Creating national identity

Colonialists invariably saw football, like other sports, as a means of developing a form of recreation that might unite diverse colonies. In India both religious and educational authorities, perceiving the virtues of obedience to authority and teamwork, not merely promoted sporting development but by the end of the nineteenth century took teams from schools and churches on regional tours, according to one colonial administrator, to ‘pro­mote that feeling of friendship and union between the races of various parts of India which has hitherto been so little in evidence’.²⁰ In the twentieth century, regional and national league and cup competitions were established to promote national identity, though they could just as easily prove divisive where local and regional pride was at stake.

In India and Burma, for instance, national consciousness was greatest where local teams played against colonial teams, though most colonial governments anxiously ensured that this rarely happened. Victories, like that of Mohan Bagan in 1911, and violent clashes that ensued, were not to be repeated. Although the first league formed in India in 1898, it was exclusively for European clubs. No Indian club gained admission until 1914, when just two teams were allowed membership at any one time, a stipulation not removed until 1925. In these early years indigenous clubs played each other, remained largely separate from white interests, and posed no threat to colonial control of either football or society. Typically, colonial powers, sometimes belatedly, and despite the notion of a civilising mission, sought to retain control of one of their most successful introductions.

It was not enough for indigenous teams to beat the coloniser but it was, in some respects, necessary to become the coloniser. During the 1920s, four decades after Egyptians had learned football from British soldiers and other foreigners, Egyptian nationalists cast Egypt’s intrinsic worthiness for modern nationhood in relation to both the West and other colonised territories; football competitions ‘provided an inter­nationally recognized cultural arena for the performance and evaluation of postcolonial modernity’.²¹ Indeed, only then did football acquire national prominence in Egypt.

Between the wars, football had become as popular in many colonies as in Europe. While it might occasionally have appeared as a means of diverting aggression and opposition into regulated sporting encounters, as in Cameroon—the classic ‘opium of the masses’—it usually provided a welcome distraction from abhorrent or merely difficult colonial circumstances. It is unlikely, however, that sport slowed, distracted from or significantly discouraged pressures for independence.

Playing football enabled both detachment from local culture, and a means of expressing and developing indigenous moral qualities. Even in recent post-colonial history, the process of acquiring ‘development’ in parts of Papua New Guinea, an Australian colony until 1975, was perceived as a project that involved becoming more like white people. Football provided one mechanism to achieve this goal. Other means involved changing the appearance of villages through more formal housing, and adopting European clothing, the English language and Western norms of good behaviour: all had resonances with football. Whites were viewed as wealthy, disciplined and lawful. Great efforts were made by indi­genous people to reproduce the visually aesthetic effects of football, notably in proper uniforms (despite a uniform costing more than the average annual income), and shaking hands with and applauding the opposition. When violence occasionally occurred, players and spectators alike felt they had failed on the basis of value judgements that they traced to white people; hence they perceived themselves as unable to play for trophies in distant places. Football was about becoming more like white people, eliciting the context not of local culture but of football as a global sport, and one means of interaction with a wider world.²² Whereas in most parts of Africa, football challenged empire, without local white competition or a regional competition, New Guinea islanders had no context through which to achieve status.

In Africa, in particular, independence movements forged links with sports teams as an important vehicle for reaching the mass of the population. Stadiums and clubhouses became places where people came together to challenge colonial power, with football creating a fragile sense of nationhood in unwieldy geographical entities arbitrarily created by colonial powers. Football thereby enabled men to develop nationalist consciousness and challenge colonial authority. Egypt’s most famous club, Al Ahly, was founded in 1907 as a place where leaders of Cairo’s student unions could meet during their struggle against colonialism. Though its first chairman was an Englishman, the club’s management quickly decided to make membership exclusive to Egyptians, earning it the title of ‘the people’s club’; its red shirts symbolised patriotic resistance to British rule in the late 1920s, when Europeans were excluded from the club. Likewise African football clubs in Mozambique were forums of protest and assembly in a colony where political and union activity was severely constrained. At a more personal level, football represented one of the very few areas where Africans gained visibility through participating in what was seen as a noble activity with interpretative and creative components that indicated physical strength and intellectual ability.

