Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

THE CAPOEIRA SCENE IN BAHIA 121
Figure 4.10 Mestre Caiçara was one of the last capoeira ‘troublemakers’ in Bahia. (Photo by the author,
Salvador, 1994.)
other people’. He related the knife and gun injuries to the ‘concentration of troublemakers’ in the area and
added a list of port professionals as if that were enough to explain violence. 120 In other words, he took on
board the identification of certain categories of workers with the ‘dangerous classes’, and acknowledged the
need for police intervention to finish with the troubles. It must be said that Noronha wrote his memoirs in the
1970s, when he recognized, retrospectively, the need for changing the culture of violence. His list of 47
‘great mestres’ that had died by then is noteworthy not only for the names but also for their occupations:
almost all of them were manual workers, and most of them worked in the harbour. Ten were porters
(canegadores), the single most important professional category in the list, followed by five dockers
(estivadores). Many worked as fishermen or fish traders and the rest in other artisan activities (shoemakers,
cart drivers, masons) or were just unskilled bootblacks. Three were electoral agents (cabo eleitoral) and
only one, Aufeu, was singled out as a professional ‘troublemaker’. 121
If almost none of the great mestres were professional troublemakers, but workers, how could they be
malandros and tough guys? I would like to suggest that malandro and valentão were not necessarily
synonyms in early twentieth-century Babia as suggested by most scholars. Whereas the malandro
distinguished himself by disguising his skills, only displaying them in an emergency, the valentão was
happy to boast about his toughness. Maybe the song ‘Oh, give me my money, tough guy/On my money
nobody lays hands’ reflects precisely the antagonism between a capoeira and a valentão. Furthermore, the
malandro typically did not work in a regular occupation, in contrast, as we have seen, to many Bahian
capoeiras. So how could a worker-capoeira be a rogue? First of all, malandragem of course could also be
used to fool the boss or headman or to deal with the authorities. But maybe malandragem also became an ideal,
which workers strove to live up to. 122 The roda certainly provided them with such a space, not only to relax
their tired bodies, but also to escape dominant values by living according to the ideology of idleness.
Although a young Bahian capoeira was likely to be a malandro, or a tough guy, or a worker, he rarely was
all three at the same time.