Football and Colonialism. Nuno Domingos

the need to integrate populations was rhetorically used by interest groups that had different opinions and pursued distinct objectives. Access to sport in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques became one of Noronha Feio’s main projects, integrated in a vast social intervention plan titled Plano de Beneficiência da Área Suburbana de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Suburban Area Improvement Plan).¹⁹⁵ Noronha Feio would leave Moçambique in 1973, when he was elected director geral dos desportos (general director of sports). The “integration of the populations” thus became a discursive device that legitimated forms of intervention on the ground. The regime’s interest in integrating the populations, to avoid social and political upheaval and to stabilize an urban African labor force, generated the necessary conjunctural conditions for a handful of agents on the ground to initiate a policy of democratization of sports practices, which allowed the field of sports, which was structurally discriminatory, to open up to some degree.

       Imperial Narratives

      The attempts to instrumentalize sports for social and political management, presenting it as an example of social integration, were at odds with the discrimination that prevailed on the ground. While this situation persisted, a propagandistic imperial narrative that exploited the success of a few African athletes in the metropolis was developed. To a degree that would merit closer scrutiny, this discourse drew on the powerful penetration of the football narrative in a mediatized urban popular culture so as to invest in a wide-spectrum and widely disseminated lusotropicalist rhetoric, which became even more effective when mediated by the seemingly neutral prose of specialized media outlets.¹⁹⁶ This situation revealed the need, among those who held key positions within the colonial field of power, to take into account the social influence of popular culture.

      The presence of African players, the most prominent of whom came from Lourenço Marques, in popular metropolitan clubs, and in the national team promoted a “banal lusotropicalism” that was adopted by the Portuguese government, especially when the Benfica club of Eusébio and Coluna won the European Cup in 1961 and 1962,¹⁹⁷ and when the national football team came third in the World Cup in 1966.¹⁹⁸ The induction of Eusébio in the Portuguese army in 1963, widely reported by the media, and his participation in campaigns in support of Portuguese soldiers organized by the Movimento Nacional Feminino are only some of the examples of the political exploitation of the popularity generated by football.¹⁹⁹ In the context of the war, the campaigns run by the Gabinete de Acção Psicossocial (Office of Psychosocial Action) were also built around the presence of a metropolitan football narrative among the African populations.²⁰⁰ Spurred on by a powerful associative impulse and supported by the local authorities, the various tours of Portuguese clubs to the colonies reinforced these imperial conceptions of nationality.²⁰¹ The propaganda efforts undertaken by the Portuguese from the 1950s onward, which translated into a process of euphemization of the pervasive racism in the colonial spaces, opened up a split between events in the colonial terrain and an official and persistent historical narrative based on the romanticized accounts of these African players’ sports narratives.

      Before the participation of the Portuguese national team in the 1966 World Cup, journalists were already referring to a “Euro-African” game style, which was a vehicle for political metaphors and cultural prejudices. Media narratives often registered the naturalization of an imperial motor habitus,²⁰² the synthesis of a lusophone body created by the Portuguese gest. The style of play was included as part of a discourse of propaganda and control that will have had its identitarian effects, shaping the imagination of the population both in the colonial territories and in the metropolis. The bodily movements of the national team players expressed, from this point of view, a singular identity, distinct from any other national football style. Vítor Santos, a journalist for A bola, a metropolitan sports newspaper, emphasized the influence of the “‘technical touch’ executed by the players from tropical and subtropical areas” in the “lusophone football ‘model’”: “the result of this miraculous mix of a natural technique, relaxed and swinging, typical of tropical and subtropical players, with the methodical preparation conducive to seriousness and to the achievement of an ideal performance, which is the product of the studiousness that, in some way, defines ‘northern people’ from this Old continent with a long history and tradition.”²⁰³ The discourse was similar, in many ways, to Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalist narrative, here adapted to football. For Freyre, in the many pages devoted to the unique features of the bodily practices of the Brazilian players, football was the manifestation of a national identity, a non-European one, of course.²⁰⁴

      African players’ performances in Portuguese teams also led to various political and nationalist metaphors.²⁰⁵ After Benfica won its second European Cup, the director of A bola, Silva Resende, a man linked to the Estado Novo regime, talked about the benefits of having African players, such as Eusébio and Coluna, playing for Portuguese teams. These players, who had the “feline appearance that sets colored men apart,” introduced to the “game an element that was new to the habits of a public that perhaps had not realized that Portugal, without losing its intrinsic nature, was a multiracial nation.”²⁰⁶

       Sports and the Colonial Field of Power

      The process of sportization promoted from the early twentieth century in Lourenço Marques reified the main dividing lines that traversed the colonial system: class practices, racial divisions, and gender inequalities. The colonial situation thus helped to structure a segregated sports sphere of activity. The dissemination of sports, essentially promoted through the practice and consumption of football, took place, to a large extent, outside the state’s direct action, through the initiative of the network of associations and clubs that created regular competitions. The relation between the state and the private sports dynamic was ambivalent and must be interpreted in the context of the ambiguous territory of indirect rule. The leaders of clubs and associations within the settler’s universe, especially among those that had more influence, came for the most part from the dominant colonial classes. These leaders used sports as an instrument of clientelist and patronage relations, which granted them local prominence and also gave them, in the sphere of commercial and industrial development, the means for managing workplace environments, which proved useful in terms of achieving social peace and economic productivity. Although under political control, clubs and associations fostered competitive sports that officially were thought to have no pedagogical purpose and that gathered crowds that were fed misguided conceptions of the role of sports. Given that they could not impose, all the way from Lisbon, the official project of physical practice, set up in the 1930s, the state ended up trying to use sports popular culture, promoted by a federated associativism organized across transnational networks, to cement a wide social domain, both in terms of a policy of social integration and for propaganda purposes, by means of the creation of imperial narratives. It was only in the last stage of the Portuguese dominion over Mozambique that sports was included within a belated social policy program driven by the state. Although theoretically relevant, the division between private sports and state sports, the latter promoted by the colonial power itself, has obvious limitations, as both had their political field of performance, sometimes complementary, other times contentious. Such tensions and conflicts steer us toward a more adequate interpretation of the state’s action, beyond its laws and discourses. Hence, the untimely concern with the integration of indígenas, in the 1950s, forced the state to attempt an opening of the sports field, more in line with the lusotropicalist propaganda than with the reality on the ground. It was only in 1959 that legislation was passed to end the split and racialized football organization in Lourenço Marques.

      The project of social transformation and political tutelage that pervaded the regime’s physical education policies and that took the athlete’s body as the site for the reproduction of the social and political order, proved unable to structure the field of sports. In this context, the state tried to develop its model of indirect rule, much dependent on the dynamics of local society and on the strategies of several agents in the colonial terrain. While presenting dimensions of informality that were often not picked up in the documentation, this model adjusted to the political cycles and to the changing needs of social regulation felt by the colonial system, that explains for instance the relation between segregation and political overture. But this model was also forced