Early international matches displayed nascent forms of nationhood. In Malta, the visit of a team from the French protectorate of Tunisia in 1923 was an early indication that Malta could participate in global affairs, a situation that recurred in many other colonies. When India played an international against China in 1936, local commentators observed how the crowd were united in their desire for an Indian victory and lamented wistfully that such unity could not be sustained off the football field.

In the 1930s, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who became the first president of Nigeria, founded black-controlled sports clubs to challenge racism and foster a sense of nationhood. A decade later he led goodwill tours throughout Nigeria, though the intended construction of a frail sense of national identity faced resistance in the largely Muslim north, where cul­tural and religious identity differed from the more heterogeneous south. Subsequently, in 1949, he led a tour to Britain, where the idea of football as a set of sporting values ‘for­mulated, propagated and held up as symbol of cultural superiority by the colonialists was now used by Zik and his press as a gauge of imperial decadence and unfitness to rule’.²³ If football success engendered some degree of national pride and a semblance of unity, that remained a substantial achievement in a large and fragmented country. Curiously, in the 1950s the first international club championship in Africa, between teams from South Africa and the Belgian Congo, was organised specifically by colonial authorities to demonstrate the virtues of colonialism. While international competitions helped build national identity, more subtle if banal notions of nationalism evolved from the organisation of competitions which demonstrated management competence and ‘asserted the humanity of black workers in a colonial political economy and, in the process, afforded African men new opportunities to acquire social honor’.²⁴ Women, significantly, were largely excluded from such processes and pleasures as football, from the playing fields, to the grandstands and boardrooms.

In Algeria football played an even more critical role in the process of decolonisation. During the war of independence of the 1950s, the National Liberation Front (FLN), which had earlier ordered the withdrawal of ethnic clubs from colonial leagues, formed a ‘national’ team in exile. This included some of the best Algerian professionals, formerly based in France, and it became a symbol of the struggling nation, legitimised the leader­ship of the FLN (especially as the best players had chosen to leave France to support the cause) and raised global awareness of the Algerian struggle. Football grounds became targets in attacks on the European population that formed part of the FLN’s bombing campaign during the ‘Battle of Algiers’ in 1956—1957. In a much more partisan venture than Azikiwe’s tour of Britain, the FLN created and sent its own national team around the world, as far as east Asia, between 1958 and 1961, literally flying the flag and singing the anthem of a country fighting for a wider audience. It played in countries seen as future allies of the Algerian Republic, including the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, North Vietnam and various Arab nations. Meanwhile, touring was impossible in western Europe since the global governing body, the International Football Federation (FIFA), had threatened severe penalties for any member nation that played the FLN team. A year after the tour ended, Algeria became independent.²⁵

International competition universally fostered nationalist sentiment and at least tem­porarily overrode local ethnic differences. Football more than anything else showed how, as Eric Hobsbawm argued, ‘the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people’.²⁶ Football proved a powerful means of envisaging the nation as an important and viable national identity and as the collectivity of those who lived there.

At the same time, domestic competitions sometimes challenged that sense of unity by emphasising regional distinctiveness. While national leagues linked nation and territory, and national teams enabled citizens to belong to the nation, however temporarily and tentatively, they simply masked often acute regional, ethnic, religious, political and other social divisions. In the late colonial era, leading clubs in Ghana had links to major political parties, and in Cameroon (divided between French and British colonisers) key clubs were associated with either francophone or anglophone speakers. Sport battened on to long­standing divisions and in turn emphasised those divisions, just as religion had done. Football posed complex paradoxes, and intense competition and collaboration, in relationships between nation, ethnicity and identity.