Football and Colonialism

Body and Popular Culture in Urban Mozambique

Nuno Domingos

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780821445976
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist José Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed "malice"—or cunning—to negotiate their places in the colonial state. "These manifestations demand a vast study, " Craveirinha wrote, "which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography."

In Football and Colonialism, Nuno Domingos accomplishes that study. Ambitious and meticulously researched, the work draws upon an array of primary sources, including newspapers, national archives, poetry and songs, and interviews with former footballers. Domingos shows how local performances and popular culture practices became sites of an embodied history of Mozambique. The work will break new ground for scholars of African history and politics, urban studies, popular culture, and gendered forms of domination and resistance.

1

Football and the Narration of a Colonial Situation

JOSÉ CRAVEIRINHA’S ETHNOGRAPHY OF SUBURBAN FOOTBALL IN LOURENÇO MARQUES

In 1955, José Craveirinha, a prominent Mozambican mestiço poet and journalist,¹ suggested that the distinctive performance of African players from the suburbs of Lourenço Marques revealed a form of intelligence, an “extraordinary and limitless . . . fantasy” of the indígena (native) population, which the poet attributed to its “acute sense of malice.” Malice, usually associated with grave and harmful actions springing from an evil source, was here given a positive spin, as intelligence or cunning.²

This was one among a series of articles that Craveirinha wrote that year in O brado africano³ on the kind of football played in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques. In another piece, he addressed the way in which suburban players adopted, adapted, and re-created the game, a European invention.⁴ “The indígena,” he emphasized, “is ready to adapt to new things but also to transform them or even discover them anew.”⁵

The use, in local football, of what he termed “witchcraft practices” was one of the most conspicuous manifestations of this process of adoption. Craveirinha highlighted the influence of “ancient taboos, beliefs, superstitions” in the local adoption of the game. These beliefs had a powerful effect on the players’ “reflex system.” For years in succession, Beira-Mar, a team from Chamanculo, a suburban neighborhood, won the local championship because, the poet claimed, “before the matches, their athletes drank a special tea at the president’s house and, at some point, several black-and-white crows would appear behind the opposing team’s goal, to indicate how many goals they would suffer.” “Black men and many mestiços,” the poet continued, “still entered the pitch with small ‘copper’coins inside their boots, and would rub certain ‘remedies’ on their knees beforehand in order to protect their bodies from the opponent’s sorcery.” Africans, he noted, “gladly accepted countless impositions and customs from a more advanced civilization but, at the same time, they held on to a series of traditional practices that reflected their ‘worldview.’” The interpretation of this topic led the poet to issue a challenge: “these manifestations demand a vast study, which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography.”⁶

As in so many other places, the urbanization process in Lourenço Marques transformed both individuals and groups. In the city, one acquired practical skills but also began to perceive and imagine the world differently. In the capital of Mozambique, this modern phenomenon was shaped by colonialism, and more specifically by the colonial projects that marked this space under Portuguese rule. The development of sporting practices and forms of consumption in Lourenço Marques was underpinned by this colonial situation.⁷ From the first decades of the twentieth century onward, both in the center of the “European city” and in the African suburbs, from children’s matches taking place in any random plot of land to the more organized competitions, from matches of an informal nature among friends to those following the model of an official competition, football established itself as a dynamic element among emergent leisure practices, and made its mark as a communitarian spectacle. Here, as elsewhere around the world, by becoming a public event, the game no longer had a meaningful existence for the players on the pitch only. Performance was now shared with an audience, with those that witnessed the spectacle in situ as well as with those that gathered information on it through other, indirect, means, either personal interactions or specific channels such as the media. Sports like football were thus transfigured into a medium of everyday individual and collective identification, a secular religion of sorts, a universal language.⁸ In those contexts where football became a competitive spectacle, performed for an audience, the effect of competition and of the growing pressure exerted by fans converted football into a “serious” activity, in contrast with the typical image of a “disinterested” amateur practice.⁹

The values and practices shared and praised by football players and public in the Lourenço Marques suburbs, and above all the predominant faculty of malice, will serve as a starting point for an inquiry into the specific nature of colonial domination in Lourenço Marques and the particular culture it fostered. The situated study of players’ bodies gives rise to a singular representation of the colonial process. This representation is in stark contrast to the pastoral genre that gave voice to the interests at play within the field of colonial power. In the Lourenço Marques imagined by colonial propaganda, its suburbs were either culturalized or, quite simply, omitted. The city was also conceived by modernizing projects that, from the 1950s onward, were concerned with the way in which the African labor force had been reproducing.

The nature and evolution of the colonial field of power in the capital of Mozambique can be perceived through the way in which the Portuguese state and other agents—local interest groups, companies, religious organizations, nations, and international institutions—conceived the city’s suburbs and their populations. The adoption of football in the periphery ran parallel with the struggles for the definition of a suburban social contract. Framed by the indirect rule that characterized the indigenato system, and under the thumb of a predatory state, this social contract was geared toward fulfilling the need for the reproduction of the suburban labor force and maintaining the order and racial hierarchy that regulated the relation between the colonizers and the colonized.¹⁰ The existence of a local football dynamic in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques was partially a response to a segregation policy led by the state institutions and translated into the network of sport associations. Sports practices and consumptions were part and parcel of a broader, radically uneven process of exchange, which affected the living conditions of Mozambican populations and their specific adaptation to the environment of the city.

