Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

In their zeal to show the irrelevance of African traditions, Eurocentric or ‘America-centric’ scholars have
often ignored important commonalities amongst the African slaves. In terms of music, for example, West
and Central Africa were not characterized by ‘mutually exclusive traditions or style clusters’, but rather by
‘a network of overlapping styles which share common features of structure, basic procedures, and similar
contextual relations’. 10 This allowed for significant continuities in Afro-American music and dance.
Afrocentric writers on the other hand, eager to prove the extent of continuities between African and Afro-
American cultures, have disregarded the ruptures, and overlooked the mechanisms captives used to
compensate for the loss of traditions. Too much insistence on smooth cultural continuities can lead one to
underestimate the brutality of slavery and to rehabilitate the institution. These debates show that we need to
ask more precise questions about the continuity of traditions as well as the moments of rupture. We need to
distinguish between contradictory processes of fusion and acculturation on one side, and segmentation and
juxtaposition on the other. We need to ask what aspects were more likely to change and how representative
a particular cultural manifestation was in its original context. We need to look at developments from
African, as well as European and American perspectives.
Before examining slave culture in Brazil it is necessary to introduce the reader to two issues crucial for the
examination of capoeira formation in its wider, transatlantic context: the degree of diversity of African
cultures and societies from which slaves were abducted; and the redefinition of ethnic boundaries and the
emergence of new, African-derived ‘nations’ in the Americas.
African nations and slave identity
THE CONTEXT OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC 33
Colonialism and slavery deeply marked Western views about Africa and its people in the diaspora. As a
result, a number of prejudices and stereotypes affect common perceptions of African, slave, and Afro-
American culture even today. Africa has for centuries been the privileged site for the location of
‘barbarism’ and ‘savagery’. 11 These conceptions, developed during the centuries of the slave trade, were
systematized in the Age of Enlightenment and resulted in the formulation of racial theories about ‘Negro’
inferiority in the nineteenth century. 12 They guided and legitimated the colonial policies of European
powers until African nations acquired independence in the second half of the twentieth century.
Decades after formal political independence, the decolonization of African history still seems incomplete.
Even reformed, contemporary visions of Africa in the West often perpetuate gross misconceptions. One
common stereotype is the idea that Africa is home to ‘traditional’, ‘tribal’ cultures, whose ‘authentic values’
have remained unchanged over centuries. These clichés and the racialized politics they inspired have in turn
resulted in modern African revivalists, especially in the US, often borrowing elements from these racial
stereotypes to challenge white supremacists. 13 As a result, the historicity of African societies is often denied
or ignored, in order to make a return to an ‘essential’ Africa possible for the people in the diaspora. In
reality, though, deep changes affected African societies from the time of the first contact with Europeans
until the end of the slave trade and thereafter. This process transformed not only the social structure, the
forms of political organization, the techniques used in production or warfare, but also entertainment,
aesthetics and religion. This might be obvious for anybody more acquainted with African history or society,
but unfortunately it is far from constituting common knowledge among the large community of capoeira
practitioners, whose understanding of Africa often relies on the old stereotypes still transmitted by
secondary schools in Brazil and elsewhere. Even though new sholarship allows us to question simplistic
views of the African past, we still lack many elements that would allow us a deeper understanding of the
complexity of cultural change that affected slaves and their descendants in the Americas. Moreover, if
academics have produced a major revision of African history over the last decades, they have not painted a