’s Vitória de Setúbal football club in the 1960s. Well before those later, more comfortable years, Conceição grew up in a Luanda bairro (neighborhood) in the 1950s, and the meager salaries his painter father and sewer mother earned, coupled with the presence of eleven children to feed, forced him to abandon his studies upon completing elementary school to take up work at a carpenter’s shop.13 For players raised in single-parent homes, this eventuality was even more unavoidable. As Vicente Lucas, who grew up in Lourenço Marques and lost his father when he was fourteen years old, explained, “We were semi-poor. My mother even sold rope. . . . I walked to school, but eventually stopped attending and went to work for a blacksmith. . . . We weren’t really happy in Mozambique because there were many children—four boys and four girls—and we had difficulties of various types.”14 For players like Lucas, continued schooling simply wasn’t economically viable.
Unfortunately, for players such as Lucas and Conceição, the intellectual and intercultural competency facilitated by extended schooling in the colonies helped migrant footballers integrate once in the metropole. Indeed, those players, typically from more privileged families, who were able to complete secondary school while in the colonies, and, even more significantly, those who opted to play their football for Académica, typically experienced even more facile transitions into metropolitan life. Of course, neither these scholar-athletes nor the parents who had mandated schooling in the colonies realistically envisioned this eventual social-athletic outcome. Nor did a parental emphasis on education necessarily generate enthusiasm for academics among these budding football stars; for most of the athletes, soccer, rather than school, motivated them.
For those players who were thrust into remunerative activities in the colonies, employment often featured a soccer connection, just as it would for those who opted to sign for CUF (Companhia União Fabril) once in the metropole. Oftentimes, clubs in the colonies were operated by, or at least had meaningful links to, commercial interests and would arrange employment with a private or state entity (e.g., the railroad) to attract talented footballers to their squads and, subsequently, to retain them. For example, Augusto Matine, who grew up in Lourenço Marques in the 1960s and played locally for Clube Central before going on to play for Benfica in Lisbon, recalled:
Sr. António, Central’s leader, came to me and asked me what I did. . . . I learned the trade of surveyor of measures in gas stations and of agrarian measures and taxi meters. . . . There were others who were placed elsewhere and learned to be mechanics. After one year, a year and a half, two years, we really started to earn some money in the places where we worked. We became part of the staff. I remember that I made 400 escudos a month and I could use this money to feed my family.
One of Central’s directors had a factory called the Companhia Industrial da Matola, which made various types of pasta and cookies. At the end of the month, he gave me a rancho: ten kilograms of sugar, ten kilograms of rice, two soap bars, milk, butter, cookies, and some money for my mother. If I received 400 [escudos], I would give 300 to my mother and keep 100. That was to protect myself. If my brothers asked me for something, they wouldn’t lack anything. This was how I lived. I grew as a man and as a respected football player because I worked for it.15
Footballers of European descent who made the jump from the colonies to the metropole typically enjoyed more comfortable, if still modest, upbringings. For example, Alberto da Costa Pereira, who grew up in the 1940s in Nacala and Nampula,
