4 ideas
Because Italy ends the war on the winning side, the Fascist regime keeps power and its African colonies until 1960. That year Lorenzo Pellegrini, a sports reporter, is sent to cover the colonial football championship, and the tournament becomes his route into what Italian rule in Africa actually looks like.
A dictatorship's survival depends less on its ideology than on whether it ends up on the winning side of a geopolitical conflict. Once Fascist Italy is useful to the Allies, the democracies accept it as a partner and leave its colonial and repressive apparatus untouched. Moral condemnation of a regime follows strategic alignment rather than preceding it.
A football league looks apolitical, so it shows how a colonial system really works with its official propaganda stripped away. Who plays for which team, who fills the stands, and how the matches are reported all expose the racial hierarchy and the regime's image management. A reporter assigned to trivial beat coverage ends up recording the system's contradictions more honestly than political journalism can.
Once an authoritarian regime lasts long enough, it stops feeling like an emergency and becomes the ordinary backdrop of daily life. People pursue careers, follow the football, and absorb censorship and racism as normal working conditions. This everyday accommodation, more than active belief, is what keeps the regime going.