Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

COMPETING MASTER NARRATIVES 23
In Salvador Neves e Souza visited the Axé Opó Afonjá shrine and also attended a ceremony at the
terreiro directed by the wife of the famous capoeira Mestre Bimba. He went to Mestre Pastinha’s capoeira
Angola school too and drew a series of pictures of the septuagenarian teacher and his students. 71
Unfortunately no report seems to exist about the encounter of these two men, which was to have such an
impact on the way capoeira origins were to be perceived. 72 Neves e Souza was struck by the similarity
between capoeira movements and a dance of his native country, the n’golo. He thus propagated the idea that
‘N’Golo, the Zebra Dance, is possibly the origin of the Capoeira, the fighting dance of Brazil’. He even
(although rather unconvincingly) compared M.Pastinha to the quimbanda (‘witch-doctor’) Chipalanga,
‘who rules over the “Efico” ceremonies in Mucope, and who therefore lays down the laws regarding the
N’Golo dance.’ 73 Neves e Sousa also corresponded with the outstanding Brazilian folklorist Luís da Câmara
Cascudo (1898–1986), providing the later with more information about the rituals associated with the
n’golo. Câmara Cascudo quoted extensively from this correspondence in his books about Brazilian folklore,
and endorsed Neves e Souza’s hypothesis. 74 Thus not only a renowned mestre of capoeira Angola, but also
a leading Brazilian scholar started to defend the idea that capoeira might have its remote origins in the
n’golo dance. Yet at this stage both the scholar and the mestre only considered it a possibility, not an
established fact (see Chapter 6). Also, in institutional terms Cascudo held a rather marginalized position in
the field of Brazilian folklore studies and thus his stance on capoeira origins did initially not have that much
impact. 75 Furthermore, in times of harsh repression of ‘non Brazilian ideas’ by the military regime, few wanted
to openly challenge the Brazilian character of capoeira.
Meanwhile, the idea of Nagô purity versus Bantu lack of tradition also came under attack in other
quarters. Inspired by Herskovits’ work on ‘African survivals’ in the Americas, by their own exposure to the
vitality of African culture in the diaspora and the growing strength of the Black Movement in the US and
elsewhere, a range of scholars undertook research on more specific aspects of African or African-derived
culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Since the 1970s, Robert Farris Thompson pursued his project of
‘identifying specifically Yoruba, Kongo, Dahomean, Mande, and Ejagham influences on the art and
philosophies of black people throughout the Americas’. His piece on the Bakongo identified Kongo
symbolic patterns in ground-drawings, charms or burial grounds in the African American Diaspora. He
shows for instance that the cross, far from constituting an evidence for Christian influence, is also a key
element in Kongo cosmology. 76 His work has influenced and inspired a range of younger US scholars
working on related topics, including capoeira. The ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik highlighted concrete
traits of Angolan culture in Brazil, showing the continuity of rhythmic patterns, instruments, dances and
games, among them capoeira. He challenged the assumption that Afro-Brazilian music had to be understood
in terms of ‘acculturation’, which merely identified African ‘roots’ for contemporary manifestations. He
suggested that Afro-Amercian music should be seen instead as ‘a consequent and creative extension
overseas of African musical cultures’. 77
When the Black Movement re-emerged in Brazil, during the 1980s, its militants turned towards Afro-
Brazilian cultural expressions such as capoeira in their search for a black alternative to hegemonic Western,
Eurocentric values. Julio César de Souza Tavares defended the first academic thesis on capoeira at the
University of Brasília, in 1984. He argued that capoeira constituted a ‘bodily archive’ of slaves and their
descendants, and characterized it as
[…] an expression of sociocultural resistance, as a counter-power to the dominant logic universe of
slave society. And, residually, capoeira is a characteristic of Afro-Brazilianness, a non-verbal
repertoire of communication, a bodily-gestured channel of communication, a gesticulated bricolage,
and the condensation of a bodily knowledge from an African matrix. 78