be difficult to overemphasize the effects these players had on their Portuguese club teams and, perhaps more visibly, on a national team that had been in shambles prior to their arrival. Yet their impact wasn’t limited to the period in which they were engaged in athletic careers. These “Jackie Robinsons” of global soccer were among the first African players who collectively precipitated waves of aspirant athletes to trace their footsteps from the innumerable pitches and endeavoring associations on the continent to the various leagues in Europe and beyond.35 Had these Lusophone footballers not been so effective on and off the pitch, this form of athletic emigration may well not have developed so rapidly, or spawned so many imitators.
1
Foundations
The Introduction and Consumption of Soccer in Lusophone Africa
In Mozambique, I saw Belenenses [a Lisbon-based club] when they came. I also saw Académica [a Coimbra-based club] when they came to play in the Portuguese Cup. . . . In Africa, we saw Portuguese football as something from another world. We didn’t have TV; we relied on radio. But the following day at school, or at work, when we discussed the result of the match we often said: “Did you see that play? Did you see that cross?” Others would say, “He was offside.” But we had only heard the match on the radio! We had passion for metropolitan football. . . . It was always a frenetic environment when Benfica, Porto, or Sporting [Portuguese clubs] came to Mozambique or Angola. . . . Angola had . . . better conditions, but the enthusiasm was great everywhere.
—Shéu Han, a Mozambican player who traveled to Portugal in 1970 to launch a career with Benfica and also participated on tours of the African colonies while a member of the club, 2014
Few Mozambican youth would go on to enjoy the type of decorated soccer career that Shéu did, but virtually all of them followed metropolitan football growing up in the colony, enthusiastically and imaginatively envisioning events unfolding on the distant pitches. The seeds of this durable sporting enthusiasm had been planted decades previously by an array of individuals wielding a range of motives, many of which overlapped. This mélange of football advocates included missionaries, soldiers, sailors, colonial administrators, corporate officials, and merchants. In the aftermath of Portugal’s consolidation of formal colonial control at the end of the nineteenth century, soccer was introduced into the series of oppressive, exploitative environments that made up the country’s African empire. These constituent settings featured institutionalized racism, segregation, and pervasive inequity. Yet, even in these unlikely sporting incubators, the game steadily took hold. Subsequently, newspapers, radio, and, eventually, television would transmit the latest metropolitan soccer developments to colonial populations—both African and European—who eagerly consumed this news and, just as Shéu and his colleagues did, endlessly discussed it. The sizable Portuguese settler populations in Angola and Mozambique fed this soccer fervor. Beyond rooting for their favorite clubs, colonists shared their soccer allegiances with indigenous residents, cultivating and influencing the latter’s loyalties. As African footballers began playing for Portuguese clubs, the dialectical connection between colonized subjects of empire and metropolitan football only intensified. These passions were periodically stoked when Portuguese clubs toured the colonies during the summer months, with both settler and indigenous fans flocking to watch their footballing heroes—especially those players who had been locally produced.
This chapter examines the introduction of football into Portugal’s African territories, its growing popularity in these stops, and the myriad ways that metropolitan football both deepened and broadened consumption of the sport in the empire. I begin with an overview of Portuguese imperialism in Africa, including consideration of the shifting colonial environments that indigenous residents daily negotiated. It was in these milieus that football would come to flourish, with local practitioners and fans responsible for the sport’s explosive growth. Finally, I examine the ways that various forms of popular media in Africa facilitated local allegiances to metropolitan clubs and, in general, heightened interest in the game in the colonies; the profound impact that African footballers who joined these squads had on local consumption; and the sporting, social, and political dimensions of Portuguese teams’ soccer tours to the African colonies.
The History of the Portuguese (Empire) in Africa
The Portuguese first reached the areas in Africa that would eventually constitute its empire on the continent in the 1400s. In many places on Africa’s western, southern, and eastern shores, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive and would subsequently parlay their navigational precocity to generate considerable wealth via a flourishing trade in gold and slaves, among other items. The waves of European commercial imitators that followed in Portugal’s footsteps quickly outpaced the Iberian originators of the commerce between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. Yet the various Portuguese outposts along Africa’s coasts endured, primarily as embarkation points for slaves headed across the Atlantic and also as dumping grounds for metropolitan exiles, known as degradados. Otherwise, these stations waned in importance and influence over time, languishing for centuries and yielding few tangible rewards for Lisbon.
As European nations contemplated and subsequently engaged in the violent invasion of Africa during the second half of the nineteenth century, Portugal was compelled to claim imperial space on the continent in order to preserve its overseas interests. Reflective of its severely eroded standing in Europe, Portugal predicated these territorial assertions on its history of commercial interaction in sub-Saharan Africa dating back to its initial forays some centuries earlier. Ultimately, internecine power politics and rivalries among the European heavyweights facilitated Portugal’s otherwise unlikely establishment of an empire in Africa. Consequently, the diminutive nation departed from the 1884–1885 conference in Berlin, at which the European imperial powers carved up Africa into colonial domains, with geographically incommensurate, yet formally recognized, claims to five territories: Angola, Mozambique, Guiné, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
In the aftermath of Berlin, Portugal strove to subjugate the indigenous populations resident within its imperial claims. Lisbon also began to actively colonize these territories, though primarily only in and around the torpid urban spaces that Portuguese merchants and a handful of intrepid settlers had established centuries earlier. It took the underfunded Portuguese military significantly longer to satisfy the requisite “pacification” of local populations that the Berlin accord stipulated than it did the more powerful European nations. Yet Portugal was eventually able to establish control, often relying on high-profile acts of terror to maintain order, which, in turn, facilitated the exploitation of local human and natural resources.
In order to justify the initial conquest and ensuing overrule, the Portuguese state fostered powerful notions of European cultural superiority and, correspondingly, African inferiority. These increasingly accepted “truths” were reinforced at every turn, thereby influencing racial sentiments and, attendantly, interracial interactions in both the metropole and the colonies. Isabel Castro Henriques has described this specious position as pure “mythology,” which not only condescended to Africans, but also portrayed Portugal as a victim of the other European imperial nations. Rival continental powers allegedly “had ‘illegitimate’ African appetites,” since, after all, the Portuguese had been the first Europeans to arrive in sub-Saharan Africa.1 Henriques further contends that “this situation led to the reinforcement of ideas and prejudices that had already taken root in Portuguese society, in which the somatic, the Negro, and social, the slave, were articulated together to define the African.”2
Another measure that Lisbon took to legitimate and consolidate control in its African empire was to encourage metropolitan citizens to relocate to the colonies. Influxes of these (often destitute) settlers in the early twentieth century significantly altered the demographic and economic landscapes in the two colonies that received the overwhelming majority of these individuals: Angola and Mozambique. In the former, for example, the white population more than
