Following the Ball. Todd Cleveland

by the Portuguese colonial authorities as culturally superior to the local game was further exemplified through the provision of radio broadcasts of Portuguese football. . . . These practices had resonance beyond football and they can be read as part of the broader drive to promote colonial hegemony.”²⁸ Yet, upon closer examination, Darby’s binary appears experientially spurious: colonial officials also “culturally” enjoyed “the local game,” which similarly featured a preponderance of Portuguese players. Moreover, as Domingos reminds us, settlers also had loyalties to local clubs, which were “axes of urban sociabilities, and identification with these clubs became a means of individual and collective recognition.”²⁹ Further, the football played in Portugal was of an indisputably higher quality, which itself offers an explanation for its popularity that is both plausible and innocuous. Former Rádio Clube de Moçambique announcer João de Sousa affirmed that when a metropolitan match began at the same time as a local game, the former was the one that was transmitted. This option, he indicated, was “justified on commercial grounds. This was the game more people wanted to hear.”³⁰ Finally, by failing to plumb Africans’ sporting sentiments, scholars risk ignoring the tastes, desires, and predilections of these football consumers; instead, indigenous fans are cast as unknowing, helpless victims of hegemonic pressures exerted by anonymous colonial officials such as those invoked above by Darby, or of some type of “false consciousness.” As Allen Guttmann has cogently argued, this dismissive conclusion related to culturally dominated groups’ enthusiastic engagement with sports is quite simply “not persuasive.”³¹

      As outlined above, the local affiliate squads were, for a variety of reasons, less popular than their Portuguese parent clubs. Yet, by often featuring the same, or very similar, team names and virtually identical uniforms, local clubs provided Africans and Europeans a more proximate means of connecting with their more famous parent teams—a type of association by proxy. As Gary Armstrong has contended, the supporters of these local affiliates had “an implicit loyalty to their Portuguese namesakes.”³² However, for all of this local support and the umbilical links that many colonial clubs featured, as de Sousa indicated above, it was the parent clubs that consistently captured the auditory devotions and most stoked the sporting passions of both settlers and Africans alike in the Lusophone colonies.

      Following the initial transfers of players from the colonies to the metropole in the 1940s, interest in Portuguese soccer enjoyed even greater support in Lusophone African stops. As African players began relocating to the metropole, news about Portugal’s Primeira Divisão (First Division) was of increasing interest to fans throughout the empire. For example, according to Ângelo Gomes da Silva, who played locally in Mozambique but never made the leap to Portugal, “Matateu’s transfer to Belenenses [a club located in greater Lisbon] in 1951 was the defining moment. . . . When the players started moving to Portugal and began to succeed there, we became really interested in Portuguese football.”³³ Matateu’s brother Vicente Lucas, who would himself go on to star for both Belenenses and the Portuguese national team, confirmed the enormity of his older brother’s relocation to and subsequent footballing success in Portugal: “When we came to know, through the newspapers, the extent of the success that he was having in Portugal it generated enormous happiness for everyone. I cut out the newspapers . . . with all of the commentary on the goals that he scored. There was much praise for him.”³⁴ Moreover, Augusto Matine indicated that because African footballers who transitioned to Portugal were newly seen as paragons by locals, the resultant adulation further intensified the consumption of metropolitan soccer in the colonies: “When I was playing in Portugal I was a role model for my friends here in Mozambique. All of them wanted to know what was happening with me, and I became a reference for them. But I said Matateu, Coluna, Eusébio, Manhiça, Valdmar, Rui Rodrigues, Mário Wilson; all these guys were references—not me. Everyone in Lourenço Marques knew that we [Africans] were in professional football. In every bairro there was an interest in knowing more about the Portuguese clubs where we were playing.”³⁵

      So deep was the interest in, and affinity toward, the metropolitan clubs that the renowned Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes has revealed that these loyalties even generated empathy, if only temporarily, between otherwise mortal enemies. In describing his combat experiences in Angola as a conscript fighting for Portugal against the nationalist Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA; People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) guerrillas, he candidly admitted:

      When Benfica was playing, we would aim our rotating rifles toward the bush and, consequently, there were no attacks. The war stopped. Even the MPLA was for Benfica. It was an extremely strange situation because it didn’t make sense that we were angry at people who were pulling for the same club as us. Benfica was, in fact, the best protector of [combatants during] the war. And nothing like this happened when Sporting or Porto were playing, which annoyed the more well-born captain and some junior officers. I even understand how you could shoot a supporter of Porto, but one from Benfica?³⁶

       Summer Projects: Metropolitan Clubs’ African Tours

      As early as the 1930s, and increasingly commonly from the 1940s on, metropolitan clubs toured the Portuguese colonies during the summer, following the conclusion of their domestic seasons. These tours were extremely popular, drawing both European and African fans to a series of exhibition matches. Although residents in the colonies could connect with their favorite metropolitan teams through local affiliate clubs and popular media, neither form of engagement rivaled witnessing “the real thing.” Eventually, African migrant footballers themselves served as promotional agents of the sport in the colonies, returning home with their respective touring metropolitan clubs to play in the matches against local squads.

      Notwithstanding the eventual success and popularity of the tours, they began rather inauspiciously and not without a host of associated obstacles, many logistical. Indeed, prior to widespread air travel, these forays to the colonies necessitated maritime travel, which entailed weeks at sea just to reach, for example, Luanda from Lisbon, and additional time to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope to arrive at Lourenço Marques. With limited time for players to rest and rejuvenate during the summer months, this type of elongated travel was particularly onerous. Upon arrival in the colonies, metropolitan-based footballers also voiced their grievances related to the rudimentary playing conditions, namely the dirt pitches. The disagreeable nature of the tour experience at times colored the competitors’ interactions as well. As Bittencourt reveals, “Some of these sporting encounters in Angola (and presumably elsewhere, as well) were marked by altercations between players from Portuguese clubs and those from Angola, as happened with Acadêmica in 1938, Benfica in 1949, and C.U.F. in 1954.”³⁷ And it wasn’t always the African-based players who instigated these fisticuffs. According to Bittencourt, CUF players sparked the 1954 incident as, having just won the second division in Portugal, they were “bitter” after losing 6–1 to a team of Luanda-based footballers.³⁸

      Although metropolitan clubs were always favored to triumph in these matches, they occasionally failed to play their part, as supposedly inferior, yet manifestly plucky, teams from the colonies periodically won and, just as CUF discovered, sometimes by wide margins. Metropolitan clubs were most vulnerable when they were matched up against teams composed of the most talented footballers from the colonial capitals, essentially local “all-star” squads, and especially when those squads featured players who would later go on to star in Portugal. Even when the typically racially diverse colonial teams didn’t win, though, they instilled local pride among both indigenous residents and settlers.³⁹ Indeed, Domingos has argued that these sporting visits constituted “instances in which the settler could demonstrate his vitality in front of a representative of the empire’s ruling center.”⁴⁰

      The impetuses for these footballing jaunts varied, changed over time, and are still debated. What is irrefutable is that the tours were lucrative for the participating clubs, with the revenues on offer providing ample motivation (and explanation) for their realization. But the tours also appear to have featured a patriotic/political dimension, a way to reaffirm the links between the metropole and the empire, which collectively composed the multisited mundo português, or Portuguese world. Ana Santos, writing about Benfica’s tours throughout the empire, indicates that metropolitan media traveled with