Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

PASTINHA AND ANGOLA STYLE 155
Pastinha was not—unlike Bimba and many other capoeiras of his time—an active practitioner of
candomblé, although he always showed great respect for Afro-Bahian religion. In some pages of his
manuscripts he refers to the ‘sacred Scripts’ and Jesus, revealing his strong belief in a Christian god. 41 In an
interview he declared to be ‘neither Catholic, nor of candomblé. I believe in God, only one God’ and
asserted his respect for all religions. 42 For Pastinha, capoeira Angola constituted an equally ‘sacred
patrimony’ which he passionately aspired to preserve. His often stated necessity to ‘love’ capoeira Angola
probably was a sentiment akin to love in the Christian faith. According to his friend the sculptor Mário
Cravo ‘Pastinha was a mystic, because he lived capoeira with intensity and made his own interpretation of
the mystic universe’. 43
In accordance with his faith stood the duty to serve his community. Given the past animosities among
capoeiras, Pastinha considered it his responsibility to help organizing the Angoleiro community through the
CECA: ‘we should not remain isolated, because [then] there is nothing we can do; the popular saying is
more than right which says: unity gives strength’. 44 M.Pastinha passionately defended this ideal during his
entire life, because he believed capoeira Angola deserved much higher regards than it was commonly given
by society. He was convinced that ‘capoeira is trying to enter, and live in society, [and] the actual and future
capoeirista is respectful, and decent’. 45 According to him, all mestres had the duty to teach capoeira Angola,
and he blamed those who ‘deserted’ from that obligation:
A friend asked me that question: Pastinha, why does this comrade not play with skill? Yes, because
they did not teach him to play within the rules; all mestres have to know the rules and many do not. I
know mestres who know as much as I do, but they do not teach; everybody knows that when the cat
taught the jaguar, what happened? 46
In other words, although be condemned the reluctance of many mestres to teach, he recognized the necessity
for the teacher to always keep at least one secret resource. That is why the cat, when teaching the jaguar,
omitted to teach one move, which helped him to escape when the jaguar decided to eat the cat. In Pastinha’s
case this was said to be the movement called pulo da onça (‘the leap of the jaguar’). 47
Why did Pastinha and his companions advocate so strongly for the traditional capoeira modality to be
called and identified with Angola? Afro-American culture and identity in Bahia, was, perhaps more than in
many other plantation regions, based on specific ‘nations’, that had reconstituted themselves under slavery.
After the end of the slave trade and even more so after abolition, religious communities became the
‘principal repositories’ of African derived cultural traditions. 48 The identification with a specific ‘nation’
was crucial for the establishment of a concrete link with an African homeland. It was more appealing for
Bahians of African descent and offered a stronger symbolism than ‘Afro-Brazilian’, a relatively recent term,
which only started to be adopted and propagated at the time, mostly by academics.
More important than a concrete biological ancestry, which in the end could not matter that much in a
highly mixed population, it meant the adoption of a specific, African derived tradition. It certainly struck a
chord with anybody acquainted with the ‘nations’ in candomblé. In 1937, 15 candomblé shrines, out of the
67 founding members of the ‘Union of Afro-Brazilian Sects’, declared to be of the Angola ‘nation’, and
another seven claimed to belong to ‘nations’ also broadly identified with the Kongo/Angola region. 49 As we
have seen in Chapter 4, Angola in this context represented a neo-African identity of slaves and their
descendants in the American diaspora rather than an original African ethnicity or the actual state with that
name. Asserting that capoeira was the continuation of an Angolan manifestation constituted therefore a
perfectly coherent practice in the context of Afro-Bahian culture of the post-emancipation period, even
though Pastinha innovated in so far as he applied the concept of ‘nation’ to another type of manifestation.