There is a particular kind of history that never enters the archive. It does not appear in state records, nor in the clean timelines of political struggle. It lives instead in kitchens, in cigarette smoke, in late-night laughter, in scars that are half-joke and half-warning. It lives in the way a godfather tells a story that begins as comedy and ends, without warning, in melancholy. It is this history that I found in conversation with my uncle Arthur—Tio Artur—and it is this history that now sits, improbably, wheat-pasted as a mural in Beirut.

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What began as a simple question about a football match turned riot, became a cartography of apartheid Johannesburg told from below: not from parliament, not from Robben Island, but from La Rochelle, from Hillbrow clubs, from fruit and veg shops, from pavements where you crossed the road not out of politeness but out of survival. As Artur puts it, “you either moved to the other side of the road or they would bliksem you.”

Tio Artur does not speak of ideology. He speaks of clubs: La Poupet, Cloud Nine (although difficult to escape), Barbarellas, Bella Napoli, The Sting, Clarendon. He speaks of slinging fifteen men across three cars because “we were stupid, we spread ourselves thin.” He speaks of becoming La Rochelle United not as a gang, but as a form of collective insurance. “One guy against ten guys, he’s got no chance,” he says. “So we said, we are stupid. We must go together.” If the Afrikaners would not protect you, if the police did not care whether “the Lebs and the Porras killed each other,” then the only structure available was the one you made yourself.

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Under apartheid’s taxonomy, the Portuguese occupied a curious position: imported in the 1960s from Madeira, and then after 1975 following the Carnation Revolution, to “bolster the white population,” they were never quite accepted as white by Afrikaners. They were foreign enough to be distrusted, Catholic enough to be suspect, poor enough to be humiliated. The Lebanese, also Catholic, also immigrant, also foreign, became the nearest available rival. Not because of theology, not because of politics, but because, as Artur says plainly, “they didn’t like that we were chirping their chicks, and taking their clubs.”

And here the language matters.

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Porras and Lebs were not names either community chose for themselves. They were terms coined and circulated by Afrikaners — linguistic shorthand’s for people who were never fully legible, never fully accepted, always slightly out of place. The insult comes first; the identity hardens around it later. Two communities, diminished by the same vocabulary, end up performing rivalry inside a box built for them by someone else.

History here does not begin with grand causes. It begins with pride, boredom, Friday nights, and being “moered” out of a club. From this, territories form. Clubs become borders. Hillbrow, Johannesburg, becomes a map of ethnographic fault lines. “We started going twenty, twenty-five guys,” Artur laughs, “so we had backup. We could fight the whole club.”

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And then the violence escalates, as it always does, from fists to knives, from bravado to vendetta. A stabbing. A .44 Magnum purchased with the sincere intention of murder. Parties crashed. Weddings turned into battlegrounds. A hospital ward where the stabbed and the stabber are admitted on opposite sides and continue fighting across bedsheets and bed pans. It is absurd. It is tragic. It is completely believable.

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But the real origin story of La Rochelle is not the Lebanese rivalry. It is the Afrikaners.

Arthur describes the “Duck Tails”—Afrikaner youths with comb-overs and mullets who ruled the pavements. Portuguese children crossing the street to avoid being assaulted. Being asked for your pass on your own road. “You want to see your moer, sea-kaffir? Move,” they would say. A fruit shop incident where an Afrikaner girl calls older men to beat a Portuguese boy half to death for looking at her as she passed the shop.

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And then, one day, the Toppies—the older Portuguese men—have had enough.

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Two Afrikaners are killed in a courtyard with coal stones and gravity. Portuguese Women and children line Johannesburg Road while a hundred police cars drive up and down in a pulse of blue and red interrogation… and nobody speaks. Nobody is arrested. Something switches permanently. The Afrikaners begin leaving La Rochelle. The Portuguese begin buying and fixing the houses. La Rochelle becomes “Little Portugal.” Not through policy, but through a riot of collective refusal.

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This is the psychological landscape in which the football riot occurs.

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The match is almost incidental: Lusitano Johannesburg versus Hellenic Cape Town. A referee making bad calls. A crowd already trained by a decade of defending itself. Artur says it plainly: “You only need one idiot with courage to jump the fence.” Then everyone follows.

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The photograph appears in the Portuguese newspaper, O Seçulo. My grandfather—arriving home from work—sits at the kitchen table with the paper. Someone has shown him. He holds the newspaper in both hands, squinting at an image he cannot quite decipher but immediately understands: his son, mid-chaos, mid-field invasion, mid-arrest, frozen in print for all of Johannesburg to see. The fury is instant and theatrical. Not loud, not explosive, but the kind that sits heavy in the room. A man who has crossed oceans, who measured twice because life rarely fits the first time, who bent wood into the table he sat at, who built a house brick by brick, now confronted with proof that his son is publicly behaving like a hooligan. He does not need to read the caption to know what has happened. He points at the photograph and says that one day you will regret certain things. Not because of morality, but because of probability: you are living on a knife edge, and eventually you will fall to the wrong side. The humour of the situation, retold years later, lies in the absurdity that this is how he finds out — not from police, not from neighbours, but from the morning paper, like discovering your child has accidentally become famous for the worst possible reason.

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Not the riot. Not the fight. But the kitchen.

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A father, a newspaper, a son who has accidentally become public. The domestic space invaded by the spectacle of street masculinity. The quiet warning of a man who understands systems better than the boys do.

Because what Artur understands, in hindsight, is that they were performing a form of survival theatre inside a state that had already declared them peripheral. “Nobody would stand up for another ethnicity,” he says. Greeks with Greeks. Lebanese with Lebanese. Portuguese with Portuguese. A micro-apartheid beneath the macro-apartheid. And all of it narrated in names that were never theirs to begin with.

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And then the crucial turn: when guns arrive, Artur leaves. “Before we used fists,” he says. “When they started bringing guns, I said no, not for me.” The younger boys keep the name La Rochelle United as a shield, but he walks away. Marriage, work, exhaustion, adulthood, fatherhood. The comedy of sleeping under cars on a mechanic’s creeper until 10 a.m. because you’ve been fighting all night gives way to the realization: “This is hard fucking work.” He laughs about jacking up a car, sliding under on the creeper, and sleeping until his boss woke him at ten. “I was fresh. I slept four hours.”

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There is a final, quiet inversion that Arthur could never have predicted. His god son now sends artwork to be installed as a mural in Beirut. The mural in Beirut exists because of Nabil Assaf— the Lebanese street artist he is working with — who organised for this story of Portuguese boys in apartheid Johannesburg to be pasted onto a wall in his city. And now, in a strange and tender reversal, he finds himself organising for Nabil to paint a mural on the outskirts of Bez Valley, in the old Portuguese neighbourhood where he was born. It feels like a peaceful turf war across generations: no knives, no fists, no clubs, no territory to defend — only walls offered to one another as gestures of trust. Where once “Porras” and “Lebs” were names thrown from outside to divide, now a Portuguese artist and a Lebanese artist are trading neighbourhoods as invitations. The rivalry has become collaboration. The inheritance has softened. What was once defended with bodies is now shared with images.

The mural now in Beirut is a strange return of this story to another geography of ethnic tension, club culture, masculinity, migration, and neighbourhood pride. Beirut understands territoriality. It understands how history lives in streets, not textbooks. It understands how Catholic immigrants can still be outsiders. It understands how fathers read newspapers with dread.

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So the collage of his grandfather and the newspaper is not nostalgia. It is a diagram.

It is about how boys become symbols without realizing it. How communities form militias without calling them that. How apartheid produced not only victims and oppressors, but also strange in-between peoples who had to invent their own forms of protection, dignity, and foolishness.

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Artur laughs while telling these stories.

He says, “You can’t make this shit up.”

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He is right.

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But art can rearrange it.