Football and Colonialism. Nuno Domingos

In a suburban neighborhood 99 percent of the population did not have electricity and 89 percent had no running water; 99 percent had set up their kitchen on the porch, 76 percent used a latrine in their backyard, and fewer than 4 percent had a septic tank.¹⁴ Stagnant water, where children often played, teemed with rats, mosquitoes, and all kinds of diseases.¹⁵ Respiratory problems and intoxications flourished. To fight an ever-growing number of afflictions, suburban dwellers resorted to traditional medicine. In 1964 seven times as many Africans died as Europeans, although the two populational universes were about the same size.¹⁶

      Rita-Ferreira’s impressive account was not propagandistic as such, but neither did it offer any anticolonial invective. On the contrary, his report emerged from within the colonial scientific vanguard. But unlike Oliveira Boléo’s lusotropicalist pastoral, for the anthropologist and civil servant the suburb was primarily an economic and political issue, and its populations were conceived as economic and political agents. The critical description of life in the city’s outskirts responded to problems raised by modern developmentalist projects, which demanded the fixation and qualification of the labor force, and by their interchange with the consolidation of political management at a time when the war had spread. The quick turnover of workers in Lourenço Marques’s labor market harmed economic activities that required a greater degree of worker specialization and for which a training period was necessary.¹⁷ Malnourishment led to exhaustion and a weak psychomotor activity.¹⁸ Between 60 and 75 percent of the budget of the individuals interviewed by Rita-Ferreira was spent on food;¹⁹ nonindígena families of Lourenço Marques put aside nearly 34 percent of their budgets for that same purpose, close to the average percentage (30) in developed countries.²⁰ Complaints by some economic sectors on the feebleness of the local “human capital” were related by Rita-Ferreira and would be heard further on.²¹

      Workers’ dependence on their extended families as a social and economic support network brought along a set of obligations inherent in gift economies grounded in kinship (attending family rituals—weddings, christenings, funerals; assisting the sick and minors; lending a hand in building a house). Such obligations collided with the schedules imposed by work regimes, generating situations of recurrent absenteeism and quick turnover that reduced productivity. The uncertain and dangerous conditions of this urban labor market, inadequate for individuals to plan their futures, left open the option of returning to the safer and more stable environment of the countryside.²² When he published Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques, Rita-Ferreira registered the existence in the suburbs of what he called a “cultural hiatus.”²³ In Lourenço Marques there grew a structurally young population, educated in the city and freer from its ties with rural society, managing their own movements and desires: “many urbanized Africans live in marginal and transitional areas, and even immoral and broken, environments where there are no new values to take over from the old ones.”²⁴ Empirical evidence clearly demonstrated how the suburban social contract was not a reliable framework for regulating the production and preservation of social peace.

      These studies acknowledge that the colonial state’s incapacity to fill this void could lead to the emergence of a dangerous national consciousness.²⁵ Even if South African labor agencies continued to operate in Lourenço Marques, unemployment among young educated Africans grew, and with it a resentment of the lack of opportunities, which made them potentially dangerous in the eyes of the colonial apparatus.²⁶ Their position within the social structure, their educational level, and their contact with sources of information made them more sensitive to discriminatory processes, which persisted well after the end of the indigenato.²⁷ The situation of racial conflict in neighboring South Africa made these fears all the more vivid. Such dangers were enhanced by continuous discrimination. In 1967, out of the 1,069 marriages celebrated in the city, only 52 joined people of different ethnic groups; only one involved a white person and a black; and 21 joined whites and mixed-race people.²⁸ In that same year, of 5,499 births, 522 resulted from “mixed” relationships, and 254 were illegitimate children.²⁹ In 1968, 8.3 percent of the city’s population was the result of a “racial mix” and the trend seemed to point toward a decrease in these numbers.³⁰

      The biographical memories of former football players who were born out of relations between Western men, mostly Portuguese, and African women, bear clear testimony to this basic inequality. Mário Wilson talked about the origins of his privileged situation:

      My grandfather was an American, Wilson, who snatched a black woman, just because he wanted his problems sorted out. He crossed over to the other side of Lourenço Marques, Catembe, and on one of his walks he spotted the daughter of a régulo that had the shapely body he was looking for, and he said, “That one’s mine.” He crossed the river again, back to Lourenço Marques, and made her his wife. Because he was an American he might well have been racist through and through, but he still had child after child, six children, and he raised every one of them simply because he could afford it, [and] sent them over to study in South Africa. The two eldest sons were sent to boarding school straightaway. . . . Across the whole of Africa, all the Mandelas were born among the African elite. The African part had their own culture, their social gatherings and festivities, their sporting representations, but all of these things were marked by racism, a rejection that individuals themselves internalized and accepted as natural.

      The story of Hilário da Conceição (b. 1939), a Portuguese international raised in Mafalala who played for Sporting de Lisboa, is rather different. He thinks of himself as a “second-rate mulatto,” the typical condition of children not recognized by their white fathers:

      My mother is a Chopi, tribal, one of those that have tattoos on their faces and belly. . . . I never knew my father. My mother came from Manhiça to the city. . . . she was a very pretty and sweet girl and she didn’t know anyone there. . . . To this day I don’t know who my father was. That happened sometimes, you know? In this kind of relationship, the father was almost always Portuguese, and then he’d take off. And why did he take off? Because often the Portuguese would go from Portugal to Mozambique but had a wife back home, or else the wife was here and they had children, a married life, but they had fun with the African women. But then when there was some responsibility . . . if they had got a woman they were seeing pregnant, then they’d cut and run.

      Rita-Ferreira’s research also demonstrated how the indigenato was still operational after its legal end.³¹ Although the administrative division of Lourenço Marques approved in 1969³² did not make any reference to traditional powers, the state continued to delegate certain functions to it.³³ Beyond the day-to-day management, the state delegated a host of official duties to these authorities: information on local issues, resolution of cases of private law, and identification of individuals wanted by the law.³⁴ Reports on the “social situation” sent by the local Portuguese governors to the SCCIM in 1965, which were based on a centralized inquiry, revealed how traditional authorities were chosen, co-opted, and permanently surveyed long after the indigenato was abolished.³⁵ The transference of Africans, in 1969, into the framework of common law did not solve the problems of a population that for the most part remained unregistered or unidentified by the administration³⁶ and that lacked the educational, financial, and bureaucratic means to access justice or file complaints about urgent matters: property rights, rent disputes, labor law issues, and questions of social rights or family law. The construction of provisional shelters and houses in the suburbs also depended on the acquiescence of traditional administrators.³⁷ The suburb dweller continued to be subjected to institutions that were increasingly inadequate to handle the disputes that emerged out of the everyday urban experience. Given the legal vacuum and the frail legitimacy of the traditional institutions in the resolution of conflicts and problems, suburb dwellers increasingly resorted to the services of the emergent “witchcraft market” as a means of defending their rights. Many of these practices broke with the standards of the weakened customary law. The need for protection was consistently invoked by former football players when they mentioned witchcraft. Daniel Matavela (b. 1952), one of the first black players to play in the Mozambican branch of the Portuguese football club Académica de Coimbra, in 1968, noted,

      Each people have their own ways. The African is superstitious.