CHAPTER 1
Football
Ecstatic fans in vast stadiums. Carefree kickabouts on golden beaches. The unmistakeable yellow shirts. Jogo bonito ('beautiful game'). Brazilian football evokes many images, but the country's relationship with the sport is far more complex than the clichés suggest. Since its introduction in the 1890s, football has not only entertained but been made use of to exclude and to control.
When Brazil became a republic in 1889, it was a country of more than three million square miles and around ten million people. Most of the population were illiterate and disenfranchised, and slavery had only just been abolished. Although Brazil had a monarchy, which may explain why it did not split into different countries, more was needed to weld together this disparate assortment of peoples, interests and influences. Football helped to provide this, and became a national passion.
'The English invented it, Brazilians perfected it' (old Brazilian saying)
Fable has it that in 1894 Charles Miller, the Brazilian-born son of a Scottish rail engineer, returned from his schooling in England with a football tucked under his arm and went on to ignite Brazil's infatuation with football. Miller organized matches of this strange new game, as did another son of British immigrants, Oscar Cox, who founded Brazil's first football club, Fluminense, in 1902.
At the outset, football in Brazil was the leisure pursuit of privileged Anglo-Brazilians, who did not appreciate their 'noble game' being played by the largely non-white lower classes, and did their best to prevent others from playing or even watching the sport. The elite's determination to keep football for the white and rich was rooted as much in an attempt to maintain the status quo as in racist Victorian attitudes. In 1888 Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery and, by the time football arrived, the country had a growing underclass largely made up of former slaves. The elite, who had retained most of their privileges, were eager to find something to demonstrate their difference from the hoi polloi. Football appeared to fit the bill.
However, the ease with which the game could be understood and played made it difficult for the privileged class to keep the new sport to itself. By 1910 makeshift pitches had sprung up across Brazil, as informal kickabouts took place on streets and spare pieces of land, with oranges or rolled-up socks for balls.
In a last-ditch attempt to keep out the underclass, Brazil's official clubs insisted that players must be amateurs and have another source of income, largely ruling out black players from poorer backgrounds. Mixed-race players who managed to join official clubs were subjected to racist abuse and vilification; Fluminense gained its nickname, pó de arroz (rice powder), because a mixed-race player, Carlos Alberto, used to whiten his skin with rice powder before matches in an attempt to fit in.
It was not until Vasco da Gama, Rio's Portuguese club, started picking players because of their ability rather than their race that the white elite's grip on the game began to loosen. According to Alex Bellos, in his book Futebol, The Brazilian Way of Life, Vasco got round the insistence on amateur status by employing their players in the shops and factories of Rio's Portuguese community. When the elite clubs responded by insisting that players know how to write their own names in order to play in matches – a test that most of Vasco's illiterate players failed – the club organized literacy lessons and got many players to shorten their long names, starting the tradition of Brazilian players using abbreviations or nicknames.
Bellos argues that football's racist origins also helped to forge the Brazilian style of play: black players who came up against white players used dribbling and other improvised skills to avoid physical contact with their opponents and the retaliation that could be expected to follow.
Brasil tetracampedo
A 2–0 victory by a team of Sao Paulo and Rio's best players over visiting Exeter City in 1914 is generally considered Brazil's first international match, but it was not until 1938 that the power of football as a unifying national force was fully realized. President Getulio Vargas, who had come to power on the back of an uprising in 1930, centralized the sport, creating a national football council and funding Brazil's trip to the 1938 World Cup in France. There, for the first time, Brazil made it past the first round, eventually reaching the semi-finals. The team and its style of play were personified by centre-forward Leonidas, who became Brazil's first football hero (whom many Brazilians credit with inventing the bicycle kick). The national team, or seleção, became a symbol that all Brazilians could understand and get behind.
Amateurism collapsed in Brazil in the early 1930s, thanks largely to the introduction of professional contracts by European clubs, which meant that Brazilian clubs risked losing their players unless they paid them. By 1933, Sao Paulo and Rio had professional leagues, with one Rio club, Bonsucesso, fielding a team of eleven black players in its inaugural year. Football was finally open to all Brazilians.
The rising importance of Brazil as a power in football was recognized in 1950, when the country was chosen to stage the first FIFA World Cup after the Second World War. The famous Estadio do Maracaña was built in Rio for the tournament, and on 16 July 1950 some 200,000 spectators crowded into it, expecting to see the national team defeat Uruguay in the final and take the Jules Rimet trophy. However, Uruguay won 2–1, sparking tears, heart attacks and even some suicides among fans.
