Following the Ball

The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975

Todd Cleveland

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780896804999
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

With Following the Ball, Todd Cleveland incorporates labor, sport, diasporic, and imperial history to examine the extraordinary experiences of African football players from Portugal's African colonies as they relocated to the metropole from 1949 until the conclusion of the colonial era in 1975. The backdrop was Portugal's increasingly embattled Estado Novo regime, and its attendant use of the players as propaganda to communicate the supposed unity of the metropole and the colonies.

Cleveland zeroes in on the ways that players, such as the great Eusébio, creatively exploited opportunities generated by shifts in the political and occupational landscapes in the waning decades of Portugal's empire. Drawing on interviews with the players themselves, he shows how they often assumed roles as social and cultural intermediaries and counters reductive histories that have depicted footballers as mere colonial pawns.

To reconstruct these players' transnational histories, the narrative traces their lives from the informal soccer spaces in colonial Africa to the manicured pitches of Europe, while simultaneously focusing on their off-the-field challenges and successes. By examining this multi-continental space in a single analytical field, the book unearths structural and experiential consistencies and contrasts, and illuminates the components and processes of empire.

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 doubled from 1900 to 1920, from 9,198 to 20,700.³

In both of these settings, waves of incoming Portuguese rapidly displaced long-standing mestiço (mulatto) populations, newly occupying low-level positions in the colonial bureaucracies that members of the mixed-race communities had previously held. Prior to these Portuguese arrivals, mestiços had provided invaluable service in the strapped administrative apparatuses that featured in the empire. With Lisbon unable to allocate sufficient human resources to African outposts, Portuguese men had long miscegenated with local women—a combination of libido, human nature, and administrative necessity. As such, Lisbon tolerated this form of intercultural interaction, even if it didn’t actively encourage it. The case of former footballer Hilário, who was born in 1939 in Lourenço Marques to an ethnic Chopi mother and a Portuguese father, is exemplary of these types of scenarios. He explained that his mother “was one of those who have tattoos on the face and on the belly. It was a style that was very beautiful and she had luck with boyfriends. . . . My mother came from Manhiça to the city [roughly 100 kilometers separate Manhiça and Lourenço Marques]. . . . She was a very beautiful girl.”⁴ Indeed, it was from these mixed-race communities that many of the most prominent members of the community of footballing migrants, Hilário included, emerged.

With the overthrow in 1926 of the Republic of Portugal, a short-lived government that itself had come to power only after toppling the Portuguese monarchy in 1910, the colonies were increasingly eyed as sources of revenue rather than as spaces to develop. With the emergence of the corporatist, authoritarian Estado Novo in 1933, expenditures for the empire were slashed while Lisbon continued to squeeze whatever revenues it could from the territories. With the advent of the new regime, the relative fiscal and political autonomy that the colonies had enjoyed under the republic came to an abrupt end; power was increasingly centralized. As part of the broader political and economic calculus of the Estado Novo (1933–1974), the regime facilitated the relocation of thousands of Portuguese to the colonies, in part to rid the metropole of under- or unemployed members of the population, but also to stimulate the colonial economies, such that the settler communities in both Angola and Mozambique grew more than tenfold between 1930 and 1970.⁵

Providing a complementary ideophilosophical justification for overseas Portuguese settlement, in the early 1950s the Estado Novo regime formally embraced the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s concept of Lusotropicalism to further explicate the relationship between the Portuguese and the constituent peoples of the empire. Freyre theorized that the prevalence of mixed-race individuals in areas Portugal had colonized was attributable to a form of inherent racial and cultural tolerance that the Portuguese, as a people, uniquely embodied and exhibited. After initially distancing the Estado Novo from Lusotropicalismo on racialist grounds following its promulgation in the 1930s, António de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who durably ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968, eventually adopted it as official state ideology. Salazar invoked the theory to justify empire, even if the exploitative treatment of both blacks and mestiços in the colonies experientially undermined any veracity that the dubious concept might have contained.

