A local sport?

While football was exported by colonial masters, it acquired varied cultural characteristics in different destinations. In South Africa, by the 1920s, football was increasingly a working-class sport for black people, whereas rugby, cricket, tennis and golf were linked to white power and identity.

Indigenous urban migrants, such as port and mine workers, formed their own clubs and later leagues without foreign involvement and leadership. By the 1920s most colonial cities hosted several teams, usually organised by workplaces and government bodies (such as the police) or by district. Migrant workers used football clubs for social support, replacing what they had left behind in rural areas, so partly deferring the acquisition of national identity. The emergence of local teams thus contributed to divisions, along district, religious and ethnic lines, especially within cities, rather than to the loose nation-building virtues that colonialists (and later nationalists) had anticipated.

Colonial subjects took up football and employed it in ways different from those envi­saged by the colonial powers. It was not only muscular Christians who adopted football; it proved just as popular among Hindus and Muslims. Although infused with local elements, football as a game was largely accepted and unchanged, especially on the field of play. Yet certain styles and practices were much appreciated, particularly those involving subtle skills, trickery and artifice, with prominent local players who were invariably deemed to have mastered certain tricks that the British, more methodical and disciplined, had never acquired. Skills and athleticism, and the appropriate moral order of proper dress, applause and the suppression of anger, and ultimately success on the field, emphasised indigenous success at mastering a colonial game. Yet few of even the very best players moved beyond the colonies and then only at the very end of empire and invariably to countries, notably France and Portugal, that saw the colonies as overseas provinces and departments. The Mozambican Eusebio, who in 1961 arrived at Benfica in Lisbon, eventually became Por­tugal’s greatest player. A decade later, the Malian Jean Tigana, among others, came from Africa to France and literally changed the face of local and national teams.

Football nevertheless gradually evaded and avoided colonial discipline. By the end of the nineteenth century in Zanzibar, where football had been introduced in the 1870s, colonial authorities had difficulty in maintaining control over teams and leagues. While games were played by international rules, the incorporation of magicians, diviners, sorcerers and hea- lers—intended to strengthen local players—introduced a distinctive component. Some team names, like the Cape Coast Mighty Dwarfs (Ghana), invoked aspects of local mythology and cosmology, yet colonial connections were rarely far away. Many teams took names that smacked of colonial origins: Hearts of Oak in Accra, Jeanne d’Arc in Dakar, Bamako and La Reunion, Aston Villa in Accra and Sunderland in Dar es Salaam. Much later some names changed—Sunderland became Simba—but more often their retention evokes memories of colonial times. Nicknames of players in South Africa similarly emphasised colonial connections and new forms of consumption. Between the wars players were variously nicknamed ‘British Empire’—after the player had worked in the diamond mines—‘Cape to Cairo’ and ‘Prince of Wales’, or ‘Scotch Whisky’. Some Zulu players, however, acquired names once reserved for warriors and chiefs.¹⁹ Culture, colonialism and commercialism enmeshed in complex and evolving patterns.