Following the Ball. Todd Cleveland

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 of this keenness. For example, Paul Darby argues that “the extent to which Portuguese football was promoted by the Portuguese colonial authorities as culturally superior to the local game was further exemplified through the provision of radio broadcasts of Portuguese football. . . . These practices had resonance beyond football and they can be read as part of the broader drive to promote colonial hegemony.”²⁸ Yet, upon closer examination, Darby’s binary appears experientially spurious: colonial officials also “culturally” enjoyed “the local game,” which similarly featured a preponderance of Portuguese players. Moreover, as Domingos reminds us, settlers also had loyalties to local clubs, which were “axes of urban sociabilities, and identification with these clubs became a means of individual and collective recognition.”²⁹ Further, the football played in Portugal was of an indisputably higher quality, which itself offers an explanation for its popularity that is both plausible and innocuous. Former Rádio Clube de Moçambique announcer João de Sousa affirmed that when a metropolitan match began at the same time as a local game, the former was the one that was transmitted. This option, he indicated, was “justified on commercial grounds. This was the game more people wanted to hear.”³⁰ Finally, by failing to plumb Africans’ sporting sentiments, scholars risk ignoring the tastes, desires, and predilections of these football consumers; instead, indigenous fans are cast as unknowing, helpless victims of hegemonic pressures exerted by anonymous colonial officials such as those invoked above by Darby, or of some type of “false consciousness.” As Allen Guttmann has cogently argued, this dismissive conclusion related to culturally dominated groups’ enthusiastic engagement with sports is quite simply “not persuasive.”³¹

      As outlined above, the local affiliate squads were, for a variety of reasons, less popular than their Portuguese parent clubs. Yet, by often featuring the same, or very similar, team names and virtually identical uniforms, local clubs provided Africans and Europeans a more proximate means of connecting with their more famous parent teams—a type of association by proxy. As Gary Armstrong has contended, the supporters of these local affiliates had “an implicit loyalty to their Portuguese namesakes.”³² However, for all of this local support and the umbilical links that many colonial clubs featured, as de Sousa indicated above, it was the parent clubs that consistently captured the auditory devotions and most stoked the sporting passions of both settlers and Africans alike in the Lusophone colonies.

      Following the initial transfers of players from the colonies to the metropole in the 1940s, interest in Portuguese soccer enjoyed even greater support in Lusophone African stops. As African players began relocating to the metropole, news about Portugal’s Primeira Divisão (First Division) was of increasing interest to fans throughout the empire. For example, according to Ângelo Gomes da Silva, who played locally in Mozambique but never made the leap to Portugal, “Matateu’s transfer to Belenenses [a club located in greater Lisbon] in 1951 was the defining moment. . . . When the players started moving to Portugal and began to succeed there, we became really interested in Portuguese football.”³³ Matateu’s brother Vicente Lucas, who would himself go on to star for both Belenenses and the Portuguese national team, confirmed the enormity of his older brother’s relocation to and subsequent footballing success in Portugal: “When we came to know, through the newspapers, the extent of the success that he was having in Portugal it generated enormous happiness for everyone. I cut out the newspapers . . . with all of the commentary on the goals that he scored. There was much praise for him.”³⁴ Moreover, Augusto Matine indicated that because African footballers who transitioned to Portugal were newly seen as paragons by locals, the resultant adulation further intensified the consumption of metropolitan soccer in the colonies: “When I was playing in Portugal I was a role model for my friends here in Mozambique. All of them wanted to know what was happening with me, and I became a reference for them. But I said Matateu, Coluna, Eusébio, Manhiça, Valdmar, Rui Rodrigues, Mário Wilson; all these guys were references—not me. Everyone in Lourenço Marques knew that we [Africans] were in professional football. In every bairro there was an interest in knowing more about the Portuguese clubs where we were playing.”³⁵

      So deep was the interest in, and affinity toward, the metropolitan clubs that the renowned Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes has revealed that these loyalties even generated empathy, if only temporarily, between otherwise mortal enemies. In describing his combat experiences in Angola as a conscript fighting for Portugal against the nationalist Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA; People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) guerrillas, he candidly admitted:

      When Benfica was playing, we would aim our rotating rifles toward the bush and, consequently, there were no attacks. The war stopped. Even the MPLA was for Benfica. It was an extremely strange situation because it didn’t make sense that we were angry at people who were pulling for the same club as us. Benfica was, in fact, the best protector of [combatants during] the war. And nothing like this happened when Sporting or Porto were playing, which annoyed the more well-born captain and some junior officers. I even understand how you could shoot a supporter of Porto, but one from Benfica?³⁶

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