a bottle of rose syrup and five sardines were on offer for the victors of at least one match in which he participated.25
African Organization: Leagues of Their Own
Although neighborhood matches were a mainstay of suburban life throughout the colonial period, African players and spectators also organized formal leagues of their own, modeled on the Europeans-only squads and leagues that Portuguese settlers had formed. Initially denied access to these associations, such as the Associação de Futebol Lourenço Marques (AFLM) in Mozambique, due to racially segregative policies in the colonies, Africans formed their own squads and leagues, thereby democratizing organized football. In Mozambique, beginning in the 1920s and ultimately formalized in 1934, African players organized (and were confined to) the Associação Africana de Futebol (AFA), composed of more than ten participating clubs. In Angola, a similar initiative gave birth to that colony’s African league, though the association in that setting featured only roughly half as many clubs, while the association in Portuguese Guiné was even more modest.26
Portuguese colonial officials, unlike their French counterparts elsewhere in Africa, condoned these imitative leagues, deeming them innocuous and potentially even constructive. This type of replicative sporting development has prompted Richard Cashman to ask elsewhere, in regard to the growth of cricket in the West Indies: “Where does the promoting hand of the colonial master stop and where does the adapting and assimilating indigenous tradition start?”27 In the Lusophone African context, it would be difficult to discern an exact transitional point between these two processes, as, in practice, they were complementary, overlapping, and flowed seamlessly into one another.
In an effort to analyze this dynamic in the realm of cricket, scholars of the sport, including Fahad Mustafa and, perhaps most famously, C. L. R. James, as well as scholars of soccer, such as David Goldblatt, have interpreted the formation of indigenous associations—and, more abstractly, “traditions”—as “resistance” and “platforms for political struggle.”28 Yet, in practice, there was no political struggle, explicitly or otherwise, that flowed out of this sporting process in the various Lusophone African settings, even if nationalist leaders, such as Amílcar Cabral in Guiné, recognized that sport could be used to mobilize his countrymen for the struggle against colonialism and even formed a club with this aim in mind in 1954 in the capital city of Bissau.29 Regardless, it’s difficult to identify any tangible “platforms,” or roots, of contestation in these initiatives in the Lusophone colonies. Although many Africans who would go on to join the various nationalist movements initially played for the teams that composed these leagues and political discourse certainly circulated within these clubs, it would be misleading to characterize the squads or, more broadly, the associations, as loci of anticolonial sentiment. Eschewing the tendency among scholars of Africa’s past to locate “resistance” in seemingly every aspect of colonized life, I instead consider the indigenous leagues as intermediate stops at which African practitioners enjoyed the game and forged meaningful relationships with teammates, while the most gifted among them honed their skills to facilitate further sporting ascension. Indeed, it was to the constituent clubs of “native” associations that talented African players from neighborhoods throughout the colonies graduated. And it was at these same clubs that they would subsequently showcase their skills for scouts from the superior colonial leagues and, eventually, from the metropolitan teams.
The clubs that composed the African leagues in the colonies required from their players a level of commitment, a sporting discipline, and a sense of European-influenced formality, including mandatory jerseys and shoes, that were absent in the bairro peladas. In turn, these new behavioral and athletic emphases would serve players well as they continued to ascend the ranks of colonial soccerdom. But despite some novel elements of decorum, the football played in these leagues by and large continued to feature the improvisation and “creolization” that had been devised in neighborhood contests. Many European observers praised this indigenous approach to the game, while the oft-dancing, -drumming, and -singing African spectators both reveled in and further encouraged this style of play. Conversely, football traditionalists rejected this performative flair, deeming indigenous players to be, first and foremost, entertainers, rather than faithful disciples of the game. Ultimately, African players would have to curb these crowd-pleasing displays in favor of a more subdued, disciplined approach in order to continue their footballing ascension.
Imitative Leagues
The leagues formed by African patrons, coaches, and players resembled the Europeans-only leagues in their organizational structure but were, divergently, very poorly funded. Local elites, who were often, though not exclusively, assimilados (assimilateds), generally bankrolled the clubs and covered the leagues’ administrative expenses, though the players themselves typically derived from lower social strata.30 Alegi has attributed the development of these leagues elsewhere in Africa to “wage-earning urban workers with some Western education—men with discretionary income and leisure time.” But his profile of these individuals as “dressed in jackets and trousers . . . secretarial workers . . . situated in a position of intermediary ambivalence,” would overstate the economic means and cultural outlook of many of the footballing entrepreneurs in the Lusophone African settings.31 For example, Hilário characterized these individuals in Mozambique as “guys who lived in the districts, in huts, shall we say, wooden and zinc houses, and worked in factories or petrol stations, in the quay or the railway.”32 Even if these players enjoyed only basic accommodations, though, they typically did have steady, if modestly compensated, employment in much-needed lines of work. For example, the founding members of Grupo Desportivo Beirense, a Mozambican AFA club, included a fish trader, two shopworkers, three drivers, seven attendants, one lifeguard, one dockworker, a collector, and five servants—each occupation important, but all poorly compensated.33
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