It is tempting to write that Nuno Domingos has written a book anyone can enjoy, but that would be hyperbole, however much my mind expanded while reading his book on football in Mozambique's colonial-era capital, Lourenço Marques. Football and Colonialism: Body and Popular Culture in Urban Mozambique is three histories rolled into one. It is an overview of mid-century football in Mozambique, an urban history of popular culture in colonial Mozambique, and an embodied history of how subalterns engaged the political economy of late Lusophone rule. To sum up the argument, as Domingos neatly does: ‘by absorbing the main traits of the colonial system, football became an embodied representation of a historical experience’ (18). In the same fashion that colonialism strove to regulate black people's lives, Domingos sees colonial sport as an effort to regulate black bodies and the movements that black footballers made while playing the game. Football matches — the pitches on which they took place, the equipment players used, and the spectators who thrilled to virtuosic play — reflected the exclusion and inequality of the colonial situation.

Domingos works with the relevant archival material in Maputo and Lisbon but also draws in voices of colour commentary from the contemporary African press, penned by observers such as José Craveirinha, one of the era's most important writers. Domingos also interviewed a number of key footballers from the 1950s and 1960s, and their testimony threads a verisimilitude through his story, especially in discussing the meaning of success, as well as how players found it, whether with ‘in-your-face’ feints or by calling upon powerful spiritual intervention.

An opening pair of chapters grounds readers in Mozambique's colonial capital, Lourenço Marques. In setting out the physical space in which the city developed, they also sketch the social and cultural terrain on which football would be played by Africans, Afro-Europeans, and Europeans. Above all, the spatial separation of the settler community from the black population is crucial for the history that follows, for football's emergence as a form of popular culture cannot be understood without a grasp of racial residential segregation. In the urban core, Europeans lived and competed using one style; in the surrounding black neighbourhoods, people lived and competed using another. We learn enough about European practices on and off the pitch to know the standard against which Africans were often measured, but Domingos gives most of his attention to life along the periphery. Sport reflected broader racial and class hierarchies, and football emerged bearing marks of the racial exclusion and exploitation characteristic to the region. Likewise, just as people's experience at large often differed from formal colonial practice, so, too, did black footballers play the game quite differently from the governing norms, upsetting the assimilationist aims of colonists and black petty bourgeoisie alike.

The middle pair of chapters is where Domingos truly hits his stride. Digressions into cultural theory largely fall away and he gives readers a visceral sense of how the game flowed on the sandy, sometimes uneven pitches in Mafalala, Xipamanime, and other black bairros. He constructs a stupendous dialog between Craveirinha, who in 1955 wrote a glossary of sorts interpreting players’ moves (what Domingos often calls their motor repertoire or gestures), and players’ own recollections of the terms Craveirinha explained, their memories fleshing out how they moved a foot or leg, shifted their weight, or switched up their tempo as they sought advantage. Such moves included efforts to intimidate, ridicule, or even injure an opponent, at times illegally. Domingos evokes the characteristic of malice to describe this style of play; as he puts it, there was ‘no room for nice boys’ (115). In creating this kind of football — with its many deviations from downtown and international norms — players engaged in ‘a theatre of subversion that expressed an alternative reading of the world’ (132).

Domingos also shows how players recognized and reached out to an alternative world itself, counting on witchcraft experts to influence match outcomes. This strategy might resemble universal sporting superstitions governing diet or equipment, but he lays out the specificity of such beliefs. Use of witchcraft was institutionalized — clubs hired and paid practitioners, and preparation and observance was no individual matter, but rather a collective undertaking. The most powerful witchcraft could alter the flow of time and ensure a victory, though the effect was always on the overall outcome — no magic could elevate individual skill or alter ‘the aesthetic level of the performance’ (146). Even as former players confirmed witchcraft's effectiveness, Domingos notes an ambivalence lurking around its significance. After all, the ‘legitimacy of their careers’ required an affirmation of ‘talent and individual worth’, rather than the intervention of someone who might not even show up at the match (142).

The later chapters in the book show us how African football institutions evolved in the last decade or so of colonial rule. The colonial situation changed, and so, too, did football. Portugal sought to rebut anticolonial critiques, renaming its colonies as ‘overseas provinces’ — a lexical sleight-of-hand that left Africans’ political status unchanged. Still, the discursive collapsing of empire's spatial order accompanied African footballers gaining fame in Europe. Players who developed their skills on sandy pitches led Portugal's top teams to great heights in the 1960s. Such movement started when the urban-centre, formerly whites-only clubs in Lourenço Marques poached some African teams’ best players, who then went on to star in the metropole. While good for individual players, and for football overall, the bleeding of talent left some of the African clubs bereft of players. This partial and highly selective undoing of the colonial order saw the integration of African teams into the downtown league, though on an unequal basis, as they occupied the lowest rung in the league's hierarchy.

The three-in-one character of the book is mostly a success, even if not all readers will appreciate some of the slightly repetitive dives into cultural theory or more technical excursions into the history of football (Chapter Six has a dozen or so such pages, complete with diagrams, on the history of the WM system, a 1920s-era formation for positioning players on the pitch). Still, this approach fits with the ‘something for everyone’ nature of the work. This book could easily be slotted into an advanced undergraduate or graduate level cultural or sports history course, and would also serve students interested in African or global history.