LITMIR.BIZ

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in the colonial city center, were mostly composed of settlers and other European players, though class ties enabled some players from old native families, namely mestiços, to play in the downtown championship. When the young Guilherme Cabaço (b. 1919), a settler who at the time was starting what was to be a long-lasting career in the colonial civil service, joined Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques, in 1926, the black and white of the team’s official shirt represented for him the two worlds that existed Mozambique. In the 1920s and 1930s, this old colonial civil servant reported, Desportivo had white and nonwhite athletes, mostly mestiços, such as the Bento brothers. Except for Sporting de Lourenço Marques, where only white players played, “in the other teams people mixed.” This “mix,” however, happened within the strict confines of a circle of interests close to the local “ruling class.” 1.^o de Maio, further removed from this circle of relations, was, as he recalls, a “club for workmen and suburban people.”

      During its first decades in Lourenço Marques, the spectacle of football within European society never ceased to be a class-bound practice. The search for talented players, however, granted opportunities to some settlers from lower social groups, who arrived in town and gradually integrated into the professional labor system, as workmen, especially in the railway, but also in small commerce and the civil service. Football’s transformation into a competitive public spectacle, which promotes rivalries, led the clubs to look for the best players. This phenomenon, already noticeable in the 1930s, led to the gradual formation of a market.⁷⁷ The football player would secure his own status; he was admired for his performative abilities and for the fact that he represented a socially identifiable collective, linked to neighborhood communal experience, for instance, against opposing collectives.

      The continuous arrival of Portuguese settlers heightened the social differences within the European population, as the administration and labor market became more specialized. In 1930 the settler population was 17,842; 27,438 in 1940; 48,213 in 1950; and 97,245 in 1960.⁷⁸ In 1974, a year before Mozambique’s independence, this population reached two hundred thousand people.⁷⁹ Sports associations, accompanying the city’s growth, were organized in the neighborhoods, establishing an umbilical connection with these places of sociability. As such, clubs like Malhangalene, a settler neighborhood previously inhabited by the native population, and Clube do Alto Maé emerged, founded in 1934 and 1937, respectively. In the 1950s and 1960s, other neighborhood clubs appeared, such as Carreira de Tiro, in 1950, and Clube de Futebol o “Central,” in 1951.⁸⁰ In the following decades, others followed the same pattern, with clubs always representing a sense of social and spatial belonging.⁸¹ The activities of small sports associations allowed for the simultaneous reinforcement of close regional networks and the introduction of their members into larger networks of relations, which operated as a mechanism of social integration. Despite the differences between the small clubs and the powerful downtown teams, which was also an indicator of the social stratification among the settlers, the sports movement in the cement city, even after the political overture in the sixties, was mostly a way to reify the European origin of its members; as a locus of sociabilities the clubs were agents of what Dane Kennedy identifies as “islands of white.”⁸²

      According to Cabaço, football, in its first decades, expressed—through the effort of those who founded the clubs, organized matches, and erected pitches—the heroism of the pioneers who built the city. As he recalls, the actual match ball, in that era of conquest, served as a metaphor for the hardships of this period:

      It was terrible, pure agony, because it was made of leather and inside it had a piece of rubber that had to be air-pumped, and at the opening was a leather string. We thought twice before heading the ball. When you headed it, you lost some of the skin on your forehead. The string was prominent and it was horrible, even for goalkeepers. If the ball came sideways and the guy touched it with his hand, he lost most of his skin. Not today; nowadays it’s more like a toy, like those small rubber balls I used to play with at home.

       Football as Urban Spectacle

      In the first decades of the century, football became one of the most popular organized leisure activities in Lourenco Marques. Clubs promoted themselves through meeting and sharing centers, spaces of communitarian mobilization and organization. Practice pitches, which were originally very precarious, regularly hosted the first competitions. Newspapers began to follow the game more closely, reporting on the main matches. In 1922 the first specialized newspaper, A semana desportiva, was published, lasting only one year and briefly returning in 1932. In 1938, Eco dos sports was the first sports newspaper to succeed, becoming an important instrument for the dissemination of the game as well as a standard-bearer for the sports community’s demands before the state.⁸³ Newspapers were a fundamental means of promoting the game. The press turned rivalries into copy and into the raw material for readers’ identification and imagination. Football press narratives were a particular dimension of what Benedict Anderson calls “print capitalism.”⁸⁴ Football’s presence in the newspapers, marked by the calendar of the competitions, was like a never-ending soap opera, which the reader followed passionately. The organization of the first Mozambican football championship, in 1956, one of the first public events to gather representatives from the various Mozambican provinces, was made possible, above all, through the persistent work of the local sports press.⁸⁵

      Prime media moments were those in which a selection of Lourenço Marques’s best players, from the AFLM, played against visiting teams representing other regions, particularly South African teams, such as Northern Transvaal and Southern Transvaal, but also metropolitan, English and Brazilian teams, as well as teams from other countries.⁸⁶ Visits from the metropolis, quite common after the 1940s, also served to renew national ties and had a festive, nostalgic component: they provided opportunities for settlers to demonstrate their vitality before representatives of the empire’s ruling center.⁸⁷ This was all the more significant since these matches featured the so-called Lourenço Marques home-born team, a group composed exclusively of players born in Mozambique, the sons of settlers.

      A source of local pride, sports often served as a ground for making demands, and a vehicle for an autonomous consciousness that, although limited in scale, occasionally translated into proto-autonomist positions.⁸⁸ The most persistent demand was perhaps that of taking part in competitions that included representatives of all Portuguese territories, from which the settler clubs were excluded, a demand voiced not only through the press⁸⁹ but also through official interventions and institutional relations.⁹⁰

      After newspapers, radio would also play a decisive role in promoting the game. In March 1934, the defeat of Portugal’s national football team by its Spanish counterpart in Madrid was broadcast by Estação Emissora do Grémio dos Radiófilos, through loudspeakers placed in the head office of one of the most important local newspapers, Notícias. This broadcast, a novelty in the city, took place “before a huge crowd.”⁹¹ The match report reached Lourenço Marques with a two-minute delay, which was close to nothing for people who were used to getting the news several days later, in the newspapers. This technological novelty inaugurated a different relation with football, in which a new kind of mediation enabled the fan to accompany and imagine a distant event in real time through an oral report that could be shared. Following a match no longer depended on going to the stadium. The broadcast was also a social event. Technological evolution would bring about the gradual privatization of radio reception, something that never stopped broadcasts from becoming an opportunity for meeting in the public space, not just in the cement city, but also in the suburbs.

      Over a relatively short time, football ceased to be an activity experienced by a small number of individuals; it became a regular and public display organized by clubs and followed by large groups of fans. Club identification grew and expanded. The game became a source for the creation of a specific stock of knowledge, a generator of local narratives that were then reproduced through daily interactions. Even though football practice in the cement city was mostly confined to a white universe of relations, as a type of knowledge mediated by popular culture it could be much more widely disseminated. This allowed for its expansion beyond the line of social segregation and into the suburbs of Mozambique’s capital. But this did not happen merely with the information that came from

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