Football and Colonialism. Nuno Domingos
be rectified.
Said Mogne, who started playing football in the AFA championship toward the end of 1940, made a link between these changes and transformations in the political situation:
The Associação Africana de Futebol was created with a specific intent, that of segregation. There was the Associação de Futebol Africana, on the one hand, and the Federação de Futebol de Lourenço Marques, on the other. There was no common ground between them. When the “smoke” of independence began to rise up then there was an effort toward approximation . . . and the idea emerged of, one way or the other, merging the two clubs. Those that had the good fortune of being integrated survived. . . . The question arises because of existing political pressure. There had to be a coming together because separation in the AFA was a racial issue.
In the 1960s, official statistics indicated a greater degree of inclusion of nonwhite members in Mozambican sports clubs and associations. Between 1959 and 1964 the number of black members of sports clubs and associations increased across the territory (table 2.2):
TABLE 2.2. Percentage of black members and mestiço members of sports clubs and associations in Mozambique and Lourenço Marques, 1959–64
Source: Based on data from Anuário estatístico de Moçambique (1959–64)
It is likely that these statistics included African clubs that had not been previously surveyed. The inclusion of their members in these figures puts the notion of openness in perspective.
THE INEFFICIENCY OF THE PHYSICAL EDUCATION MODEL
Even when it came to the segment of the population included in its activities—that is to say, the nonindígena population—Mocidade Portuguesa proved largely inoperative. Reports sent by its Comissariado Colonial (Colonial Commissariat) to the governor general between 1949 and 1951 reveal a difficult situation, characterized by an inability to act outside district capitals176 and by a permanent lack of funds, material, and employees.177 MP had to recruit specialized civilian teachers, even though these teachers and technicians often declined the post since they would earn less than what they received from the clubs.178 The development of official sports policies in the final period of Portuguese domination, given the lack of direct investment, depended on the income generated through sports competitions, such as the football championships. Part of the budget of Mozambique’s CPEF came from the Fundo de Expansão Desportiva (Sports Expansion Fund), whose revenue was gathered by collecting 5 percent of sports competitions’ ticket sales.179 In 1966 the introduction of a sports betting competition in the territory, Totobola,180 raised the funds that would be channeled to sports.181 This led the state, at a time when the war effort was already eating up a great portion of the budget, to reduce direct investment in this area even further.182 Official reports from meetings taking place between 1959 and 1967 reveal that during this period a great deal of the CPEF’s work had to do with the resolution of problems related to federated competitions. One example is the validation of footballers’ transfers following requests from the respective clubs and associations.183 Although filtered by social and racial divides, the football market managed to create its own means of labor integration.
The disciplinary instrument, which aimed to regulate and impose a new logic on the activity of associative sports, namely football competitions, was held hostage by the actual system it strove to control. Failing as an agent that aimed to “produce” acceptable sports practices and consumptions, the state sought to regulate activities, oversee them, avoid political appropriations, and, as far as possible, to use the specific social power of associative sports to hold on to their control over the city’s populations.
In the metropolis, given the inability to curtail the popularity of football, a sport that led young people away from schools and workshops,184 the regime acknowledged, in the 1953 law that reformed “national physical education,” that sports associations promoted “a physical culture that, although lacking control and practice, had the virtue of uniting groups of people who enjoyed competition or exhibition. Here, they found a complement to an increasingly demanding social life.”185 In 1960 the Estado Novo recognized professionalism in football, cycling, and boxing186 so as to distinguish amateur sports, sponsored by state institutions, from professional sports, which were pedagogically and morally reprehensible.187 This law was extended to colonial territories in 1963,188 when it was already obvious that football had become, in cities such as Luanda or Lourenço Marques, a powerful social force.
Even though it was not considered a good practice by state specialists, in Mozambique’s capital, in the cement city, and in its suburbs, football mobilized young men and adults, practitioners, and spectators of a popular culture that established itself as a basis for ample sociability. The number of clubs and associations constantly increased, as did their total membership (table 2.3):
TABLE 2.3. Number of Mozambican sports associations and clubs and total membership, 1930–64
Source: Based on data from Anuário estatístico de Moçambique (1930–64)
Maintaining its criticism of the irrational and unedifying character of competitive games, the regime saw them from a different angle. Government experts considered now that football had an escapist effect; it created an arena for the manifestation of conflicts in a political context where the channels for public protest were virtually closed. In the colonial world these transformations are inseparable from the debate on the indígena question, as well as from imperial propaganda and urban social-management policies.189
During the 1960s the number of transfers, instigated by the rise in the number of settlers and by the end of the indigenato, reached an impressive tempo, although the state attempted to delimit this market.190 For example, it stipulated that athletes wanting to compete should have a minimum level of schooling.191 This policy prevented many players from competing. Despite such restrictive measures, football’s primacy—as a promoter of sports movements in Lourenço Marques, repeated in informal practices, and consumed as a dominant leisure activity—was imperious. Even if they were politically controlled, clubs and associations continued to promote an antipedagogic “movement policy” and became the key nuclei of football narratives deeply embedded in popular culture. The “game’s gestures” were replayed in the neighborhoods, in schools, on beaches, and in organized competitions, and then were echoed in the media, read, and listened to.
In the closing years of Portuguese power in Mozambique, the colonial state sought to use sports policies as a way to invert its role as the legitimating ground of a deeply hierarchical and racialized society. To that effect, a number of interrelated factors proved crucial: (1) the propagandistic exploitation of sports, (2) the implementation of social policies, particularly in the major cities, but also (3) the specific and relatively autonomous dynamics of a specialized field of physical education teaching and theorization that gradually abandoned the semimilitarized model of the MP in favor of a teaching system that, although integrated within the regime, had been subjected for some time to influences from more progressive traditions.192 It was only after 1967, when José Maria Noronha Feio, formerly a director at the Instituto Nacional de Educação Física (INEF) in Lisbon, was appointed leader of Mozambique’s CPEF, that sports policies, welfare, and urban-inclusion policies finally came together more efficiently. Noronha Feio managed to break with the semimilitarized practice of the MP, whose members still exerted influence on the CPEF.193 Regarding his action as a policymaker, Noronha Feio stated that his priority was organizing “educational recreational activities that promoted the gregarious spirit among the less-developed populations, in spheres such as hygiene, human relations, and land settlement.” This action, he continued, “represents one of this nation’s government’s greatest concerns—the integration