FOOTBALL’S SPECIFICITY
The role played by football in the construction of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques was anchored in the game’s features as a form of popular culture. A particular social process transformed the players’ performances, the basic cells of a sports activity, into shared knowledge.40 Football knowledge (a player’s name, the memory of a certain special play, the list of scores) was managed according to the interactional situations individuals found themselves in.41 Through a singular process, a specific sporting capital was converted into social capital, given that the team, its victories and defeats, represented the individual in a variety of everyday situations. In the colonial city, leisure practices contributed to the development of these more or less widely spread “specific bodies of knowledge.”42 Individuals related to this knowledge according to their social position and trajectory and, in the case under analysis, along gender lines. Football in Lourenço Marques was mainly a performance by men, and for men’s consumption. For young African men the game was not only an athletic performance but also a means to achieving a certain status within a local urban environment that defied previously established hierarchies.
One of the most salient features of the process of accumulation of this specific knowledge was the way in which the information produced by the game, regardless of its scale, was organized by means of a narrative texture disputed by those who appropriated and transformed it.43 The recursive nature of football competitions ensures the temporal continuity of these “football narratives.”44 In Lourenço Marques, apart from informal neighborhood matches, which generated a grassroots knowledge, three institutionalized narratives with varying degrees of dissemination were prevalent, emerging out of three distinct competitions: the “European city” championship, the “African suburb” championship, and the metropolitan championship, covered by the local media. A dimension of “the presentation of self in everyday life,”45 club affiliation was the structuring element of local football narratives, the position from which individuals manage their football knowledge in the course of their social interactions.46 While allowing individuals to communicate and establish bonds, this specific knowledge became an “interaction repertoire.”47 During interactions individuals used their knowledge through rhetorical apparatuses—shared expressive techniques—creatively adjusting their dramaturgical agility to the social situations where they are involved: at school, at work, or in leisure relationships.48 The rhetorical use of narrative enabled the development of personal interpretations on a range of facts that in turn may be shared, or not, with others: teams and players’ histories, competition results, trophies.49
Sports identifications have become, in many instances, a means to express social struggles and frontiers, enhancing the strength of identities and occasionally generating radical breaks.50 Integrated within social relations defined by the existence of what Max Gluckman has called “multiplex ties,”51 sports narratives are able to operate as elements that reinforce the practical and identitarian frontiers of human groups organized according to specific ethnic, religious, class, or spatial bonds (a shared regional past, a new life in the urban neighborhoods), strengthening the self-identification of the group in a context of interaction with groups of different backgrounds in an urban space, for instance. In Lourenço Marques, where the development of sociabilities was conditioned by a system of domination inscribed in the urban space and in the existing social stratification, the circulation of knowledge, the acquisition of techniques, habits, and schemas for the interpretation of the surrounding world was subject to a variety of social enclosures and favored the development of belongings and identities, bonds activated to respond to a host of practical everyday issues.
However, football knowledge, as an interaction repertoire, also facilitated the creation of bonds against the background of nondysfunctional conflicts. In these cases, the conflict, as noted by Coser, was a means of recognizing difference and agreeing upon a relational lowest common denominator.52 Regardless of the capacity to cement previous identifications, sports narratives, woven into a growing popular culture, were able to assist in interactions between individuals that did not share any other filiation or even a social or spatial proximity other than that of belonging to a stratified urban community. This specific knowledge, then, helped the creation of what Mark Granovetter has termed “weak ties.”53 In the context of intense urbanization, where people of different backgrounds found themselves interacting with each other, the creation of a common knowledge and common ways of acting was a key principle of coexistence. These weak bonds were fragile but nonetheless essential bridges that allowed for interknowledge among individuals of different backgrounds who were compelled, in this context, to interact.54
The way in which these football narratives are transformed into a relational resource, facilitating participation in everyday encounters, points us toward a wider interpretation that will be critical in the history of football in Lourenço Marques. The manipulation of information in interactional situations is the ground for the formulation of arguments, the justification of opinions, the participation in debates, emotional expression and sharing and the production of moral and aesthetic judgements.55 Being in possession of football knowledge, which in the colonial city was far more democratized than other bodies of knowledge, individuals use it as a mechanism for personal and gregarious affirmation before others, which can either be part of their closest circles or socially more distant. The manipulations of football narratives, then, meets the need for differentiation that results from the urban collective dynamics itself.56 Thus a specific public space takes shape. This is critical because by means of the manipulation of a sports narrative, commentaries on other spheres of reality are being produced. These comments do not imply the manifestation of an opinion on a particular political, economic, moral or religious issue, although they may also function as a means to judge these matters. In a mediated and implicit manner, the production of aesthetic and ethical judgments on events within the sports practice itself offers a set of reference points that legitimate or invalidate forms of agency and worldviews and that manifest the strength of a reason molded by local practices.
STYLES OF PLAY
The emergence of a local style of play was an element of the construction of this specific public space in Lourenço Marques. With Craveirinha’s help, football’s language could become the foundation for a historical inquiry. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning note,
The observation of an ongoing game of football can be of considerable help as an introduction to the understanding of such terms [social configuration or social process] as interlocking plans and actions. Each team may have planned its strategy in accordance with the knowledge of their own and their opponents’ skills and foibles. However, as the game proceeds, it often produces constellations which were not intended or foreseen by either side. In fact, the flowing pattern formed by players and ball in a football game can serve as a graphic illustration not only of the concept of “figurations” but also of that of “social process.” The game-process is precisely that, a flowing figuration of human beings whose actions and experiences continuously interlock, a social process in miniature.57
The practice of football is defined by a set of elementary conditions that delimit the performance: the maneuvering of the ball and the relation established with a given space for a given period of time. The rules that organize the match, in turn, mediate the choreography of modern football. The universalization of modern sports formats, governed by preordained rules, was a fundamental element in what Elias calls “sportization process,” the phenomenon of the regulation of pastimes.58 These norms are not neutral: they convey a certain ethics. For instance, they establish a principle of universality: everyone is subject to the same law. Rules seek to curb situations