Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

PASTINHA AND ANGOLA STYLE 165
experience. Yet despite Pastinha’s greater proximity to Western intellectual traditions, he entered the history
book as the revitalizer of traditional vadiação. This should not necessarily surprise, as history is full of
visionaries who re-invented national, ‘anti-Western’ traditions based on the intimate knowledge of the West.
M.Pastinha showed how a man in his seventies could still play, do acrobatics and catch out much
younger capoeiristas. Capoeira for him was a holistic, spiritual exercise that even helped him to
fight aging. 94 Bimba, in contrast, stopped playing when he could not win any longer against younger
players. 95 Rather than interpreting their role only in terms of a simplistic white/black dichotomy, I would
suggest that their respective styles offered different solutions to the polarities between which all capoeira
practice ultimately evolved: fast and slow, ritual and combat, playful and antagonistic.
During one of his last interviews, Pastinha had said: ‘The secret of capoeira is dying with me and with
many other [old] mestres. Today there is only a lot of acrobatics and very little capoeira’. 96 During his last
years, and even more so after his death, capoeira Angola was depicted in the media as an art in extinction:
‘He [Pastinha] is the last capoeirista de Angola in Brazil, known in the whole country. He has no successors
nor students […]’ 97 The incredible revival of capoeira Angola after his death was to show how mistaken these
views were.