The next World Cup was held in Switzerland in 1954. Brazil was again one of the favourites. This time they were knocked out by Hungary, in what went down in football history as the infamous 'Battle of Berne'. Three players were sent off, and the Brazilian team and supporters invaded the Hungarian dressing-room after the match, keen to continue the fight. The Brazilians were called 'animals' for their behaviour, and over the following decades this negative view of Latin American teams prevailed.
The seleção's hour arrived at last in 1958 in Sweden. Their victory owed much to the arrival of a new star: Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé. Only 17 at the time of the tournament, the Brazil number 10 scored two goals in the final against the home team, and Brazil went on to win 5–2.
Brazil won again in 1962, but it is the dazzling team of the 1970 tournament that is widely considered the greatest of all time. Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostao and, of course, Pelé inspired the seleção to a third victory, the footage of which – broadcast around the world in colour for the first time – helped to cement the iconic status of the team in the yellow shirts.
The seleção of the 1982 World Cup, featuring the likes of Zico, Sócrates and Falcão, gained almost as much adulation, although it was knocked out in the second round by the more defensive and pragmatic Italians. Brazil went on to win the 1994 and 2002 World Cups, though never with quite the same attacking verve.
If football is sometimes a matter of life and death in Brazil, it is also a commodity. Brazilian football is a potent brand, used to sell everything from sporting goods to holidays, and thousands of Brazilian footballers have been exported to play in foreign leagues.
The sport has also made fortunes and political careers. During the military regime, giant stadiums were built across the country in an attempt to bolster political support for the government. Corruption scandals, rigged matches and bribed referees in the domestic leagues are common, and many of the clubs and federations have been run by the same officials for decades. Known as cartolas (literally 'top hats'), these officials enjoy immense power and prestige and have become wealthy men. Election candidates still make donations to local teams in exchange for votes.
However, football is also a means of challenging the status quo. During an international match in Paris in 1978, for example, TV cameras could not help showing the giant banners unfurled by Brazil supporters in the crowd calling for an amnesty for political prisoners. Several players have been prominent political activists, notably Sócrates, an outspoken pro-democracy campaigner during the military dictatorship.
In 2013, as the seleção made unexpected progress towards the final of the Confederations Cup – an international association football tournament for national teams, currently held every four years by FIFA – hundreds of thousands of Brazilians poured on to the streets to protest about growing inequality, corruption and poor public services. Broken government promises that public money would not be used to fund the huge expense of building new stadiums – several of which were built in remote cities without a prominent local team or even much of local football tradition – and infrastructure for the 2014 World Cup meant that public anger was also directed towards FIFA and the football establishment.
Demonstrations were organized to coincide with Brazil matches, and signs began to appear warning people not to go to World Cup matches, and demanding that public money be spent on schools, hospitals and public transport instead of on stadiums that most Brazilians would never enter as they wouldn't be able to afford the tickets. Many superstar members of the seleção belatedly threw their support behind the protests, perhaps shocked that football, previously untouchable, was suddenly playing second fiddle to the concerns and rights of ordinary people.
Women's football
The most talented woman footballer in the world is Marta Vieira da Silva, a Brazilian chosen FIFA World Player of the Year five times and known as 'Pelé in skirts'. But the national women's team has received little encouragement from Brazil's football authorities. Between 1965 and 1982, women were banned altogether from the game. But recent signs are more hopeful: a new women's football league of 20 teams began in December 2013, with funding from a state bank, and Brazil has decided to bid for the 2019 Women's World Cup. Brazil's Sports Minister Aldo Rebelo was determined: 'If we don't get it for 2019, then we'll have to look at another year, possibly 2023.' Could it be that the macho world of Brazilian football is at last going to make space for women?
CHAPTER 2
Culture
Brazilian culture is spectacularly vibrant and rich, something that is no doubt a consequence of the country's huge geographical and ethnic diversity, and the enormous social and economic upheavals it has undergone, from the impact of colonialism and slavery, through successive waves of modernization, to its contemporary prominence in the globalized world. At the level of popular culture, African and Amerindian traditions lie at the heart of Brazilian music, dance, popular religion and a huge array of regional and local festivities. But Brazil has also produced some of the most radical and influential experimental movements in the arts, from the avant-garde modernist poets, painters, composers and prose writers of the 1920s, such as Mario de Andrade, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Oswald de Andrade, with his theory of 'cultural cannibalism', to the innovators in the visual and performance arts in the years since the Second World War, such as the Concretists and Neo-Concretists, Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, and the Tropicalistas.
