Following the Ball. Todd Cleveland

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СКАЧАТЬ John Bale and Joe Sang have argued that these indigenous customs and associated notions of masculinity constituted the “soil into which the seeds of European sport would later be planted.”³ In the Lusophone African context, precolonial traditions and competitions of this nature helped fuel soccer’s initial appeal, as well as its eventual widespread popularity. In the following section, I examine the ways that African practitioners began engaging with the sport and trace these fundamental, often rudimentary, forms of participation over time.

       Peladas and Makeshift Balls

      In the Global North, images abound of barefoot Africans kicking around improvised spherical objects on uneven patches of dusty land bookended by makeshift goals. Although these images are somewhat misleading—formal soccer venues of all sizes can be found throughout the continent—virtually every one of today’s elite African footballers learned the sport by playing on exactly the types of scruffy pitches that fill Western imaginations. Not surprisingly, African practitioners in Portugal’s colonies commenced their engagement with the sport in similar fashion, often playing without a proper ball, or even shoes, as they partook in pickup games, or peladas.⁴ Into the waning decades of Portugal’s empire, these austere conditions persisted; indeed, each and every footballer who was talented enough to play in the metropole initially developed his skills in these humble spaces.

      Unable to afford proper soccer balls, participants in neighborhood peladas instead fashioned makeshift balls from whatever materials were available: rags, socks, women’s stockings, and even the innards of animals. According to Calton Banze, who grew up in the Chamanculo neighborhood of Lourenço Marques in the 1960s, “We had to make the balls. Socks, rags, plastic, elastic—these were the materials we used. And I shouldn’t forget the stomach of an ox, which was already a ball. I also remember a tennis ball that somebody brought, already too old to use for tennis any longer. We also used inner tubes stolen from bicycles.”⁵ Although players continued to craft these improvised balls through the end of the colonial period, and beyond, in the 1960s, a rubber company headquartered in the Mozambican capital introduced the Facobol. This development improved the quality of innumerable neighborhood contests; yet, for most practitioners, the cost, though minimal, of the revolutionary ball rendered it out of reach. As such, the rubber Facobol quickly became a status symbol, separating those players with sufficient means, however limited, from those for whom the purchase of even this reasonably priced item was cost-prohibitive.

      If African footballers weren’t discouraged by the lack of a proper ball, the absence of athletic footwear—or shoes of any sort—similarly did little to temper their enthusiasm. Because footwear was not historically customary in many African communities, this apparent problem was, in fact, not an issue at all. But over time, as colonial fashion influenced local sartorial styles, the practice of wearing shoes became increasingly widespread, especially in cities, the loci of soccer engagement and development. Still, neighborhood football remained an almost universally shoeless endeavor. Even when games in the bairros were better organized and local teams were formed, players rarely donned footwear. As Eusébio recalled in 2004: “It is normal in Africa, even today, for the kids to play barefoot in their neighborhood teams. When we played for our local team, we never had boots or shoes.”⁶

      White players who lived and played in the neighborhoods similarly participated in these sans-shoes affairs, though not always for exactly the same reasons. According to Ernesto Baltazar, a white Mozambican hailing from a poor family who grew up playing alongside Eusébio and other future talents deriving from the colony, “We [Eusébio and I] played soccer barefoot. I had sneakers, but if I arrived home with dirty sneakers, I was in trouble. In the beginning, I removed the sneakers and played with socks. My socks were dirty and pierced; my mother ordered me to wash them. After that she would beat me. After that I realized that there was no chance; otherwise, I would have been beaten every day. So I played barefoot, too.”⁷

       Playing Spaces: “Infinite Horizons”

      If proper balls and shoes of any type constituted lavish accessories, space in which to play was much more essential. Consequently, committed players found space wherever they could, even in the tightest areas. For example, according to Calton Banze regarding 1960s Lourenço Marques, “With the tennis ball and other balls, we played on the verandas of the houses. The verandas were about two meters wide and seven or eight meters long. We played two-versus-two or one-versus-one. . . . How many windows were broken! How many times we raced away to avoid being caught! And how many balls were ripped to shreds because they landed in the backyard of somebody who didn’t like football!”⁸ Of course, the greater the number of players, the larger the requisite space. Thankfully, for these enthusiastic youth, even the steady population growth that the colonial capitals and secondary cities experienced didn’t deprive practitioners of ample room for matches of all varieties. As António Joaquim Dinis, an Angolan who would eventually play for Sporting Lisboa, conveyed during a 1972 interview regarding this available recreational space: “Empty, wide lots, which we could use as our field, we had plenty of those. In this aspect, the kids of Luanda are happier than those in the metropole, because there are several empty spaces where they can entertain each other without the risk of breaking windows or suddenly having the police showing up.”⁹ Reminiscing about these open spaces, Shéu Han, who used to play on the beaches of Inhassora, on the Mozambican coast, before he began suiting up for Benfica in the 1970s, declared, “That’s where great champions such as Matateu, Eusébio, Mário Coluna, came from. They were all shaped by these infinite horizons, by the fascination for those great spaces.”¹⁰

      Although African players nostalgically remembered the “infinite horizons,” many of them also soberly lamented the gradual disappearance of at least some of these spaces. Over time, urban development encroached upon many formally open plots. And later, the influxes of rural refugees fleeing the fighting generated by the wars for independence and the ensuing civil conflicts, which engulfed the newly independent Lusophone African states, further filled what remained of these spaces. During our interview, Hilário explained that

      in Mozambique and especially in Lourenço Marques there were a lot of abandoned lots, so growing up we would play on these lots all around. . . . Another thing that is a difficulty for the current players—and the opposite helped us—was the amount of free space we had to play and exercise, and when the colonial and civil wars were happening everyone who was in the provinces [countryside] fled to the capital and they would build their little houses in the free spaces, so the capital got overpopulated and the spaces in which we had to play and have fun don’t exist anymore.¹¹

      Former players also often cite the deleterious contemporary footballing implications that stem from these demographic and geographic shifts. According to Matine, “During the colonial period in Lourenço Marques, in the suburbs, there were a lot of empty fields where people used to play soccer. That’s not the reality nowadays, and that’s the reason that there is not a lot of talent coming out of African countries like there used to be. . . . Some of those fields are now markets, among other things, so it becomes very hard to find talent because you don’t teach soccer to an African; one just has to keep playing. We would play at school and then in those fields when we were out of school.”¹²

      Beyond serving as physical spaces in which to kick a ball around, neighborhood pitches, informal as they might have been, also became centers of entertainment and socialization. Further, they bestowed on the communities surrounding the spaces a sense of identity that grew out of, and was shaped by, the action on the field. As footballers from one neighborhood battled against a squad from another, spectators took pride in the players representing their locality. And, as these identities cohered and hardened over time, soccer helped to further demarcate and differentiate individual neighborhoods. According to Hilário, “Football was tough because there were many rivalries, between districts. . . . The districts were a boundary. In order to enter Chamanculo I had to know people there. This did not mean I couldn’t go in, only that it was tougher. СКАЧАТЬ