Futebol, colonialismo e associativismo em Lourenço Marques (C. 1910-50)

Abstract

This research analyses the relations between soccer and colonialism in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo, capital of Mozambique) from the first decade of the 20th century, when several sports clubs started to be founded. From the analysis of journalistic sources such as O Africano and O Brado Africano, periodicals of circulation of the colonial environment together with bibliographic sources, a Social History of Football and Colonialism was made in Lourenço Marques. Thus, with this formulation, we will not only see soccer, but its logic in the context of the Portuguese colonial plot in Mozambique. The exclusive formation of the city of Lourenço Marques and its segregational dynamics that ended up creating two distinct worlds, the Portuguese colonial world, the "city of cement", and the world destined for the "African" peoples, the suburbs, were addressed. The ways in which the game was practiced in this segregated context are exposed and the creation of associations and clubs is described, both in the great colonial center and the suburbs. The work synthesizes the double way of the associativism process in colonial times and how this phenomenon served both as a control and as a resistance for those who executed it. With a final emphasis, it addresses the questions of how African cosmovisions, especially those of southern Mozambique, were adapted to the colonial context, making soccer a place of invention of traditions and resistance to colonialism.