and the Portuguese national team, was a “total sportsman”—a basketball player, an accomplished sailor, and a record holder in the shot put. He also, in his free time, hunted rabbits, impalas, and other antelopes.16 As a child, Pereira was inspired by magazines such as Stadium, which arrived in Mozambique from Portugal, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, and occasionally featured African track stars, including Tomás Paquete, Matos Fernandes, and Espírito Santo, each of whom hailed from the Lusophone territories.17 His father worked for the railroad, so the family didn’t figure among the colonial elites. Yet the nature and wide range of leisure activities in which he engaged certainly differentiated his childhood experiences from those of the majority of African and mestiço players during their formative years in the colonies.
The Introduction of Football in the Colonies
It was into the colonial environments outlined above that a variety of individuals, including soldiers, missionaries, merchants, administrators, educators, corporate officials, and, eventually, settlers (especially as their numbers increased over time) introduced the game of football. This process of dissemination was highly uneven but generally commenced in port cities, such as Bissau, Luanda, and Lourenço Marques, in the late nineteenth century. The game subsequently traveled along overland routes and, eventually, railroads and other thoroughfares, such that it had widely penetrated the interior by the 1920s. Despite the game’s notable diffusion, though, the process of introducing it was largely unsystematic, lacking any type of formality or organization. Only much later would colonial authorities deem the sport useful to maintaining control and, thus, try to supervise this process of propagation. In the meantime, the game was introduced wherever and whenever European practitioners were active and felt compelled to share the rules, conventions, and strategies of the sport with Africans.
Scholars have debated to what ends Europeans introduced football to local residents and, attendantly, the efficacy of their designs. Some have examined the hegemonic motivations behind the introduction of soccer, while others, conversely, have considered how Africans frustrated these intentions, embracing the game but actively rejecting the elements of inculcation hidden in this alleged sporting “Trojan horse.” Irrespective of the divergent interpretive angles, it’s important to note that not all Europeans shared the same objectives related to the introduction of football to Africans. For example, unlike Portuguese soldiers who may have introduced soccer simply to generate indigenous competitors, missionaries championed the sport as part of a broader emphasis on “muscular” Christianity. Meanwhile, the colonial state was more interested in the game’s potential to subdue, distract, reinforce racial hierarchy, generate respect for authority, and minimize what colonial social engineers perceived to be an unproductive use of leisure time by indigenous residents. As such, the state encouraged soccer as a “civilizing” endeavor for African populations as part of its wider efforts to use physical education to control the bodies of the colonized masses. As Domingos has argued regarding soccer in the Lusophone African context, the games themselves were “instruments of socialization, infusing discipline . . . respect for hierarchies and rituals.”18 In this capacity, football was undoubtedly more than just a game. And the associated methods and intended lessons were far more important than the game itself.19 Although football’s efficacy as a tool to maintain social control is disputable, the sport unquestionably constituted a key component in Portugal’s cultural imperialism campaign, an important pillar in the broader process of empire.
Finally, it is important to note that in many instances, and especially in the early decades of colonial control in Portugal’s territories, Africans themselves were responsible for introducing the game. This phenomenon was most frequently associated with Mozambique and, to a lesser extent, Angola, due to their proximity to and economic links with South Africa, the site of the first recorded football matches on the continent. Regarding Mozambique, the incessant streams of migrant laborers were exposed to the game, and subsequently brought that knowledge back with them following stints in the South African mines. As Patrick Harries and others have argued, strong cultural, social, and economic connections existed between urban South Africa and Lourenço Marques, as well as along the overland routes to and from the mines.20 Migrant Mozambican mine workers cultivated and daily reinforced these links, with football figuring centrally in this transnational exchange of leisure habits.
The Consumption of Football in the Colonies: “Diseased” for Portuguese Clubs
Shortly after the introduction of football in the colonies, Africans began dribbling, passing, and shooting just about any spherical object they could fashion or find. Yet the engagement with the sport was not limited to practicing and playing. Both practitioners and fans contributed to the popularity of the sport by eagerly consuming soccer developments from the metropole and rapidly forming allegiances to—or, as some avid followers referred to this phenomenon: “becoming diseased for”—the major Portuguese clubs. Indeed, while the distance between the dusty pitches in Africa and the verdant fields in the metropole was both literally and figuratively immense, newspapers, radio, and, eventually, television daily delivered Portuguese soccer matches and news to the continent, effectively reducing the expanse.
Initially, the media accounts were primarily consumed by European colonists, who had packed up their metropolitan club loyalties and brought them to the colonies. This sporting fealty enabled settlers to retain important cultural connections to the metropole and also facilitated entry into social networks in the colonies that revolved around football fandom. The example of the family of José Águas, who grew up in colonial Angola and would eventually go on to star for Benfica, is illustrative of the durability and pervasiveness of sporting devotions within Portuguese settler communities. According to his profile in a 1956 issue of Ídolos, “He was always a Benfica supporter, as he came from a family of ‘benfiquistas’ [ardent Benfica supporters]. He knew the names and the characteristics of all the players, heard the reports, clipped the photos. When Benfica won the Taça Latina [in 1950], he was delirious with enthusiasm.”21 This type of football fidelity reigned in mixed-race households as well, given that virtually all of these domiciles featured Portuguese patriarchs. For example, the father of mestiço player Mário Torres was an avid supporter of Sporting Lisboa and tangibly expressed this allegiance in colonial Angola by founding two local affiliates of the metropolitan powerhouse: Sporting do Huambo, based in the colony’s second largest city; and Sporting de Vila Nova, located nearby.
If Portuguese settlers were the original consumers of metropolitan football in the colonies, Africans also began to develop metropolitan sporting allegiances, similarly gravitating toward the “big clubs”—the same outfits that most colonists supported. In fact, Africans’ club loyalties were often influenced by the Portuguese with whom they interacted, typically at their respective places of employment. An account by Ângelo Gomes da Silva, who played locally in Mozambique, is exemplary of the transference of footballing loyalties from Portuguese to African laborers. According to Silva, Africans and mestiços conversed with “co-workers who had come from the metropole and who supported particular clubs. So, when a Portuguese would ask which club an African supported and he didn’t have a response, the inquirer would retort, for example, ‘You don’t have a club? Then you have to support Sporting. . . . You are a man, why don’t you support a club? It must be Portugal’s Sporting.’”22 These implorations explicitly imposed Portuguese notions of masculinity upon local populations, either encouraging or even shaming Africans and mestiços into footballing allegiances.
Adherences of this nature also provided Africans a topic that they could safely discuss with Portuguese coworkers, transcending the racial divides that pervaded every colonial setting. Domingos has convincingly argued that at a range of worksites in the colonies, “football, acting as a repertoire of interaction, guaranteed a minimum common denominator for interactions between colonizers and colonized and served as a way to start conversation.”23 Indeed, Augusto Matine recalled that he used to discuss football with coworkers during breaks and that Portuguese soccer news and events dominated these conversations: “People talked more about metropolitan football than our own. We started to have all
