Following the Ball. Todd ClevelandЧитать онлайн книгу.
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. What defined the boundary was having been born there, having huts there, having a place to listen to music, talk about football, to form a team to play in another district.”13
A Dangerous Pastime? Finding Time to Play
Finding space to play football was unquestionably important, but so was finding time. As mentioned above, many parents, especially during the sport’s infancy in the colonies, saw little value in this activity and, thus, discouraged their sons from allocating too much time to play the game. However, as the sport gained both popularity and legitimacy, parents’ tolerance for the endeavor gradually grew. But guardians still typically deemed whatever schooling might have been available for their sons to have been significantly more important; meanwhile, for those families unable to afford an education for their sons and daughters, contributing to the family finances remained paramount. As such, children often had to engage with the game discreetly. Yet, just as kids the world over have done and continue to do, African youth also found time, even at the expense of more productive undertakings, to play and have fun.
The histories of two players, João Santana and Armando Manhiça, illuminate particularly well the tension that a love for the game could generate between passionate children and unconvinced parents. The childhood and teen years in the 1940s and early 1950s of Santana, who grew up on Angola’s central coast and would go on to play for Benfica, are exemplary in this respect. Keen on football, but not on the career that his father had envisioned for him, Santana’s passion for the game generated friction between his parents and him. Eventually, he acquiesced and accepted a position at the nearby Cassequel sugar factory on the central Angolan coast. Predictably, relations with his parents improved almost immediately, and they, in turn, granted Santana permission to go to a local field after work to watch his football idols practicing and, every once in a while, to kick the ball around himself. Eventually, Santana caught the eye of the manager of the team sponsored by the sugar company, Sport Clube da Catumbela, and with his father’s consent he joined the squad and was accordingly excused from work each afternoon.
Meanwhile, in Mozambique, the case of Armando, who was born in 1943 in Chamanculo, a Maputo suburb, and who would eventually go on to play for Sporting Lisboa, similarly highlights this footballing passion and the attendant tension it could generate. Growing up in a poor family, at a young age he began helping his mother sell fish, but by as early as eight years old he had already begun stealing away to play soccer with other kids in an open space in front of the market. Moreover, on the way to or from a customer’s dwelling, he regularly snuck in some football; oftentimes, he utilized the basket he ought to have been using to deliver the fish as a goalpost! His passion for the game unfaltering, upon eventually starting school at age twelve Armando often skipped out on his education to play soccer, unbeknownst to his parents. Once caught, he was roundly punished and told he could never play football again. Chastened, he was never truant again, or even tardy. Nor, however, did he lose his passion for the game, and he quickly found ways to reincorporate soccer into his life, eventually playing each day after school, from 4:00 p.m. until the sun set.14
Football as Facilitator: Connections and Transcensions
The growth of neighborhood soccer produced novel ways for African players to interact and connect with one another. Players of different ages mixed, individuals with different professions and means battled with and against one another, younger siblings found even more ways to idolize their talented older siblings, status was generated and lost, and in some, albeit rare, cases, the sons of settler families would play alongside or against Africans. Commenting on this sporting and social miscellany, Matine recalled that these neighborhood matches featured, among others, “carpenters, masons, and various apprentices, some who ironed clothes in a family’s house, some who washed clothes in the suburb, in the river . . . some who were cotton pickers.”15 At other times, age rather than occupational discrepancies generated otherwise uncommon social/sporting partnerships. In the case of Matateu, it was during the 1930s in the streets of Minkadjuine, in Lourenço Marques, where he allegedly, “as a child,