Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

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The competing master narratives of capoeira history
Myths, fakes and facts
During one dark night in the sixteenth century, the first slave escaped from the barracks, fled from the
plantation, got rid of serfdom, gained freedom…The second escaped and the third, attempting to
follow them, failed. Recaptured, he received the punishment proper for slaves […] Pursuit followed
without delay and the backlands became full of slave catchers hunting down runaways. Without
weapons or munitions, the slaves turned warriors again using that sport born during the filthy nights
of the slave huts, and the sport which had been disguised as dance was transformed into a fight, the
fight of the men of the capoeira. 1
The above extract from a contemporary capoeira journal, reiterates at least three of the powerful myths that
have nourished the practitioners’ hunger for history: the remote origins of capoeira; its invention, in Brazil,
by maroons; and the disguise of the fight as a dance. The passage illustrates how the history of capoeira is
told by many instructors or reproduced in handouts and manuals. The circulation of capoeira myths is
however far from being restricted to a close knit group of practitioners uninterested in historical research.
On the contrary, this mixture of facts and fiction is frequently reproduced in magazine articles, books and
even academic journals and dissertations, which makes it all the more interesting to examine. A brief
scrutiny of the core myths about capoeira history will allow us to illuminate some of the basic assumptions
they rely on, and start our enquiry into the historical contexts in which they emerged. By myth I understand
a rather simplistic view of some specific facet of capoeira history, which glosses over contradictory aspects
and deliberately ignores the lack of evidence or even takes no notice of any contrary evidence that disproves
what usually are essentialist claims. In some cases fakes—when evidence and sources are deliberately
manipulated to conform to pre-conceived ideas—are also part of the arsenal of myth formation.
The belief in the remote origins of the art, coupled with the conviction that an unaltered ‘essence’ of
capoeira has been transmitted from that foundational moment down to the present, confers greater authority
to contemporary practice, and is therefore shared by many practitioners. The myth of the remote origins
appears under three variants, each of which provides support and legitimacy for conflicting master
narratives of national or ethnic identity.
The first version is that of its entirely Brazilian origins. As we are going to see in more detail, nationalist
ideology helped to foster the myth of native Brazilians playing capoeira. In the words of one mestre and
capoeira politician, author of a recent MA thesis in Social Sciences at the Catholic University of São Paulo: