Football rules subjected players to a code and thus constrained their individual action, and yet they did not determine the greater portion of gestures nor the general dynamics of the game. The dissemination of modern football through the world from the second half of the nineteenth century was not linear. The game established itself as a situated and historically embedded practice, producing gestures inscribed within constellations of local meanings. These performances, Elias and Dunnning have argued, were small-scale historical laboratories. From a set of homologies, the examination of sports practices allows us to discern long-term shifts in and through the players’ bodies. In turn, these allow, for instance, for an analysis of the dissemination of certain behaviors, of the individual embodiment of principles of practical action and worldviews, of the degree of tolerance toward violence and to relate this with the increased complexity of the social division of labor, growing social interdependencies, state centralization, and a greater degree of individual, externally conditioned self-restraint, as a means of curbing impulses.61 Although in a singular manner many of the modern structural changes that Elias linked to the modernization process were part of the colonial social configuration in the twentieth century, namely in major urban centers like Lourenço Marques.
Football styles of play result from a particular relation between, on the one hand, the features of an evolving language—shaped by an ethics intrinsic to the official regulations and, progressively, by a specific tendency toward body rationalization, which molds individual and collective movements with a view to achieving greater efficiency62—and, on the other hand, structural and contextual historical trends. It is also the outcome of a series of struggles between diverse agents within a specific field of activity—players, coaches, the audiences, journalists, and other intermediaries—over the definition of what would be the most “appropriate” movement, the more spectacular performance, or the most efficient route to victory.63
In the contexts where modern football was more developed, the game’s language became increasingly interpreted by professionals, because only a professional with a learned training routine and bodily grammar could interpret the match with the necessary rigor and efficacy, as well as meet the demands intrinsic to the “representation” of the will of the fans, neighborhoods, cities, and countries. The command over football’s language was obtained by means of predetermination of the individual and collective movement carried out through the progressive development of tactical thinking. Within the frame of the modern tactical rationalization, the “pass,” for example, became the center of the game’s economy, which meant a subalternization of other gestures, such as the dribble, now subject to a more calculated use. The specialization of players’ roles and positions, in turn, attributes to each position on the pitch a particular task, whereby the proportion and types of movements depend on the performance of a specific function, which is also associated with certain physical and performative traits of the athletes (tall center backs, fast wingers, etc.).
Such rationalization of football’s language, which is always contested and adjustable within the universe of professional football, imposes a bodily hexis on the professional player, or a motor habitus, defined, after Bourdieu’s conceptualization, as a specific motor translation of trained bodily disposition during performative situations.64 However, where the conditions for the constitution of a competitive body were fragile, as in the case of the Lourenço Marques’s suburbs, the specific struggles for the definition of a style of play gave rise to multiple and heterodox genres, performed by motor habitus less shaped by this hegemonic rationality. As an empirical site of historical research, the game could operate as a barometer for gauging the expansion of structural and procedural tendencies in the long term and be the observatory of the local moral aesthetics that mimicked, recreated, subverted, or resisted, and thus fostered “other footballs.”65 The movements of Lourenço Marques suburban players, whose practical and symbolic reason was described by Craveirinha as malicious, were a specific example of how the game, when locally embedded, becomes defined by local economies of symbolic exchanges66 that produce a singular, but contested, moral economy: this moral performance expresses contradictions and is a space of negotiations, challenges, and subversions that are ultimately translated into the language of the game.67
The football choreographies enacted by the players from the Lourenço Marques suburbs expressed a physical orientation that was also a social and ethical orientation put into action by a specific libido that underlay the movement.68 Filtered by a formal language, this condition and these moralities also turned into a specific aesthetics. Individual and collective movements were the key signifying elements of that language and the embodied record of a specific historical process. Collective movements were not random. Expressing the existence of an order, an “interaction order,”69 the game was shaped by specific conventions and norms that were locally meaningful and defined a performative arena: a “space of stylistic possibles.”70 The cells of these interactions were the gestures and movements that defined the players’ “motor repertoire,” their bodily techniques, in the sense Marcel Mauss lent to this term.71 The moral and practical meanings inscribed in these movements are the gateway for the study of Lourenço Marques’s singular suburban social contract under Portuguese rule.
MAP 1.2. Metropolitan Portugal and the Portuguese colonial empire (used in classrooms), 1934. Manuel Pinto de Sousa, Porto: Livraria Escolar “Progredior.” Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
GENDERED PERSPECTIVES, METHODOLOGY, AND CHRONOLOGIES
The present research was based on archival work, both in Portugal and in Mozambique, on newspapers and magazines of the period and a set of interviews with some of the protagonists of the time, key elements to retrieve a sense of the dynamics of the game of football as it was practiced in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques. To the important descriptions of the history of football in these parts and in this period, these accounts have added information that sheds light on some of the features of the sports performances. This book aims to look at a historical process through the lens of a particular activity and, more generally, through the experience of suburban inhabitants, so as to offer a perspective that is mostly absent from the archival documents and written sources.
This partial view of the historical process can certainly be found in the “colonial archive,” even if it often reveals lines of fracture within the Portuguese power structure. Out of these conflicts and the ramification of interests around the state and its institutions there emerged a variety of viewpoints on the city’s peripheral spaces and on their populations. However, from the “African side,” by which I refer to the press in particular, the suburbs were still represented all too narrowly. In the way they critically described Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, newspapers such as O africano and O brado africano are indeed rare and precious historiographical sources. And yet, while their accounts do bring to the surface some of the dynamics of the historical processes in the capital of Mozambique, their analyses play down, and even exclude, other processes and points of view, namely of those that did not share the social status of this African elite, or their economic position, their religious beliefs, or their status vis-à-vis the state. One of the challenges of the present book was to avoid drawing a general portrait of the suburban experience through the gaze of these individuals, diverse and contradictory as it was. It could not fail to take into account their singular experience as an important historiographical source, but at the same time it also needed to avoid magnifying the information and interpretations they offer us.
The gathering of narratives on the local sports scene and on the itineraries of suburban football players was an attempt to remedy the near-absence of accounts of life on the edges of the city. Mostly provided by players with stable sports