Football and Colonialism - Nuno Domingos New African Histories

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type of control allowed for the continuation of semi-enslavement practices by public and private interests, sustaining a weak production structure based on intensive labor practices.31 The 1929 Diploma Orgânico das Relações de Direito Privado entre Indígenas e Não Indígenas (Organic Diploma of Private Law Relations between Natives and Nonnatives) completed this legal framework. Placed outside the corporative order imposed by the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, which was extended to the colonies on 5 March 1937, the indígena had a specific labor status.32 He also benefited from a separate education. After the 1926 Estatuto Orgânico das Missões Católicas Portuguesas de África (Organic Statute of the Portuguese Catholic Missions in Africa) had recognized the role of the Catholic Church in the indígenas’ education, the Acordo Missionário (Missionary Agreement) of 1940 and the Estatuto Missionário (Missionary Statute), approved the following year, gave the church the de facto responsibility for setting up segregated schools. The educational role entrusted to the Catholic Church aimed at countering the “denationalizing” effect attributed to the influence of Protestant missions, which, from the end of the nineteenth century, as a reflex of South Africa’s influence,33 were active in the Lourenço Marques region.34

      After the end of the Second World War, although at a hesitant pace at first, the indígena question was reframed, which explains the appearance of a euphemistic rhetoric in many official documents as well as in the general language we now find in the archives. The process of euphemization of the exercise of power reached its highest level in 1951, when the Portuguese government replaced the terms empire and colonies with overseas and overseas provinces. Portugal was uno e indivisível (one and indivisible). A few years later, the lusotropicalist theory devised by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre was a political legitimating tool, based on the principle of the exceptionality of Portuguese colonialism.35 During this period, the regime was laying the groundwork for a new stage of economic exploitation of its African territories.36 Still, the increasing state control over African labor, put in place by laws like the Regulamentos dos Serviçais Indígenas (Indígenas Servant’s Regulations) of 1944 and 1949, continued to foster the conditions for the formation of an institutionalized discriminatory society.37 According to these regulations, which essentially aimed at regulating social life in urban spaces like Lourenço Marques, the indígena was generally defined as a servant whose urban existence was dependent on a labor activity that the state, through the Curadoria dos Negócios Indígenas (Native Affairs Curatorship), tried to discipline through fear, intimidation, and punishment. The coercive formation of a labor market imposed a certain moral economy in which paternalism and violence become the ground of a wide social contract.

      The elaboration of the Planos de Fomento Económico (Economic Development Plans), which also served to accommodate private capital’s growing business interest, marked a new era of expansion.38 As argued by Gervase Clarence-Smith, in spite of the discourse on Portugal’s civilizing mission, the Portuguese Third Empire in fact reinforced its economic vocation.39 The state’s investment in infrastructure but also in the production of specialized knowledge, to face the multiplication of colonial science’s spheres of intervention, sought to accommodate the internationalization of Mozambique’s economy and the influx of capital, which was concentrated in large metropolitan economic groups and in foreign companies. Historian Adelino Torres defines the Portuguese strategy in Angola as a “second colonial pact.”40 On the basis of the formation of an imperial economic space, Portugal tried to maintain sovereign control within a context of economic internationalization. In Lourenço Marques, during the late colonial period the economy became less dependent of South African demand, but colonial revenue captured by the taxation of the migrant workforce continued to be decisive for the equilibrium of the trade balance.41

      Lourenço Marques was inhabited at the close of the 1970s by at least one hundred thousand Africans.42 This population grew at an average rate of twelve hundred individuals per year between 1940 and 1959, and sixty-five hundred per year between 1950 and 1960. After the end of the indigenato, with the slackening of restrictions to circulation and residence, entries increased.43 Dependent on entering the symbolic space of “the cement” to survive, suburban dwellers built their own life territory, beyond the city’s social and racial dividing line, in the absence of state urban planning.

      The concentration of workers in the cities, the adaptation to a life regulated by modern social institutions, the monetization of exchanges, and the loss of traditional bonds became causes of potential instability. In the African colonial context, considering the nature of the working masses, the problems arising out of the “social question” were grouped, by colonial policies’ theoreticians, under the term detribalization, a term that described the process of social, cultural, and economic adaptation to an urban and industrialized context. Although the “detribalized” indígenas did not enjoy the rights afforded to the “civilized,” living in a context that Brigitte Lacharte designates as “apartheid laissez-faire” they integrated the urban culture they had indeed built.44 Sports practices and consumptions were part of this urban dynamic at least since the beginning of the twentieth century.

       Leisure Practices in the Cement City

      Within the framework of a system of social segregation, Lourenço Marques’s dynamic economic activity in the transition to the twentieth century placed Mozambique’s new capital at the center of the territory’s development, as a port of call for various economic interests, traders, workers, and numerous public and private activities, transforming the city into a cosmopolitan place where there was a permanent flux of people and goods. Among the various national groups living in the city, the British community stood out due to its power and influence.45

      As in many other regions of the world, the existence of a British community was decisive toward the introduction of sporting practices in Mozambique, namely in Lourenço Marques. Besides founding association-type clubs, such as the English Club (est. 1905), the British Club or the Caledonian Society (1919), British people set up their own sports clubs, such as the Lourenço Marques Athletic Club (1908). They also contributed toward the foundation of elite clubs, like the Lourenço Marques Lawn Tennis Club (1908), Club de Golf de Lourenço Marques (1918), or Club da Polana (1923). Part of the Portuguese colonial bourgeoisie of Lourenço Marques joined these sporting social circles. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the British Athletic Club was one of the main promoters of sports practice, especially football. Newspaper articles from this period suggest that football matches were part of a set of mundane activities and were meeting spaces for the colonial ruling classes, in which athletes could exhibit an amateur ethos.46 The sophisticated sportsman, whose ethics and gestures represented the modern embodiment of a privileged condition, was also present in the colonial world. In many ways the European hunter in Mozambique was the forerunner of the local modern sportsman.47 The expansion of sporting practices in the early twentieth century in Lourenço Marques followed the elective affinities of a “ruling class” composed of high-ranking state administration officials and the colonial bourgeoisie, both Portuguese and non-Portuguese, which explored the business opportunities opened up by an expanding regional economy.48

      FIGURE 2.2. The tennis courts in the Public Garden and the Clube da Polana golf course. Tennis courts and golf courses were spaces used by the local English elite, as well as by some Portuguese members of the city’s upper classes, to entertain themselves. These appropriated spaces were also conquered landscapes in which hegemonic social projects were singularly situated. Passive and barefoot African golf caddies were an expression of this project. Photos mainly by H. Graumann and I. Piedade Pó, void of copyright as collective work. Scan of original book from Memórias d’África e d’Oriente, Aveiro University. Source: Wikimedia.

      Among the sports introduced in Lourenço Marques from the beginning of the century, football became the most widely practiced. One of the first records on sports activity in Mozambique, written in 1931 by a Portuguese army captain, Ismael Mário Jorge,49 indicates that football matches were being organized as early as 1904.50

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