Rising Symbol for a Falling Empire: The African Footballer Eusébio

Abstract

The portrayal of racial differences was crucial to defining Portugal’s imperial project, although the importance of such differences was publicly denied. This chapter focuses on the emergence of the footballer Eusébio as a public figure in 1961, the same year the colonial war started in Angola, to understand the ambiguous status of racial difference in the political strategy of the final years of the Estado Novo dictatorship. The chapter discusses the historical coincidence and analyses the media coverage of sporting figures from the colonies to interpret both the representations of war and the evolution of colonial discourse regarding Portugueseness and the country’s relationship with Africa and the Africans.