Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

CONTEMPORARY CAPOEIRA 179
them are long dead, and it is impossible to ask them if they did recognize their students as having the level
of a mestre. 61 Equally important is the more informal peer recognition at events or street rodas; and
occasionally some teachers are vetoed by some of the older mestres to participate in an event. As we have
seen, the Brazilian state has tried to control the capoeira business through federations, but this was far from
successful. In 1998, president Cardoso passed a new law that regulates the profession of physical education. 62
Under that law any professional needs a diploma in physical education in order to teach capoeira or any
other physical activity, a recognition issued by the Federal Council of Physical Education and its regional
outlets. An exception is made only for instructors able to prove they have been teaching for three years
before the adoption of the law. Since this regulation will exclude many capoeira teachers without a formal
diploma, this law and its enforcement have been the object of heated debates and a number of protests in
recent years.
Two basic types of capoeira organizations emerged during the last four decades: groups and federations.
One academy with a mestre or even a teacher can form an independent group; but usually groups consist of
larger associations, where one mestre or a group of mestres and teachers maintain training venues in several
locations. The federations, in return, aim to establish institutional links between groups. The federations’,
and more recently the Brazilian Confederation’s, explicit aim was to ‘organize’ capoeira, providing
guidelines and support for local groups and a framework for more encompassing events. Federations have
been relatively successful in some states, in particular in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Yet even here many
groups felt that this kind of umbrella organization was not helpful, and resented patronizing bureaucrats and
political cooptation. Capoeira grew to its present size more through the groups than through federations.
Given the growing national integration and the intensity of migrations within Brazil, most if not all groups
important on a local level rapidly expanded to acquire a regional and national dimension, thus bypassing the
federations.
Most groups develop a strong identity and expect their nuclei in other states to adhere and conform to
their style, methods, and ideology, usually developed by a core of mestres and other ‘organic’ intellectuals.
The style of each group provides easier models of identification than a federation, always perceived as stateowned
and controlled. The groups also develop their own forms of administration, but compared to the
bureaucracies of state-sponsored sports organizations, this is kept to a minimum, and they usually do not
employ full-time administrators. Federations have always tried to embrace groups, and made them offers to
join. Yet the divergence of opinions between participant groups and the inevitable power struggle for the
direction of federations and the CBC have resulted in many groups refusing to join, or even leaving. A
recent power struggle at CBC, for instance, even resulted in the respected M.Suassuna and Damião being
expelled from its Council of Mestres. 63 Some mestres whose views did not prevail within a federation set up
rival organizations. M.Paulo Gomes, for example, funded the ACAESP, later expanded into the Brazilian
Capoeira Association (ABRACAP), in 1984. 64 Thus neither the federations nor the CBC managed to become
the key institution of contemporary capoeira. As M.Luiz Renato stated: ‘It is clear that the groups were the
mode of organization that capoeira chose’. 65
Yet relations between groups can become equally competitive, especially when they try to tap into the
same segment of the market. Personal animosities—resentment because a teacher left one group to establish
a rival one, for instance—is a further reason for acrimonious relations between groups. These sometimes
become public when members of rival groups confront each other in ‘open’ rodas (that is, open to other
groups as opposed to rodas reserved for group members) and provide some background for understanding
the violence that occasionally occurs in this context.
Some groups have devised elaborate market strategies to foster their growth. For instance, they attempt to
recruit teachers already working in areas where they want to expand. Or they try to convince reputed mestres