Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

6 COMPETING MASTER NARRATIVES
The Father José de Anchieta in the year 1595 published a book with the title: The Grammar of the
most used Language on the Coast of Brazil, in which exists a quote that ‘the Tupí-Guaraní entertained
themselves playing capoeira’ […] it is reported that Martim de Souza [Portuguese explorer and first
governor of Brazil, 1531–1533] also observed tribes playing capoeira. 2
Since no precise reference is given, one can but wonder about the nature of that supposed quote. In view of
the fact that the term Tupí-Guaraní was only coined by modern ethnologists long after the Tupí had been
exterminated along the Brazilian coast, one has to conclude that the quote is a fake, even though sanctioned
by a respected academic institution. The absolute lack of evidence that native ‘Tupí-Guaraní’ played
capoeira has, however, resulted in the weakening of this myth over the last decades, even though that now
obsolete idea is still defended in some quarters in Brazil.
A far greater number of practitioners claim that maroons (runaway slaves) invented capoeira. Almost
every book on capoeira history contains an initial chapter on slave resistance, where the heroic quilombos
(maroon settlements) are always singled out for their fierce opposition to slave society. 3 Although not all
authors explicitly associate capoeira and maroons, that connection is made plain by many, transforming for
instance Zumbi, the famous icon of black resistance, into a capoeira fighter. 4 This story became so common
place that the movie Quilombo, an official choice for the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, featured maroons
fighting slave-catchers using capoeira movements. Directed by Carlos Diegues, with music by Gilberto Gil
and starring singer Zezé Motta, it thus suggested that the art was already practised in the famous
seventeenth-century ‘Black Republic’ of Palmares, a federation of maroon villages that resisted colonial
authorities for almost a century in the mountains of Alagoas in North-Eastern Brazil.
The romanticized image of maroons practising capoeira has dominated historical accounts of the art for
the last half century. It circulates under two different variants, one emphasizing the African heritage of the
maroons and the other their proximity to nature. In the words of Almir Areias, capoeira mestre and author
of an influential introductory booklet about capoeira, ‘not possessing enough arms to defend themselves,
almost none of the conventional weapons of the time, it became necessary for the [runaway] slaves to
discover a way to confront the weapons of their adversaries’. Although the author acknowledges that
African ‘games, competitions, etc.’ might have contributed to its development, capoeira seems essentially to
stem from the imitation of animals which cohabited with the maroons in the wilderness: ‘In that manner,
imitating cats, monkeys, horses, oxen, birds, snakes, etc., the slaves discovered the first kicks of that
fight’. 5 To support his claim, he asserts that
We have in some documents quotations of bush captains [slave catchers] and commanders of
expeditions which, referring to the fights with the slaves, commented about ‘a strange game of the
body’, which these used in the moment of fight, ‘as if they were truly untameable animals’. 6
That sounds rather impressive, were it not again for the embarrassing detail that no precise reference is
given and the quote de facto does not seem to exist—at least not in colonial documents. As we are going to
see, however, this sentence was invented by a nationalist writer in the 1920s and has been cited ever since.
Through frequent repetition these fake quotes acquired the value of ‘truth’. One can therefore hardly blame
capoeira teachers like Areias, who only repeated in writing what everybody else had been reiterating for
many years. Academics sometimes take on board that myth, assuming that it derives from some kind of oral
tradition. 7 The attractiveness of the story is enhanced by the fact that it is quite plausible: Some kind of
African inspired martial games probably existed among greater maroon settlements. Not one single
contemporary source, however, has been found to confirm this hypothesis. And, more important, it is unlikely