Following the Ball. Todd Cleveland
were “instruments of socialization, infusing discipline . . . respect for hierarchies and rituals.”18 In this capacity, football was undoubtedly more than just a game. And the associated methods and intended lessons were far more important than the game itself.19 Although football’s efficacy as a tool to maintain social control is disputable, the sport unquestionably constituted a key component in Portugal’s cultural imperialism campaign, an important pillar in the broader process of empire.
Finally, it is important to note that in many instances, and especially in the early decades of colonial control in Portugal’s territories, Africans themselves were responsible for introducing the game. This phenomenon was most frequently associated with Mozambique and, to a lesser extent, Angola, due to their proximity to and economic links with South Africa, the site of the first recorded football matches on the continent. Regarding Mozambique, the incessant streams of migrant laborers were exposed to the game, and subsequently brought that knowledge back with them following stints in the South African mines. As Patrick Harries and others have argued, strong cultural, social, and economic connections existed between urban South Africa and Lourenço Marques, as well as along the overland routes to and from the mines.20 Migrant Mozambican mine workers cultivated and daily reinforced these links, with football figuring centrally in this transnational exchange of leisure habits.
The Consumption of Football in the Colonies: “Diseased” for Portuguese Clubs
Shortly after the introduction of football in the colonies, Africans began dribbling, passing, and shooting just about any spherical object they could fashion or find. Yet the engagement with the sport was not limited to practicing and playing. Both practitioners and fans contributed to the popularity of the sport by eagerly consuming soccer developments from the metropole and rapidly forming allegiances to—or, as some avid followers referred to this phenomenon: “becoming diseased for”—the major Portuguese clubs. Indeed, while the distance between the dusty pitches in Africa and the verdant fields in the metropole was both literally and figuratively immense, newspapers, radio, and, eventually, television daily delivered Portuguese soccer matches and news to the continent, effectively reducing the expanse.
Initially, the media accounts were primarily consumed by European colonists, who had packed up their metropolitan club loyalties and brought them to the colonies. This sporting fealty enabled settlers to retain important cultural connections to the metropole and also facilitated entry into social networks in the colonies that revolved around football fandom. The example of the family of José Águas, who grew up in colonial Angola and would eventually go on to star for Benfica, is illustrative of the durability and pervasiveness of sporting devotions within Portuguese settler communities. According to his profile in a 1956 issue of Ídolos, “He was always a Benfica supporter, as he came from a family of ‘benfiquistas’ [ardent Benfica supporters]. He knew the names and the characteristics of all the players, heard the reports, clipped the photos. When Benfica won the Taça Latina [in 1950], he was delirious with enthusiasm.”21 This type of football fidelity reigned in mixed-race households as well, given that virtually all of these domiciles featured Portuguese patriarchs. For example, the father of mestiço player Mário Torres was an avid supporter of Sporting Lisboa and tangibly expressed this allegiance in colonial Angola by founding two local affiliates of the metropolitan powerhouse: Sporting do Huambo, based in the colony’s second largest city; and Sporting de Vila Nova, located nearby.
If Portuguese settlers were the original consumers of metropolitan football in the colonies, Africans also began to develop metropolitan sporting allegiances, similarly gravitating toward the “big clubs”—the same outfits that most colonists supported. In fact, Africans’ club loyalties were often influenced by the Portuguese with whom they interacted, typically at their respective places of employment. An account by Ângelo Gomes da Silva, who played locally in Mozambique, is exemplary of the transference of footballing loyalties from Portuguese to African laborers. According to Silva, Africans and mestiços conversed with “co-workers who had come from the metropole and who supported particular clubs. So, when a Portuguese would ask which club an African supported and he didn’t have a response, the inquirer would retort, for example, ‘You don’t have a club? Then you have to support Sporting. . . . You are a man, why don’t you support a club? It must be Portugal’s Sporting.’”22 These implorations explicitly imposed Portuguese notions of masculinity upon local populations, either encouraging or even shaming Africans and mestiços into footballing allegiances.
Adherences of this nature also provided Africans a topic that they could safely discuss with Portuguese coworkers, transcending the racial divides that pervaded every colonial setting. Domingos has convincingly argued that at a range of worksites in the colonies, “football, acting as a repertoire of interaction, guaranteed a minimum common denominator for interactions between colonizers and colonized and served as a way to start conversation.”23 Indeed, Augusto Matine recalled that he used to discuss football with coworkers during breaks and that Portuguese soccer news and events dominated these conversations: “People talked more about metropolitan football than our own. We started to have all kinds of information about football. As I read Benfica’s newspaper, I knew more about the club than some guys who were there [Portugal]. I devoured that newspaper to learn more about Benfica, about every sport. If I saw a magazine with things about Sporting I would also grab it and would not pass it to anyone before I finished it. Only then would I pass it to the next guy.”24 Matine’s account underscores both the personal and the social importance of this type of sporting knowledge.
Regardless of the influence that some Portuguese exerted on indigenous residents as the latter formed their club loyalties, most Africans developed their particular soccer allegiances organically. Most often, these fidelities developed for the same reasons they always have: sporting success. As such, young boys in the colonies formed allegiances to the best Portuguese clubs, namely Sporting, FC Porto, Benfica, and Belenenses. Fans of all ages would often gather around to listen to someone read the latest news regarding the clubs, or, from the mid-1930s on, radio broadcasts in the colonies of metropolitan matches, which both facilitated and hastened this affective process.25 Supporters often listened to games on transistor radios powered by car batteries—events that drew clusters of people huddled around the set, alternately elated or deflated according to the unfolding events. Matine, a Mozambican who would eventually play for Benfica in the 1960s, indicated:
Growing up, I wanted to be like Travassos, like Coluna. They were my idols. I saw them in the newspapers. . . . I was “diseased” for Benfica: I did not miss a single report in which Benfica appeared. My dad had a little radio, always tuned to Emissora Nacional, the metropolitan national radio. It was three o’clock in Portugal, five o’clock in Mozambique. We had finished everything, I had played in the morning in my district, had played on Saturday, and on Sunday I would listen to my club play. We lived as if we were watching the game. That disease still exists today. I knew every single Benfica player, the entire team, managers and all that. I was fortunate enough to have access to the club newspaper. There was a Portuguese man in Mozambique who owned a photography company and subscribed to Benfica’s newspaper. After reading it, he passed it on to me. Even if it was last week’s, I wanted to know everything that was going on with my club. There was that disease.26
In response to newspaper accounts, radio broadcasts, and other sources of football information, countless neighborhood kids latched on to one of the major Portuguese clubs and imaginatively closed the space between them and the distant squads to which they had pledged their allegiance. For example, António Brassard, who would play for Académica in the 1960s, recalled that as a child, his bairro team was called the Águias Dourados, or Golden Eagles—the nickname of Benfica: “We even made the emblem with the eagle. Benfica really was the club of our dreams! We used to listen to the radio commentaries and we imagined we were playing with the stars of the team.”27 By engaging with the major metropolitan clubs in a variety of creative ways, African fans were embracing a topic that could be endlessly discussed and debated among family, friends, coworkers, and even strangers.
Despite the demonstrated alacrity that characterized Africans’ engagement with metropolitan soccer, some scholars have questioned the organicity or benignity associated with the development