afforded them a special, intermediate legal status. Assimilados typically benefited from otherwise-rare educational opportunities and were often the offspring of Portuguese fathers and African mothers, known as mestiços (mulattoes). In 1950, although less than 1 percent of the colonial subjects in Portugal’s empire were officially “assimilated,” almost 90 percent of mestiços were.5 It’s not a coincidence that many of the African footballers who relocated to Portugal derived from the mixed-race population; for these players, the process of cultural integration had begun even earlier and was inherently deeper.
Immigrant athletes also actively facilitated their success in the metropole by pursuing a variety of occupational strategies. If African players largely adapted—or integrated—culturally and socially with few difficulties, a series of creative, short- and long-term labor strategies that they had either previously employed in the colonies or simply observed and internalized helped them capitalize to the fullest extent possible on their new opportunities. In some ways, the superstar status that many players enjoyed helps to obscure both their fundamental existence as wage laborers and their reliance on strategies that were derivative, or even imitative, of those that African workers in Portugal’s colonies had been employing for decades, if not longer. For example, prior to leaving Africa, many soccer prospects sought advice from players who had already migrated to Portugal, typically inquiring about which clubs offered the best working and living conditions. Armed with this knowledge, many followed in the footsteps of the athletes who had preceded them, roughly analogous to one of the countless Mozambicans and Angolans who worked in South Africa’s mines during the colonial period soliciting occupational information from a returning migrant laborer, and then accordingly targeting a specific operation for employment. Once established in the metropole, these footballers also sought advice from more experienced coworkers (i.e., teammates) when renegotiating their contracts. Many players also engaged in secondary migration, subsequently affiliating with a series of different Portuguese clubs, just as migrant mine laborers deliberately switched employers in an effort to improve their working conditions. Thus, even as these African footballers navigated drastically different professional terrain, they fell back on well-established tactics. Indigenous laborers throughout Portugal’s African empire would find neither the basic occupational nor the migratory strategies that these soccer migrants employed wholly unfamiliar.
The secondary migration paths that these athletes traversed didn’t always entail simply swapping one club for another. Instead, many of the footballers parlayed their ability to travel to Portugal to continue their studies in the hopes of receiving an education that would, in turn, serve them well long after their athleticism withered. The pursuit of a degree in higher education was primarily accomplished by playing for Académica, located in the central Portuguese city of Coimbra. This football club was associated with the country’s premier university, the Universidade de Coimbra, and during the colonial era the squad was composed solely of matriculating students. Mário Wilson, who arrived in Portugal from Mozambique in 1949, was one of many soccer migrants from Africa who acknowledged having strategically pursued this educational option: “I came to play for Sporting [Clube de Portugal]. But I only played there for one year even though I was the top scorer that season. I felt that football wasn’t the solution; no one achieved financial independence from [just] playing soccer. . . . So I went to school in Coimbra and also played for many years for Académica in the first division.”6
Other African footballers pursued postsoccer security by attaining long-term employment with CUF (Companhia União Fabril), an industrial conglomerate located near Lisbon that required members of the first division team it sponsored to be company employees, and also guaranteed them jobs following their playing days. Although neither Académica nor CUF were particularly competitive on the pitch, in both these scenarios the secondary migration strategies that players employed in order to secure academic and employment opportunities constituted foresighted thinking that sacrificed (potential) short-term athletic glory for long-term financial security.
Just as these players strategically seized educational and remunerative opportunities in Portugal, they also deftly navigated the politically charged environments in both the metropole and the colonies that the wars for independence were fueling. Consequently, they were viewed neither as subversives in Portugal nor as political stooges by their African brothers who were fighting—and literally dying—for independence. Although often internally conflicted, the athletes’ professionalism and determination to improve their lives underpinned their conspicuous apoliticism throughout this turbulent period. As such, despite their allure as potential nationalist symbols for the various African independence movements and the Portuguese regime, they failed to serve either the insurgencies or the counterinsurgency well, while remaining widely respected and admired in both the colonies and the metropole.
Historiographical Significance
Scholars are increasingly engaging with topics related to soccer and Africa, generating a nascent yet growing body of literature.7 This trend is also evident in the Lusophone context, with this project contributing to the emerging corpus.8 Although the on-the-field accomplishments of African players who migrated to Portugal during the colonial era have previously appeared in a number of homages—virtual hagiographies—this study is the first to consider these athletes’ daily experiences beyond the stadium walls, far from the droves of cheering spectators and laudatory biographers.9 In fact, Following the Ball constitutes the initial academic engagement with this otherwise-renowned stream of migrant athletes who ushered in the golden era of Portuguese soccer, while also helping to shape an evolving system of global football in which national borders are increasingly immaterial.10 This belated scholarly consideration stands in sharp contrast to the considerable attention that African footballers who played in France during the colonial period and, in particular, their radical political activity, have received.11 While my study is informed by this scholarship, I link the Lusophone migrants’ destination and places of origin not through revolutionary politics, but via durable occupational strategies and the extended process of cultural integration.
In the following section, I outline the broader historiographical, analytical, and epistemological utility of five aspects of these African footballers’ histories, including their strategic apolitical disposition and comportment; their social engagement across an array of well-established divides; their role as cultural intermediaries; their importation and application of labor strategies in the metropole, which facilitated success both on and away from the pitch; and their self-improvement objectives vis-à-vis colonial and, ultimately, neocolonial exploitation. Through an analysis of these distinguishing features, this book moves soccer studies in novel directions, while also making utile contributions across a number of scholarly fields well beyond the realm of African football.
I. Scholars of the history of soccer in Africa have cogently established that although Europeans introduced the game, indigenous practitioners were hardly passive consumers, contesting various aspects and fashioning new meanings of the sport.12 Pioneering work by Fair and Martin, among others, astutely identified the nationalist and proto-nationalist dimensions of soccer in British and French colonial Africa; insightfully reconstructed the contention over leisure time and the limits of European control; and rightfully analyzed football as a “terrain of struggle.” More recently, Alegi, Bittencourt, and others have built upon these foundational studies.13 In much more hyperbolic fashion, Goldblatt has claimed that “all across the continent, Africans turned the colonists’ game against them,” and that “lessons learned on and off the pitch were [newly] turned against colonialism.”14 And, in perhaps the most extreme examples of the politicization of football, Lanfranchi, Taylor, Wahl, and others have considered the Francophone African players who fled France to overtly support the struggle for Algerian independence.15
In continuing to highlight Africans’ active, if less confrontational, engagement with the sport, Domingos and others have demonstrated that indigenous practitioners essentially appropriated the game, attributing meanings to it unintended by those who had originally introduced it. As part of this process, African players produced
