Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

COMPETING MASTER NARRATIVES 7
that any such manifestation would have found its way back into the Brazilian cities, where Africans and
their descendants were developing their own vibrant cultures and had no reason to adopt a game from distant
backlands.
The last version of the tale of the remote origins attributes an entirely African origin to the art. In its most
radical expression, it asserts rather bluntly that capoeira as such was practised in Angola. Transplanted to
Brazil, it is supposed to have been performed without major alterations before spreading to the rest of
the world:
It was more than four hundred years ago that the warriors of N’dongo (today known as Angola) faced
the invading Portuguese Armies. In a bloody and bitter guerrilla war, the N’dongo warriors fought the
Europeans using their native martial art of ‘kapwera’—the Bantu verb meaning ‘to fight’. 8
As we are going to see in Chapter 2, recent research on possible ancestors of capoeira shows some amazing
continuities between Central African practices and contemporary capoeira. Yet despite these permanences,
capoeira changed significantly over the last two centuries, and these transformations affected not only
formal aspects and social context but also its cultural meaning. The myth of the unity of capoeira assumes
that, on the contrary, that its ‘perennial essences’ and ‘immutable characteristics’ have not been altered. As
will be discussed subsequently, it is more likely that different variants of capoeira developed in the various
Portuguese colonies, and that the ‘classical’ form played in the harbour areas around the Bay of all the
Saints (the Bahian Recôncavo) emerged only at a much later date, at the end of the nineteenth century.
So great is the desire to ‘discover’ a capoeira as similar as possible to contemporary practice in the
remote past, that some do not hesitate to manipulate historical records. Today the game is accompanied by a
musical bow called berimbau. Unfortunately one of the earliest iconographic representations of capoeira,
the famous engraving by the Bavarian painter Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), ‘Playing capoeira or
war dance’ (1835, see Figure 3.1), displays only a little drum and none of the ‘traditional’ instruments used
in modern capoeira (berimbau, atabaque, agogô, pandeiro and reco-reco). Since the berimbau is today
considered the ‘soul’ of capoeira, one of its intrinsic and constitutive parts, it cannot be lacking from any
historical representation. The instrument is thus sometimes added to the picture, transforming a formerly
passive spectator into an additional musician. 9 Academics, again, are not exempt from this attempt to adapt
sources to pre-conceived models. US scholar Robert Farris Thompson commented on the same engraving
by Rugendas as follows:
No later than 1835 the berimbau, as the lungungu came to be called in Brazil, was being used to fuel
the capoeira martial art. This we know because Rugendas in an illustration shows two men in a roda,
one doing the basic step, the ginga, at left, and the other, at right, apparently executing a step called
queixada. They are in combat. Handclapping and a drum accompany their battle. But close
examination of a man standing next to the drummer shows that he has a musical bow and is pulling
open his shirt, probably to place the calabash-resonator of his instrument against his naked stomach in
Kongo Angolan manner. 10
As the reader can verify, nothing suggests that a berimbau is hidden in the picture. Moreover, the way in
which such engravings were produced does not support the idea of the picture representing a moment prior
to the full development of the game. Engravings were not photographs grasping an ephemeral/transient
instant, but the result of a longer period of study, carefully recomposing the artist’s observations, usually
fixed in preliminary studies. If Rugendas had seen a berimbau , there is no reason why he would not have