Even as the regime self-righteously promoted Lusotropicalism to defend its perpetuation of empire, Portugal couldn’t prevent the “winds of change” from blowing across the continent, inaugurated by England’s decolonization of its Gold Coast colony (Ghana) in 1957. By the 1960s, these breezes had turned to gusts, with a steady succession of colonies transitioning to independent states. Yet, while the British, French, and Belgians all abandoned their African colonial projects, Portugal’s dictatorship clung ever more tightly to empire. In a bid to stress the indivisibility of the colonies and the metropole, in 1951 the regime recast these possessions as “overseas provinces,” signifying that they were as integral to Portugal as were the various regions of the metropole. This obstinacy and artifice did not, however, come without cost. With colonial empires rapidly disappearing, Portugal’s political stance was becoming increasingly anachronistic. Moreover, the global left, which by the 1960s also featured a large number of newly independent African states, was openly condemning Portugal for its resolute preservation of the empire and, more specifically, the racist policies in force in its colonies. Even staunch allies of Portugal, such as the United States, were privately imploring Lisbon to relax statutory controls in the empire. In another blow to the regime, the Indian army forcibly annexed the historic Portuguese colony of Goa on the western coast of the subcontinent in 1961; protestations were all the enfeebled Iberian state could muster.

The early 1960s constituted an ominous time for Portugal and its empire. In February 1961, the Angolan war for independence commenced, followed shortly thereafter by nationalist eruptions in Guiné (1963) and Mozambique (1964). These three conflicts would each rage for over a decade, with the Portuguese conceding the most territory in Guiné. With mounting numbers of Portuguese conscripts losing life or limb while fighting in the African bush, the increasingly unpopular wars were crippling an already teetering state. Finally, in 1974, a group of mid-level army officers, tapping the sentiments of the war-weary Portuguese citizenry, staged a largely bloodless coup that toppled the Estado Novo state and thereby ended the colonial conflicts almost immediately, paving the way for the independence of the African territories. Portugal’s colonial adventure on the continent had finally come to an end.

Daily Life in Portugal’s African Colonies

Following the consolidation of control in Portugal’s imperial claims in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century and, in more resistive, “troublesome” spots in these territories in the early twentieth century, indigenous residents newly operated in environments marked by racial violence and exploitation. Consistent with other imperial European nations active in Africa, Portugal’s colonial project was predicated on racial and cultural superiority, cloaked in an altruistic “civilizing mission.” For African subjects, the key elements of this “mission” included the imposition of taxes, the implementation of forced labor schemes, and the daily threat of violence for any actual or perceived incompliance. Africans’ labor was vital for the generation of revenues, but the local populations otherwise constituted nothing more than burdens for a metropole that lacked the resources to develop its colonial possessions, though the realization of widespread social improvements was never a genuine objective for the regime anyway.

Over time, influxes of Portuguese settlers saw sleepy colonial outposts transformed into vibrant urban destinations, most profoundly in Angola and Mozambique. Consequently, the capital cities of Luanda and Lourenço Marques (Maputo), respectively, eventually featured “concrete” city centers populated exclusively by settlers, and concentric rings of suburbs in which black Africans, mestiços, and, complicating this otherwise steadfast racial configuration, poor white settlers resided, though the latter’s numbers were comparatively small. The residents of these hardscrabble suburban or peri-urban areas were typically impoverished and vulnerable, but far from destitute. Testimony from Hilário captures both the tenuousness and the resilience of life in the (Lourenço Marques) suburbs: “Poverty was normal. We had our houses of wood and zinc, we fed ourselves with flour and rice and fish and prawns. . . . There wasn’t so much misery that we would go hungry. No, we lived well within the possibilities that we had.”⁶ Urban centers in Portugal’s other African colonies, such as Bissau (the capital of Guinea-Bissau) and Praia (Cape Verde’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Foundations The Introduction and Consumption of Soccer in Lusophone Africa
• 2. Engaging with the Game African Practitioners in the Colonies
• 3. Following the Ball, Realizing a Goal From the Colonies to the Metropole
• 4. Successes, Setbacks, and Strategies Football and Life in the Metropole
• 5. Calculated Conciliation Apoliticism in a Politically Charged Context
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index