LITMIR.BIZ

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       A Colonial Sport’s Field

      THE development of a field of sports practices and consumptions in Lourenço Marques was shaped by the organization and evolution of a colonial power structure, replicating its forms of social closure. Simultaneously, however, the dissemination of sports created specific autonomies that had the power to defy existent structures of domination. The social and political role played by local sports associations and clubs, and the importance of emergent forms of urban popular culture in reinforcing identities, promoting new bonds, and backing individual and collective aspirations, were among the aspects that defined the introduction of modern sports in the colonial city.

      LEISURE, FOOTBALL, AND THE BIRTH OF THE COLONIAL CITY

      The construction of a penitentiary in 1782 was the first step toward the formation of Lourenço Marques’s fragile urban mesh.¹ The first settlers, arriving in 1825, laid out a disordered cluster of primary streets. A dynamic slave trade to Brazil developed in this period. In the same time frame, a small community of Indians from Daman and Diu was established. In 1850, Lourenço Marques had six hundred inhabitants, confined to the coastal area. Portuguese authorities were had to deal with local kingdoms and were closely watched by English fleets that oversaw the slave traffic. In 1875, Portugal won the right to govern Lourenço Marques Bay, which was being disputed by the British, after a decision by French president Marshal MacMahon, who was mediating the disagreement.

      When it became a village, in 1876, Lourenço Marques already had a small administrative and commercial center. After the arrival, in 1877, of a public-works expedition led by engineer Joaquim José Machado (who later became governor of the territory), the process of draining the marshland surrounding the small urban area began, thus allowing the city’s expansion. In 1887, Lourenço Marques was incorporated as a city. An urban expansion plan, devised by engineer António Araújo, was approved in 1892. Resorting to military-engineering techniques, Araújo proposed the construction of an orthogonal urban structure, whose geometry reflected modern building methods. The colonial city’s growth led to a series of expropriations. In 1891 local populations were dislodged from the central area of Maxaquene and moved to the Mafalala, Munhuana, Hulene, and Chamanculo neighborhoods.² An outbreak of bubonic plague, which hit the city in 1907 and 1908, led to further social segmentation.³ The question of property established itself as one of the elements of the “illegality” of the colonial suburban space.⁴ A situation with wider contours, this “illegality” signaled, in Lourenço Marques, the exclusion of this population from the institutional spheres that handled administrative, judicial, and labor issues and that catered to the “civilized.” As early as 1890 the freehold concession to Africans was limited.⁵ According to the regulations on the ownership of urban plots of land approved by Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque in 1897, property owners had to prove their ownership in writing and to build a house within six months—a bureaucratic scheme that, together with the lack of capital, systematically excluded the indígenas.⁶ The regulations for the concession of state-owned land of 1918, in force until 1961, established a class of plots of land, reservations, for the exclusive use of the indígenas: they could occupy land but not own it.

      The Lydenburg Road, which began to be built in 1871 and served as a connection to the Transvaal, became a focal point around which the suburbs organized themselves and grew. The inauguration of this road—named after Lydenburg, a region in Transvaal where gold seams were discovered in 1874—marked South Africa’s labor market’s influence on the growth of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques.⁷ The city’s outskirts, which also included the Malanga, Malhangalene, and São José de Lhanguene neighborhoods, were made up of roads and paths that recognized and respected local mobility needs.

      In Lourenço Marques, where various types of spatial and social stratification coexisted, the main border was the one separating the so-called cement city from the suburbs, also called the caniço (lit., reed—the building material of most suburban houses). The circunvalação (ring) road, built in 1903, represented this line of demarcation both physically and symbolically. The urban structure imposed by Plano Araújo determined how the city would grow, something that is noticeable even in the early twenty-first century.

      MAP 2.1. Lourenço Marques and its suburbs, 1907–8. This is one of the first representations to include both the cement city and its periphery. Source: Centro de Estudos Geográficos. Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território.

      MAP 2.2. General plan of the city and harbor of Lourenço Marques, 1926. This map shows a more common representation of the cement city’s modern structure, considered by the colonial mind as the “proper city,” the one made by the Portuguese—the “civilized” city, with its rational design and geometry. Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

      In 1971, Mozambican architect “Pancho” Guedes described the main characteristics of the caniço:

      Every city and small town in Mozambique is surrounded by caniços. They are the towns’ out-buildings—the places where servants and laborers live. The word caniço means reed; in southern Mozambique reeds are the traditional building material most frequently used for walling and screens whenever they are available in the rural areas. . . . The caniços range from villages scattered around small towns, to vast slums and shanty towns made up of many quarters surrounding the larger towns and cities. In the small towns the caniços adjoin land where maize, manioc and other crops and fresh vegetables are grown. The sites they occupy are as close as possible to the town. Some are even located within the towns themselves, occupying land which has not been developed because it was low-lying and subject to flooding, or because of its irregular or steep configuration. In Lourenço Marques some of the caniços occupy the edges of an old lagoon; they are subject to floods and heavy rain, and are quite close to the main part of town.⁸

      Coming from the countryside, a great portion of the population built their houses with traditional techniques, using tree trunks, branches, bamboo, grass, and various fibers and clays.⁹ Technologic innovation improved the quality of the housing. The poorer population and migrant workers occupied fragile huts, which were built with burlap bags and tin cans.¹⁰ This kind of construction was replaced by better-equipped houses. Near the end of the colonial period, when more than two hundred thousand people lived in the larger suburbs, most houses (88 percent) were rectangular, covered with zinc, “with reed or wattle walls, daubed or bare, or made of zinc or cement blocks, houses with yards surrounded by reeds with a kitchen porch, the bath fence and latrine and other rudimentary facilities.”¹¹ At the time, the masonry houses (a mere 6 percent) were owned by the local privileged class.

      The

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