Although less known abroad, a strong tradition of fiction and poetry is belatedly reaching non-Brazilian audiences in translation, and it includes world-class names such as Machado de Assis, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Guimaraes Rosa, Clarice Lispector and João Cabral de Melo Neto. At every step, Brazilian culture has brought together a deep sense of local, regional and national identities, a cosmopolitan appetite for international innovation and a magical ability to incorporate, synthesize and recreate in fresh, original ways.
Search for identity
The search for a distinctive Brazilian identity to replace the prevailing Eurocentrism of art and politics permeated much of the 20th century's literature, art and music. Indigenous and black culture were rediscovered and the dehumanization of the modern industrial world rejected. Out went waltzes and polkas, in came the samba. Erudite composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wove the popular rhythms and melodies of the choro into his music and created the famous Bacchianas Brasilianas. Mário de Andrade wrote Macunaíma, the story of an anti-hero. Based on a legend of the Makuxi Indians, Macunaíma is an outrageous, amoral trickster and survivor who lives on his wits and so was seen as a fitting hero for modern Brazilians. For some, the book was also the first example of what was to become Latin America's most successful literary export, magical realism. The Week of Modern Art, first held in 1922 to mark 100 years of independence, became a landmark annual event.
In 1928 Tarsila do Amaral painted her famous Abaporu, launching the Anthropophagic Movement, intended to 'swallow' European culture, subvert its oppressive colonial power and turn it into something culturally very Brazilian, just as cannibals ate their enemies in order to absorb their qualities. In the 1940s and 1950s Candido Portinari, inspired by the Soviet Union's social realism, painted workers in the coffee plantations or at the docks, and refugees fleeing the drought, making the ordinary man and woman the centrepiece of his art. He also painted two giant panels, War and Peace, for the UN headquarters in New York, before dying of paint poisoning.
In the 21st century, Brazil's search for its own identity continues, as the country's economic performance far outstrips its achievements in the fields of social and human development. Is it moving into the elite band of rich countries or is it still a developing country?
Music
It's hard to do justice to the range and richness of Brazilian music. On the one hand, there is the core music of Brazil's popular traditions, such as the intensely polyrhythmic, percussive batucada and maracatu, descended from Congolese slave traditions, and their Yoruba equivalent in the Blocos Afro of Bahia; the upbeat accordion-based dance music called forró, and sertaneja – Brazil's country music; and any number of variants of samba: from the improvised, small-ensemble songsmiths of partido alto and carnival-style samba-enredo, to samba rock and samba reggae. At the same time, an endless dialogue since the early 20th century with contemporary and international currents, from Caribbean beats to European electronica and US hip-hop, makes for an amazingly dynamic and varied scene, with ever-changing hybrid styles. The internet has given musicians and singers in the far corners of Brazil access to sounds, trends and instruments they never knew about before. Recently, this explosion of internationalized voices and hybrid styles has created a powerful soundscape for a discontented youth movement to speak critically of social and political issues, just as a previous generation did in the 1960s. In a country where until recently so few people could read, music is an important form of communication; the result is that jingles, whether for politicians during elections or for consumer products, are ever present on radio stations.
While bossa nova turned into a global sensation after Tom Jobim's song 'The Girl from Ipanema' became an international hit in 1964, a second wave of left-wing protest singers, including Edu Lobo, Nara Leao, Geraldo Vandre, Baden Powell and Chico Buarque, politicized the new music to call for grassroots reforms and to oppose the recently installed dictatorship. Then came the Jovem Guarda, a youth pop movement whose main exponent was Roberto Carlos, inspired by American rock and the Beatles, focusing on dreams of a better material life, ignoring the political reality.
But in 1967, three years after the military had taken power by force, a group of talented musicians from Bahia, among them Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and brother and sister Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethania, brought the Tropicália movement to Rio and Sao Paulo and ignited a brief cultural revolution. With a provocative, libertarian fusion of Brazilian and international influences, embracing electric rock and pop, the Tropicalistas' music, lyrics and entire attitude challenged conformity and conservatism (of both the right and left). When they began singing overtly political songs like 'E Proibido Proibir' (It's Forbidden to Forbid), many of them were arrested, imprisoned or exiled.
