talk about football, to form a team to play in another district.”13
A Dangerous Pastime? Finding Time to Play
Finding space to play football was unquestionably important, but so was finding time. As mentioned above, many parents, especially during the sport’s infancy in the colonies, saw little value in this activity and, thus, discouraged their sons from allocating too much time to play the game. However, as the sport gained both popularity and legitimacy, parents’ tolerance for the endeavor gradually grew. But guardians still typically deemed whatever schooling might have been available for their sons to have been significantly more important; meanwhile, for those families unable to afford an education for their sons and daughters, contributing to the family finances remained paramount. As such, children often had to engage with the game discreetly. Yet, just as kids the world over have done and continue to do, African youth also found time, even at the expense of more productive undertakings, to play and have fun.
The histories of two players, João Santana and Armando Manhiça, illuminate particularly well the tension that a love for the game could generate between passionate children and unconvinced parents. The childhood and teen years in the 1940s and early 1950s of Santana, who grew up on Angola’s central coast and would go on to play for Benfica, are exemplary in this respect. Keen on football, but not on the career that his father had envisioned for him, Santana’s passion for the game generated friction between his parents and him. Eventually, he acquiesced and accepted a position at the nearby Cassequel sugar factory on the central Angolan coast. Predictably, relations with his parents improved almost immediately, and they, in turn, granted Santana permission to go to a local field after work to watch his football idols practicing and, every once in a while, to kick the ball around himself. Eventually, Santana caught the eye of the manager of the team sponsored by the sugar company, Sport Clube da Catumbela, and with his father’s consent he joined the squad and was accordingly excused from work each afternoon.
Meanwhile, in Mozambique, the case of Armando, who was born in 1943 in Chamanculo, a Maputo suburb, and who would eventually go on to play for Sporting Lisboa, similarly highlights this footballing passion and the attendant tension it could generate. Growing up in a poor family, at a young age he began helping his mother sell fish, but by as early as eight years old he had already begun stealing away to play soccer with other kids in an open space in front of the market. Moreover, on the way to or from a customer’s dwelling, he regularly snuck in some football; oftentimes, he utilized the basket he ought to have been using to deliver the fish as a goalpost! His passion for the game unfaltering, upon eventually starting school at age twelve Armando often skipped out on his education to play soccer, unbeknownst to his parents. Once caught, he was roundly punished and told he could never play football again. Chastened, he was never truant again, or even tardy. Nor, however, did he lose his passion for the game, and he quickly found ways to reincorporate soccer into his life, eventually playing each day after school, from 4:00 p.m. until the sun set.14
Football as Facilitator: Connections and Transcensions
The growth of neighborhood soccer produced novel ways for African players to interact and connect with one another. Players of different ages mixed, individuals with different professions and means battled with and against one another, younger siblings found even more ways to idolize their talented older siblings, status was generated and lost, and in some, albeit rare, cases, the sons of settler families would play alongside or against Africans. Commenting on this sporting and social miscellany, Matine recalled that these neighborhood matches featured, among others, “carpenters, masons, and various apprentices, some who ironed clothes in a family’s house, some who washed clothes in the suburb, in the river . . . some who were cotton pickers.”15 At other times, age rather than occupational discrepancies generated otherwise uncommon social/sporting partnerships. In the case of Matateu, it was during the 1930s in the streets of Minkadjuine, in Lourenço Marques, where he allegedly, “as a child, dreamed to be a player like Alberto, his older brother . . . and he always managed to enter the teams of the older boys during the lively and hotly disputed games along Zixaxa road.”16 Similarly, Matateu’s younger sibling, Vicente Lucas, looked up to his gifted older brother and would eventually follow in his footsteps to Belenenses and, ultimately, the Portuguese national team.
Regardless of the informality of the matches, the competition was often fierce and the skill on display in certain neighborhoods would eventually be considered “world class.” Commenting on the wealth of talent that derived from a single Maputo neighborhood, Vicente Lucas reminisced that “the neighborhood in Alto Mahé [in Maputo] could be considered a luxury [for us] at one time, because we were living at the feet of Coluna, Eusébio, and Hilário.”17 Abel Miglietti echoed Lucas’s sentiments: “I remember that when I was thirteen years old I played for a neighborhood team and I had as opponents Armando Manhiça, Eusébio, Carlitos, and my brother Justino, and many more who became famous because of football.”18 Apparently, this talent manifested itself at even earlier ages than thirteen. Indeed, according to a 1959 issue of Ídolos, “At the age of seven, barefoot, with sewn up shorts and ripped shirts, Hilário was the little idol of the group of his street. . . . Others always wanted him on their team.”19
If local practitioners connected with other players through neighborhood matches, their limitless imaginations and aspirations connected them to global soccerdom, thereby linking what Domingos has described as otherwise disparate “football narratives.”20 The names of the local teams that young players formed evinced these creative connections. For example, Hilário started out playing for a neighborhood team named Arsenal, in obvious imitation of the famous London-based club. Apparently, one of the local club’s founders had seen a clip of an Arsenal match during the intermission of a film at a local cinema; the neighborhood team even did the best they could to don red jerseys for matches so as to dutifully maintain tonal consistency with the English outfit. Hilário rendered plausibility to the alleged origins of this appellative replication: “In Mafalala, news from Europe arrived to us, in the bairro. . . . There was news. In the intervals of films, for example, there were bulletins . . . and information circulated.”21 But these emulative connections weren’t limited to European football teams. For example, clubs featuring the names Botafogo, Vasco da Gama, and Flamengo were also formed in the Portuguese colonies, in reverence to these three renowned Brazilian squads. And, perhaps most famously in this bilateral vein, in the 1950s Eusébio and a collection of other teenage players from his neighborhood formed Os Brasileiros de Mafalala (the Brazilians of Mafalala). According to Baltazar, a Mozambican footballer of Portuguese descent who played with Eusébio on Os Brasileiros, the inspiration for the formation of the club was as follows: “In that time, many Brazilian teams came to play in Lourenço Marques. Teams like Portuguesa de Santos, Portuguesa de Desportos, and Ferroviário. They had artistic football. We liked that type of football, and that was why our team became ‘Os Brasileiros de Mafalala.’”22 Individual Brazilian soccer stars also impressed young African players in Portugal’s colonies. For example, Nuro Americano recalled, “We received news about Brazil[ian] football via the radio. In fact, my idol was Gilmar, the Brazilian goalkeeper.”23 Brazil’s triumph at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, which marked the debut of a seventeen-year-old Pelé on the world stage, further extended the legendary status and popularity of that footballing nation and its assortment of superstar players.
If neighborhood practitioners dreamed about foreign clubs in distant lands capturing the world’s most prestigious soccer trophies, the prizes on offer for winning local matches were much more modest and mundane. Although a great deal was at stake in these contests—reputation, pride, identity, and, eventually, an opportunity to showcase one’s talents for metropolitan football scouts—prizes reflected indigenous residents’ limited resources in these colonial milieus. The most common spoils was a can of cashew nuts or, later, as the cash economy took hold, small pots of money, which players collectively generated prior to kickoff. Mário Coluna, who spent his childhood in the 1940s playing in the Chamanculo district of Maputo, recalled, “When local teams challenged groups
