Following the Ball. Todd Cleveland
on political union. Santos further explains that upon arrival in the capitals of Angola and Mozambique, the club was regaled with the same honors that visiting heads of state received.41 The regime’s official recognition of such sporting forays was seemingly intended to confirm its mantra, and associated propaganda, that “Portugal is not a small country” (see fig. 1.1). Indeed, even if the Estado Novo neither engineered nor mandated the tours, Lisbon certainly condoned these constitutive examples of what Michael Billig has called “banal nationalism”—the seemingly insignificant, yet highly efficacious, everyday representations of the state that collectively cultivate a national, imagined sense of community.42
Elsewhere, Lanfranchi and Taylor have unambiguously referred to these trips as “propaganda tours,” while Marcos Cardão has written extensively about their explicitly political objectives.43 For example, in addition to providing local entertainment, Benfica’s tour of Portuguese Goa in 1960 was seemingly intended to remind indigenous subjects of their imperial connections and responsibilities. The presence of General Vassalo e Silva, the governor-general of the colony, at the associated events was undoubtedly intended to reinforce this message and to signal to neighboring India that Goa remained Portuguese territory. Yet, while the Indian brass may have been impressed by the football on display, they patently ignored the political overtones: just one year later, the Indian army successfully invaded Goa, quickly removing what Jawaharlal Nehru had described as “a pimple on the face of India.”
Following the outbreak of the struggles for independence in the African colonies, beginning in Angola in the initial months of 1961, the tours became undeniably political, with the participating clubs requiring no patriotic prodding. For example, in May 1961, less than five months after the outbreak of violence in Angola, Benfica offered to play a match in Luanda against a team of Angolans, with the receipts from the game going to “the victims of terrorism” in the colony.44 Shortly thereafter, Benfica threw its support behind not only the civilian victims of the Angolan nationalists, but also the Portuguese armed forces, who had, in the meantime, commenced a brutal counterinsurgency campaign. The following summer, in 1962, Benfica toured both Angola and Mozambique, declaring in its official organ, O Benfica, that the club was bringing “the brilliance of its prestige and its metropolitan friendship to the Portuguese, who are fighting in Africa for the integrity and the continuation of the Pátria.”45 As Cardão registers, “One of the stated objectives of this tour was to raise funds for the construction of a hospital for the recuperation of the soldiers of the Forças Armadas [Portuguese armed forces] who were engaged in combat in the African colonies.”46
Figure 1.1. Replica propaganda map of the type regularly generated by the Portuguese regime during its reign.
Notwithstanding this political overtness, it is important to note that Portuguese clubs also traveled to other places in Africa (and South America), belying contentions that these tours were exclusively intended to deepen colonial control. Furthermore, clubs from all over Europe (as well as some from South America—most notably, Brazilian squads—and others from South Africa) also toured the Portuguese colonies, underscoring the fact that not every visit by a foreign club was intended to reinforce the links between the metropole and the empire.47
Once Portuguese clubs began utilizing players from the colonies, the tours also provided opportunities for metropolitan team officials to identify, scout, and, in some cases, sign talented African-based footballers. For African hopefuls, the matches constituted occasions to showcase their skills in the hopes of making lasting impressions on prospective employers. One rather extraordinary example of this phenomenon occurred in Angola during Benfica’s summer 1960 tour. Already aware of the prodigious talents of José Águas, who played for Lusitano Lobito, Benfica officials indicated that they would be assessing the footballer’s skills during the scheduled matches, one of which was surprisingly won, 3–1, by a team of Lobito-based “all-stars,” with Águas tallying a brace against the famous Lisbon club. Exceptionally, the nineteen-year-old striker signed for and immediately joined Benfica as they proceeded onward to other stops on their African tour, and he would eventually go on to play thirteen more seasons for the club.
Irrespective of the particular motivations for these tours, or even the final scores of the constituent matches, they were immensely popular, granting adoring, football-frenzied fans in the colonies opportunities to witness their heroes perform at close range. For example, responding to my question regarding the turnouts for matches involving touring metropolitan clubs, Augusto Matine responded: “The stadiums were full. There was no [empty] space,” and, to a follow-up inquiry regarding the affordability of attending, Matine explained: “For the cost of living at the time, it was expensive. But, even though it was, people made sacrifices. . . . Normally, the people who used to go to football matches were those with good jobs, but even the poor would pay 20 escudos for a ticket.”48 Similarly, Miguel Arcanjo, who grew up in Angola and would go on to become a fixture in central defense for FC Porto throughout the 1950s and into the first half of the 1960s, recalled that when the club toured the colony in the late 1940s (a tour that also included a visit to the neighboring Belgian Congo), throngs of local kids, including himself, chased after the vehicles that were carrying the visiting players, hoping to catch a glimpse of their sporting idols.49 And in no way were the scenes that Arcanjo described anomalous. In the summer of 1955, for example, when Belenenses arrived in Luanda as part of a tour of Angola, residents flooded a neighborhood of the colonial capital to present the great Mozambican player Matateu with presents and even constructed a throne upon which they insisted the footballer sit.
. . .
The individuals who introduced football to the indigenous residents of Portugal’s African territories could not have foreseen how immensely popular the game would become. Beyond generating countless practitioners, the sport also attracted legions of fans. Over time, the ability to converse knowledgeably about local, metropolitan, and even global football developments facilitated entry into social networks in the colonies and constituted an important component of masculine identity. Newspapers, radio, and, later on, television catalyzed and both broadened and deepened the consumption of local and distant soccer-related events. Eventually, African emigrant footballers themselves helped to popularize the metropolitan version of the sport in the colonies not only via their athletic success, but also by returning to the continent on summer tours as sporting heroes—embodiments of African capability.
Long before some of these Lusophone African players became international footballing idols, indigenous engagement with the game in the colonies began much more discreetly, though with a mounting fervor that presaged future success. In the ensuing chapter, I explore this unassuming process as Africans began to practice and play the sport in settings throughout Portugal’s colonial empire. Shortly after they began kicking around a ball, Africans formed “native” clubs and leagues and developed new styles and approaches that substantively transformed the activity to which they had originally been exposed. With time, the skills of talented mestiço and black players were too great for organized clubs to forgo, even in the highly racialized colonial settings. Consequently, these talented footballers were invited to play in formerly whites-only leagues in Africa before eventually going on to play in the metropole and, for some, on the world’s grandest and most revered soccer stages.
2
Engaging with the Game
African Practitioners in the Colonies
He used to play football with his many brothers on the sandy grounds of the suburbs, from dawn until dusk. He reached the football fields at a run, running like someone fleeing from the police or from the misery snapping at his heels.
—Eduardo Galeano, celebrated Uruguayan journalist and writer, describing Eusébio’s childhood
The football of my time was played with a joy and a desire to show our skills as players. Today, this football doesn’t exist because economic interests come