Following the Ball. Todd Cleveland
many of these players derived rendered their migration to Portugal more a form of geographical rather than social mobility, as they were moving from one reasonably advantaged environment to another.
Elsewhere on the socioeconomic spectrum, Armando Manhiça, who was raised in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques in the 1950s and would eventually play in Portugal for Sporting Lisbon and FC Porto, had a much more modest upbringing. The sixth child in his family, his father worked in a factory, earning a salary that was “not large,” while from the age of four Manhiça helped his mother carry, deliver, and sell fish in the city’s popular Xipamanine market.11
Irrespective of the divergences in the socioeconomic statuses of players’ families, virtually all of these future footballers attended school for at least some period of time. Enrollment was at the insistence of their parents, who deemed formal education the key to future success. In fact, no matter how personally enamored the guardians may have been with football, most considered the game a threat to their sons’ studies and, therefore, an endeavor that could potentially derail the professional trajectories they envisioned for their children—a sentiment that was especially pronounced in relatively well-off families. For example, Shéu Han recalled that his father did not want him to “dribble away his life” playing soccer, and, as such, “it was very difficult to convince him to permit the aspiring footballer to pursue his ambitions.”12 Shéu’s father, who was Chinese, instead wanted him to study to become an engineer. To this end, he sent Shéu to live with his maternal uncle and attend school in Beira, the second-largest city in Mozambique, hundreds of miles north of the small fishing village of Inhassoro, where the future Benfica star had been born.
Despite these parents’ best intentions for their children’s educations, familial financial expediencies could trump and, thus, truncate schooling careers, as was the case with Joaquim Adriano José da Conceição, who would go on to star for Portugal’s Vitória de Setúbal football club in the 1960s. Well before those later, more comfortable years, Conceição grew up in a Luanda bairro (neighborhood) in the 1950s, and the meager salaries his painter father and sewer mother earned, coupled with the presence of eleven children to feed, forced him to abandon his studies upon completing elementary school to take up work at a carpenter’s shop.13 For players raised in single-parent homes, this eventuality was even more unavoidable. As Vicente Lucas, who grew up in Lourenço Marques and lost his father when he was fourteen years old, explained, “We were semi-poor. My mother even sold rope. . . . I walked to school, but eventually stopped attending and went to work for a blacksmith. . . . We weren’t really happy in Mozambique because there were many children—four boys and four girls—and we had difficulties of various types.”14 For players like Lucas, continued schooling simply wasn’t economically viable.
Unfortunately, for players such as Lucas and Conceição, the intellectual and intercultural competency facilitated by extended schooling in the colonies helped migrant footballers integrate once in the metropole. Indeed, those players, typically from more privileged families, who were able to complete secondary school while in the colonies, and, even more significantly, those who opted to play their football for Académica, typically experienced even more facile transitions into metropolitan life. Of course, neither these scholar-athletes nor the parents who had mandated schooling in the colonies realistically envisioned this eventual social-athletic outcome. Nor did a parental emphasis on education necessarily generate enthusiasm for academics among these budding football stars; for most of the athletes, soccer, rather than school, motivated them.
For those players who were thrust into remunerative activities in the colonies, employment often featured a soccer connection, just as it would for those who opted to sign for CUF (Companhia União Fabril) once in the metropole. Oftentimes, clubs in the colonies were operated by, or at least had meaningful links to, commercial interests and would arrange employment with a private or state entity (e.g., the railroad) to attract talented footballers to their squads and, subsequently, to retain them. For example, Augusto Matine, who grew up in Lourenço Marques in the 1960s and played locally for Clube Central before going on to play for Benfica in Lisbon, recalled:
Sr. António, Central’s leader, came to me and asked me what I did. . . . I learned the trade of surveyor of measures in gas stations and of agrarian measures and taxi meters. . . . There were others who were placed elsewhere and learned to be mechanics. After one year, a year and a half, two years, we really started to earn some money in the places where we worked. We became part of the staff. I remember that I made 400 escudos a month and I could use this money to feed my family.
One of Central’s directors had a factory called the Companhia Industrial da Matola, which made various types of pasta and cookies. At the end of the month, he gave me a rancho: ten kilograms of sugar, ten kilograms of rice, two soap bars, milk, butter, cookies, and some money for my mother. If I received 400 [escudos], I would give 300 to my mother and keep 100. That was to protect myself. If my brothers asked me for something, they wouldn’t lack anything. This was how I lived. I grew as a man and as a respected football player because I worked for it.15
Footballers of European descent who made the jump from the colonies to the metropole typically enjoyed more comfortable, if still modest, upbringings. For example, Alberto da Costa Pereira, who grew up in the 1940s in Nacala and Nampula, in the far northern reaches of Mozambique, before going on to star as a goalkeeper for Benfica and the Portuguese national team, was a “total sportsman”—a basketball player, an accomplished sailor, and a record holder in the shot put. He also, in his free time, hunted rabbits, impalas, and other antelopes.16 As a child, Pereira was inspired by magazines such as Stadium, which arrived in Mozambique from Portugal, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, and occasionally featured African track stars, including Tomás Paquete, Matos Fernandes, and Espírito Santo, each of whom hailed from the Lusophone territories.17 His father worked for the railroad, so the family didn’t figure among the colonial elites. Yet the nature and wide range of leisure activities in which he engaged certainly differentiated his childhood experiences from those of the majority of African and mestiço players during their formative years in the colonies.
The Introduction of Football in the Colonies
It was into the colonial environments outlined above that a variety of individuals, including soldiers, missionaries, merchants, administrators, educators, corporate officials, and, eventually, settlers (especially as their numbers increased over time) introduced the game of football. This process of dissemination was highly uneven but generally commenced in port cities, such as Bissau, Luanda, and Lourenço Marques, in the late nineteenth century. The game subsequently traveled along overland routes and, eventually, railroads and other thoroughfares, such that it had widely penetrated the interior by the 1920s. Despite the game’s notable diffusion, though, the process of introducing it was largely unsystematic, lacking any type of formality or organization. Only much later would colonial authorities deem the sport useful to maintaining control and, thus, try to supervise this process of propagation. In the meantime, the game was introduced wherever and whenever European practitioners were active and felt compelled to share the rules, conventions, and strategies of the sport with Africans.
Scholars have debated to what ends Europeans introduced football to local residents and, attendantly, the efficacy of their designs. Some have examined the hegemonic motivations behind the introduction of soccer, while others, conversely, have considered how Africans frustrated these intentions, embracing the game but actively rejecting the elements of inculcation hidden in this alleged sporting “Trojan horse.” Irrespective of the divergent interpretive angles, it’s important to note that not all Europeans shared the same objectives related to the introduction of football to Africans. For example, unlike Portuguese soldiers who may have introduced soccer simply to generate indigenous competitors, missionaries championed the sport as part of a broader emphasis on “muscular” Christianity. Meanwhile, the colonial state was more interested in the game’s potential to subdue, distract, reinforce racial hierarchy, generate respect for authority, and minimize what colonial social engineers perceived to be an unproductive use of leisure time by indigenous residents. As such, the state encouraged soccer as a “civilizing” endeavor for African populations as part of its wider efforts to use physical education to control the bodies of the