Recreation and empire

Throughout nineteenth-century colonial empires, whether British, French, Portuguese or Spanish, government officials saw football and other sports—especially cricket in the Brit­ish case—as part of their ‘civilising mission’.² Football’s key elements of organisation, teamwork and team spirit, and fitness itself represented not merely the fundaments of empire but constituted a metaphor for Christian faith.

Educationalists also supported empire and waxed unduly eloquent over the virtues of sport overseas. The headmaster of the elite Harrow School in the 1880s stated that

the pluck, the perseverance, the good temper, the self-control, the discipline, the co-operation, the esprit de corps, which merit success in cricket or football, are the very qualities which win the day in peace and war... In the history of the British Empire it is written that England has owed her sovereignty to her sports.³

Colonial schools sought to instil ‘character’ as much as knowledge, hence games were as important as intellectual pursuits. Missions were rarely far away from sportsgrounds. In Britain’s Mediterranean outpost of Malta, football emerged, ‘in emulation of the muscular Christianity espoused by the British [and] was inseparable from the pedagogic methods of the middle-class Christian religious orders’.⁴

Colonialism sought not just a moral order of discipline and rectitude, but also a visual order of hygiene and continuous improvement. Colonial demands that local people present themselves in a particularly clean and disciplined manner established a ‘new form of per­sonhood’ that offered to remake people in a new and more positive way.⁵ Football enabled that sense of order, a means of acquiring a new image and a semblance of modernity.

The games were instruments of socialisation that infused group spirit and a sense of belonging, bringing together diverse groups, officers and men, colonials and colonised, with respect for hierarchies and rituals. In the British colonies, cricket—the established sport of empire, Christianity and the elite—often preceded football by several decades. However football, perhaps surprisingly so, in view of its widespread (but erroneous) perception as a more working-class sport, also proved a vehicle for the elite, as in one match in India in 1868 where the Indian Civil Service produced two teams, divided by class, with the Etonians (the products of Britain’s most elite secondary school) defeating The Rest 3—0 and Lord Vansit­tart scoring two of the goals. The first recorded football match in South Africa in 1862 was played between Officers and the Civil Service, while other teams included the elite Diocesan College and the 11th Regiment. Football thus replicated the class divisions of empire.⁶

The last two decades of the nineteenth century, the great period in the global expansion of football, whether through commerce, Christianity or colonialism, coincided with for­malisation of playing rules in London, which contributed to its homogeneity in the empire. Both football and empire required rules and regulation. The form of the game was crucial since on such parallels hung attitudes, rules, leadership, teamwork, community feeling, self­imposed discipline and organisational and emotional associations.⁷ Not surprisingly, such optimism foundered even if the basic form of football at least was always exactly that of the colonial powers. Although very much later, Albert Camus—pied-noir and goalkeeper in colonial Algeria—reputedly remarked that ‘everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe to football’,⁸ such lyrical images were not usually realistic.

Despite its elite colonial origins, football almost literally offered a more level playing field. Simple rules and no sophisticated equipment—or even skills—meant that the game was invaluable for empires often run on a shoestring.

Football emerged from the colonial bureaucracy, the military, missions, schools and the commerce of empire. Typically, as in Uganda, from its early twentieth-century origins, football was a key symbol of modernity particularly associated with the modern institutions of the colonial state.⁹ It grew fastest in cities and at new industrial sites, mines and plantations, everywhere where groups of men came together. It filtered through the ports, and followed the routes of railways into the interior.

Other colonial powers proved less certain than Britain about the value of sport. In Portugal there was some perception that the only sports that might be usefully transferred to ‘natives’ involved ‘natural means’ such as running and jumping, while team sports that required discipline and organisation could not easily be acquired. Literacy and music were perceived to be more valuable acquisitions. That perception was quickly disproved when football arrived in Mozambique in the early twentieth century and was adopted rapidly, enthusiastically and successfully. France was similarly reluctant for its colonial subjects to embrace football since that might challenge notions of European superiority, even in a formal context of assimilation, though missions did support local participation. Gymnastics was much to be preferred. Belgium too was uninterested in local involvement but the Belgian army were keen proponents of the game in the Congo, and in due course it became central to protest against the highly paternalistic colonial regime.¹⁰

Expansion of football was fastest in British colonies since Britain’s sporting culture was more developed than elsewhere in Europe. The first recorded African football matches in the 1860s involved white settlers in the Cape and Natal colonies of southern Africa, with games played between soldiers and public servants.

While the indigenous population might play football, they did not necessarily play with or against Europeans. Thus in Cameroon, football was initially a privilege almost exclusively reserved for the French, and even by the 1920s the only officially sanctioned games pitted local European teams against the crews of visiting merchant and naval ships. Africans were barred from such teams and prevented from playing against them, and only in small towns, with too few Europeans for separate teams, were teams integrated across ethnic divisions.¹¹

Where nineteenth-century British and European colonialism was more tenuous, and European power was blunted and opposed, David Goldblatt notes that ‘modern sports which appeared an inevitable fact of modern life and progress in Africa were viewed by many Asian elites as dangerous and distasteful alien practices’.¹² Rather later, in the early twentieth century, where there was limited European presence, as in China, organised sports of any kind remained largely absent, while later, in the Philippines and Japan, baseball dominated with elites swayed by American occupation and soft power. Curiously, in view of the dominance of cricket in subsequent South Asian sporting history, football made its greatest colonial inroads in India.