values and typically featured a performative “flair” largely absent in European versions of this activity.16 Beyond such patterns of amendment and transmutation, Fair, Alegi, and Moorman, among others, have shown that when banned from white clubs and associations in the colonies, African players and coordinators formed teams and leagues of their own that helped foster the development of distinct (local and national) oppositional identities and, concomitantly, political consciousness.17 In certain cases, this autonomous endeavor of sporting organization simulated the process of institution building in an imagined postcolonial state.
This book builds upon the aforementioned landmark scholarship, but instead of highlighting appropriation, contestation, or even liberation politics, it explores the ways African soccer players adopted European styles and conventions and, microcosmic of the broader colonial populations—settler and indigenous alike—embraced Portuguese football clubs and their local affiliates. This amenability constituted neither a Gramscian, hegemonically induced capitulation to cultural power, nor a Fanonesque, reverential, if perverse and subconscious, emulation of the dominant community; rather, Lusophone African footballers pragmatically pursued opportunities to improve their lives and, by extension, those of their families, while still retaining indigenous identities that were, of course, never static in their composition.18 Throughout these processes of engagement, players remained strategically apolitical as they transitioned from Africa to the metropole, even as their sporting success provided political cover, confidence, and a semblance of legitimacy—no matter how spurious—to the increasingly besieged Portuguese colonial project. While acknowledging the asymmetrical power relations that existed between African athletes and club, colonial, and metropolitan officials, the analytical salience of the former’s deliberate, willful cooperation significantly outweighs the much less frequent instances of discontentment or confrontation. By unconditionally applying their athletic acumen to this erstwhile foreign leisure activity, the footballers generated opportunities for social mobility and, ultimately, a ticket to, and (for some, permanent) placement in, metropolitan society.
II. If these players increasingly began to join the traditionally whites-only clubs in the colonies, at a more personal level they also cooperated in both Africa and Europe across a range of social and racial divides with teammates, supporters, and, in many cases, women-cum-wives. As these players ascended the different tiers of colonial soccerdom—in the process moving spatially from the largely black suburbs to the predominantly white city centers for their “home” matches—they experienced greater diversity among their teammates, who derived from different neighborhoods or even provinces. Indeed, over the course of the colonial period, football became a more integrative than divisive endeavor. Although players’ divergent backgrounds and the resultant unfamiliarity, or even rivalry, may have generated hostility in other scenarios, as teammates any identity politics dissipated in the face of common goals and cultivated camaraderie. At the top levels in colonial leagues and even more profoundly once in Portugal, African players on racially integrated clubs forged meaningful, reciprocal relationships with players of European descent that problematize purely antagonistic understandings of race relations in these settings.
In fact, once in the metropole, provenance served as a durable social bond, transcending, eroding, or at least tempering racial divides. It also generated a type of resilient solidarity, as black and mestiço players shared a series of formative experiences with white players from the colonies—many of whom also traveled to Portugal to play and, like their African counterparts, were permitted to do so only after formal policy adjustments. Indeed, the Portuguese had been active in, for example, Angola and Mozambique for centuries; and, thus, the many white migrant footballers that these settler communities produced felt stronger connections to Africa than to the imagined patria (homeland), a place many of them had never previously visited. Testimony from Hilário, a mestiço footballer who first arrived in Lisbon in 1958, captures these social dynamics and the experiential importance of (African and, more specifically, Mozambican) provenance:
Players from Africa—black or white—who were already in Portugal always helped a lot because they wanted to see the new African players succeed and triumph. The players from Africa had a deep connection with the continent and most would have rather stayed in Africa than have traveled to Portugal, but we had to come to play soccer. Therefore, we would support everyone who came from Africa, giving advice or anything else they needed. We liked helping one another. We didn’t care about the color difference. . . . Normally, whoever was from Mozambique was proud of being born in that country. . . . Wherever we were in the world, if there was someone from Mozambique there, we would be supported; the “Mozambique nation” will always be there to help.19
Although scholars have considered the implications of provenance among immigrant communities elsewhere, examples of interracial cooperation in these reconstituted communities are rare, as diasporic populations often reflect and actively maintain preexisting social divides.20 My emphasis on the experiential importance of provenance and, in particular, its transcendent role in helping to facilitate and deepen intercultural amity among these migrant athletes builds upon work by scholars who have examined the development of genuine interracial, intergender relations in colonial Africa.21 However, this book extends the analytical and geographical scopes of such work by adding intragender examples that featured on the continent, but also persisted into the diaspora. Although scholars have rightfully debunked Lusotropicalism—the notion that the Portuguese were uniquely predisposed to interact with their colonized subjects in a more congenial, less exploitative manner—these players’ engagement in a multitude of cooperative and conciliatory relationships with Portuguese in both the metropole and the empire to enhance their lives suggests that a more complex rendering of race relations in both settings be perpended.22
III. By considering the ways high-profile immigrant athletes occupied liminal spaces and, thereby, bridged gaps in colonial and metropolitan society, this book also engages with the extensive literature regarding African intermediaries. Heretofore, scholars have reserved this category for indigenous clerks, soldiers, and police, and, at times, traditional authorities—in short, those who assisted with the delivery or facilitation of colonial projects.23 The inclusion of African soccer migrants broadens this collection of historical actors. In the colonies, the migrant footballers increasingly operated in an intermediary manner as they ascended to play for predominantly white clubs in the urban centers, while continuing to reside in the largely black suburbs. And, in the metropole, as successful indigenous practitioners of a European game and tangible manifestations of Africa at a time when few individuals from the continent were present in Portugal, they routinely functioned as social and cultural intermediaries. Their ability to navigate, straddle, and increasingly move fluidly between African and European circles helped to erode some of the perceived cultural distinctions between these communities.
Analogous to African clerks, soldiers, and police “delivering” colonial control, these players’ success with Portuguese affiliate clubs in the colonies, with the parent clubs in the metropole, and, for some of them, with Portugal’s national team, transmitted Portuguese culture as sport and greatly intensified the (Lusophone) African consumption of it. Indeed, Africans in the colonies increasingly, and enthusiastically, engaged with this dimension of Portuguese culture, listening to broadcasts of their favorite metropolitan clubs, reading about these squads in the newspapers, attending matches that Portuguese teams played in the colonies as part of extremely popular summer tours, and, in particular, closely following African footballers who were playing in Europe.24 In practice, these players constituted the palpable go-betweens of the distant metropole and African stops, familiar vessels through which well-received entertainment, rather than exploitative colonial policy, was conveyed to the indigenous subjects of empire.
Although scholars have traditionally characterized African intermediaries as having wittingly bolstered colonial projects, thereby prejudicing their fellow imperial subordinates, these soccer players engaged in neither predominantly “collaborative” nor resistive behavior. While acknowledging the difficult roles the footballers were forced into as individuals who were conversant in multiple cultures, compelled to navigate a collection of settings
