Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

A Portuguese influence is easier to establish for the razor. The navalha, which translates both as razor or
jackknife, figures prominently in the Lisbon underworld. Its main user was the fadista, a term denominating
not only a singer of melancholic fados, but also a wider social type who belonged, with prostitutes, pimps,
vagrants and sailors, to the milieu of Lisbon marginality. Fadista meant a tough guy who liked fights and
disorder. Marcos Bretas drew attention to the cultural proximity between the fadista and the capoeira, and
Carlos Eugênio Soares has shown how technical terms such as sardinha, rasteira and even ginga were used
on both sides of the Atlantic, in the fadista slang of Lisbon and the capoeira jargon from Rio. 75 Since the
significant presence of the Portuguese in Cariocan capoeira coincided with the adoption of the razor as the
preferred weapon, one can safely assume that their specific skills in its handling also spread among
practitioners. These changes provide further evidence that transformations of the social context inevitably
impacted on the formal aspects of capoeira practice. We can therefore assume that this has always been the
case, even though the available sources do not allow us to track these changes accurately for earlier periods.
By the late nineteenth century capoeira in Rio de Janeiro combined five complementary fighting
techniques: head butts, foot kicks, open hand blows, knife and stick techniques (see Figure 3.7). No source
suggests that this kind of combination ever existed in Africa. The fusion of these disparate techniques
shows how problematic the thesis of a Bantu ‘enduring central paradigm’ is in the case of Cariocan
capoeira. 76 Capoeira was not an isolated cultural practice, but an urban phenomenon reflecting and
influencing the historical process that lead to the formation of Cariocan, and by extension, Brazilian society.
To what extent capoeira creolized is further documented by the substantial changes that affected its cultural
and political meaning in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Nagoas and Guaiamus: the capoeira gangs
CAPOEIRAGEM IN RIO DE JANEIRO 83
Figure 3.7 Open-handed blow and a razor attack ‘A Lamparina’ (left); kick to the chest (corresponds to benção in
twentieth-century practice) ‘Meter o Andante’ (centre); and head butt ‘A Cocada’ (right). Drawings by Calixto Cordeiro.
Revista Kosmos, No. 3 (March 1906). Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, a specific form of association, the maltas, consolidated
among the capoeiras in Rio de Janeiro. Although one suspects that they might have formed at an much
earlier stage, solid evidence for the existence of structured gangs—as opposed to loose groups which
assembled rather spontaneously—only exists for the 1840s onwards. Soares categorically affirms that gangs
(maltas) constituted the basic structure of capoeira activity since its beginnings. The data to support his
claim is that half of the arrests for capoeira in the period 1808–1850 were made in groups. However, most
of these ‘groups’ were composed of only two or three individuals! Soares’ conclusion that there were seven
‘principal gangs’ in the city in 1817 rests only on the fact that one officer required the arrest of