In this work, the malice described by José Craveirinha is not treated as an idiosyncratic trait of culturally framed individuals. The point, rather, is to interpret it as but one aspect of an informal social contract that emerged on the outskirts of Lourenço Marques and that was sustained by the unsettled routines of its inhabitants. In this sense, malice is not an element of a prescriptive notion of “culture” or “identity.”¹¹ Nor, for that matter, is it meant to stand for a form of “national agency,” so often invoked in the analysis of colonial experiences.¹² The use of prescriptive identitarian projections is common in the analysis of sports performances. By absorbing external referents (of a national, ethnic, cultural, or political nature), the game style (Brazilian, African, English)¹³ naturalizes the very principles of which it is presumed to be a reflex: nation, race, identity, culture.¹⁴ As a feature of a suburban habitus, a malice was inscribed in individuals’ strategies and in the responses they gave to the strict conditions that constricted and confined them.

In this book, football performances, translated into a locally meaningful style of play, operate as a laboratory of bodies, senses, and worldviews through which one can offer a representation of the local colonial society, of its structures of power and means of social reproduction, but also of the elements of transformation brought about by historical change and human aspirations.

The game, as a practice but also as a shared popular and mediatized culture, helped the population’s integration into networks of interdependence, not only those previously established through ethnic and geographic bonds, but also those shaped by other distinctly urban groups, and which may or may not have replicated those previous belongings: those that gathered in each neighborhood and those that emerged from work relations or the participation in association movements. Organized in the form of performances, played before a live audience, football contributed to the formation of a specific social stock of knowledge.¹⁵ Knowledge about football bred everyday encounters and interactions, cemented identities, and created an idiom of expression and relation for and within the community, but it was also a means of communicating with the world. In the outskirts of colonial Lourenço Marques, football was a vehicle through which local inhabitants aspired to another material and symbolic existence, sport being one of the few fields where Africans could stand out in the frame of a colonial society. This desire for social mobility was reinforced when some black and, most all mestiço players started a professional trajectory that would eventually lead them to major metropolitan clubs. Among the latter are the well-known cases of Matateu, Mário Coluna, Hilário, and Eusébio. Thus, while an analysis of the players’ on-field choreography enables us to interpret the structures of a system of domination in the capital of Mozambique, the urban dissemination of football brings to the fore the extent to which the system was unstable and subject to pressure exerted by the desires and aspirations of its inhabitants.

LOURENÇO MARQUES

In the urban history of Africa, colonial cities like Lourenço Marques established themselves, since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as specific types of social organization.¹⁶ They were focal points in a network of transnational economic relations reliant on decisions made in the metropolitan political centers and in the international commodity markets. These urban colonial societies were regulated by a set of laws and institutions, and their development generally involved military occupation and the employment of coercive means; the implementation of an administrative apparatus; the enactment of laws regulating the rights, duties, and movement of the populations; and the establishment of a regime of economic exploitation, aimed at the reproduction of the labor force, which integrated African goods and workers in international networks of production and trade.¹⁷ Colonial cities distinguish themselves by their functional role within a set of commercial and productive relations, their political framework and degree of state intervention, their social and professional stratification, their demographic structure and ethnic composition. Part of a larger process of social transformation, each colonial city presented its own unique dynamics.¹⁸ As complex and creative spaces of exchange and mobility, colonial cities like Lourenço Marques were defined by processes of social and racial segmentation that led to the creation of segregated urban areas, each with a European center surrounded by African suburbs. After World War II, the African colonial city’s functional specialization went through a decisive shift, when the need for cheap raw materials and labor generated a demographic explosion.¹⁹ Many Africans were then introduced to the dynamics of a capitalist economy, becoming workers or servants, but also consumers, participants in a developing urban culture. Facing severe material and symbolic hardships, they went on to occupy a city they had built with their own hands. A site of linguistic, religious, and cultural reinvention, the city, through the specificity of its social and spatial relations, created new patterns of conflict and cooperation, new practices and worldviews.

MAP 1.1. Mozambique, 1903. Comissão de Cartografia. Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

A symbol of a new stage in Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, the growth of Lourenço Marques came to represent the advent of this process. Despite the unmistakable signs of fragile territorialization and lack of capital, knowledge, and human resources, in other words, the relative weakness of the state’s infrastructural power, in the sense used by Michael Mann,²⁰ the projects developed in Portuguese colonial territories did not significantly contrast with the general trends that define European colonial rule in Africa, and with which they were connected. Portuguese colonialism was no exception.²¹ Lourenço Marques, which became Mozambique’s capital, replacing the former capital in the Island of Mozambique (Ilha de Moçambique) in 1898 (although legally only in 1906), had singular features. The new Mozambican capital, served by an important deep-water port, would become one of the axes of a regional economy nurtured by South Africa’s precocious industrialization, funded by British capital and based on gold and diamond prospecting. The train connection between Mozambique’s main cities and its neighboring regions, between Lourenço Marques and Transvaal Province and further north between Beira and Rhodesia, defined the city’s economic role, within the frame of a “transit and emigration economy” that characterized the southern Mozambique economic system.²² A focal point of commercial relations, Lourenço Marques became the center of one of the most important regional labor markets. The Portuguese government made several worker transfer agreements with its neighboring regions. These agreements were one of the main colonial sources of income. Each year, thousands of Africans were sent to South African mines. The migratory-work phenomenon affected the more underprivileged populations, especially those whose rural life structure was shaken by the “colonial encounter,” by tax exaction and compulsory labor.²³ The transfer of ...