to a follow-up inquiry regarding the affordability of attending, Matine explained: “For the cost of living at the time, it was expensive. But, even though it was, people made sacrifices. . . . Normally, the people who used to go to football matches were those with good jobs, but even the poor would pay 20 escudos for a ticket.”48 Similarly, Miguel Arcanjo, who grew up in Angola and would go on to become a fixture in central defense for FC Porto throughout the 1950s and into the first half of the 1960s, recalled that when the club toured the colony in the late 1940s (a tour that also included a visit to the neighboring Belgian Congo), throngs of local kids, including himself, chased after the vehicles that were carrying the visiting players, hoping to catch a glimpse of their sporting idols.49 And in no way were the scenes that Arcanjo described anomalous. In the summer of 1955, for example, when Belenenses arrived in Luanda as part of a tour of Angola, residents flooded a neighborhood of the colonial capital to present the great Mozambican player Matateu with presents and even constructed a throne upon which they insisted the footballer sit.
. . .
The individuals who introduced football to the indigenous residents of Portugal’s African territories could not have foreseen how immensely popular the game would become. Beyond generating countless practitioners, the sport also attracted legions of fans. Over time, the ability to converse knowledgeably about local, metropolitan, and even global football developments facilitated entry into social networks in the colonies and constituted an important component of masculine identity. Newspapers, radio, and, later on, television catalyzed and both broadened and deepened the consumption of local and distant soccer-related events. Eventually, African emigrant footballers themselves helped to popularize the metropolitan version of the sport in the colonies not only via their athletic success, but also by returning to the continent on summer tours as sporting heroes—embodiments of African capability.
Long before some of these Lusophone African players became international footballing idols, indigenous engagement with the game in the colonies began much more discreetly, though with a mounting fervor that presaged future success. In the ensuing chapter, I explore this unassuming process as Africans began to practice and play the sport in settings throughout Portugal’s colonial empire. Shortly after they began kicking around a ball, Africans formed “native” clubs and leagues and developed new styles and approaches that substantively transformed the activity to which they had originally been exposed. With time, the skills of talented mestiço and black players were too great for organized clubs to forgo, even in the highly racialized colonial settings. Consequently, these talented footballers were invited to play in formerly whites-only leagues in Africa before eventually going on to play in the metropole and, for some, on the world’s grandest and most revered soccer stages.
2
Engaging with the Game
African Practitioners in the Colonies
He used to play football with his many brothers on the sandy grounds of the suburbs, from dawn until dusk. He reached the football fields at a run, running like someone fleeing from the police or from the misery snapping at his heels.
—Eduardo Galeano, celebrated Uruguayan journalist and writer, describing Eusébio’s childhood
The football of my time was played with a joy and a desire to show our skills as players. Today, this football doesn’t exist because economic interests come first.
—Abel Miglietti, who was born in Mozambique in 1946 and would eventually go on to play for a series of clubs in Portugal, including Benfica and Porto
Although it is, of course, impossible to pinpoint the first time an African in what would become Portuguese imperial territory kicked a soccer ball, or even something approximating one, it’s quite possible that she or he enjoyed it. If Africans in the colonies eagerly consumed metropolitan soccer happenings, they just as zealously played the sport, increasingly generating their own noteworthy footballing developments. Africans’ enthusiastic engagement with the game grew largely in parallel to the expansion of soccer within the European settler communities: these two groups of practitioners were segregated by the administrative policies that demarcated colonial spaces along racial lines. Following the introduction of soccer in Portugal’s African empire, decades would pass before the racial boundaries that divided these footballing worlds dissipated, enabling blacks and whites in the colonies to play against and with one another.
Well before this integrative process eroded these sporting barriers, Africans resourcefully formed their own clubs and associations, organizationally mimicking the Europeans-only leagues and adhering to the rules and regulations of the game as initially conveyed to them. However, they also developed their own “creolized” styles and dynamics of play. In this manner, and in many other ways, Africans appropriated the game—making it their own, filling it with new meanings, and infusing it with a performative dimension devoid of the European version of the sport. Later, though, as talented African players began to join traditionally whites-only clubs, to achieve success they would have to conform to the prevailing tactics and approaches advocated by the array of Portuguese coaches in the colonies. Local observers bemoaned the resultant disappearance of indigenous styles of play, as footballing panache became one of many casualties of the mounting emphasis on victory above all else.
In response to a range of external pressures and administrative calculations, the various governments in the Portuguese colonies eventually incorporated the African associations into the longer-established European leagues. In turn, the elite colonial clubs newly began recruiting large numbers of talented black and mestiço (mulatto) players. On these racially integrated squads, African footballers forged meaningful friendships across racial lines, united by their athletic acumen and common sporting cause. Yet, for all of their social and sporting success, players’ salaries remained nominal. In the absence of living wages for squad members, colonial soccer teams attracted skilled footballers by arranging for employment either directly with club patrons or through associated commercial networks. By engaging in remunerative work in mixed-race environments, players both contributed to household finances and sharpened their social integration skills. And, perhaps most importantly, they also developed labor strategies that many of them would subsequently apply in the metropole in creative and innovative ways to facilitate their long-term success, both on and away from the pitch.
This chapter examines the various ways that, over time, Africans in the colonies played the game—from the dusty neighborhood matches to the downtown leagues—and traces the social and economic impacts of this evolving engagement. Although indigenous practitioners formed “native” clubs and associations and some of these footballers eventually joined formerly Europeans-only clubs, Africans never stopped playing informally in seemingly every available space, reflecting the game’s steadily expanding popularity. In these modest sites, local cultural emphases and creativity blended with a rejective spirit to produce novel playing styles and approaches that proved remarkably durable in the bairros (neighborhoods) in which they were conceived and cultivated. Conversely, African players who ascended the tiers of colonial soccerdom were forced to abandon former modes in order to continue to realize footballing and, ultimately, financial success. This chapter examines their shifting engagement with the sport as soccer in the colonies steadily became something much more than just a game.
Playing the Game: Informal Engagements
It appears that football was initially introduced in Portugal’s African colonies sometime during the end of the nineteenth century. Regardless of the exact date, by the early twentieth century, the sport had gained significant traction. In Mozambique, for example, by 1904 matches were already being organized, while local teams were apparently challenging the crews of ships docked at Lourenço Marques.1 In explaining Africans’ initial receptiveness toward the game, scholars have emphasized the strong relationships and linkages between soccer and precolonial martial
