Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

THE CONTEXT OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC 53
Imbangala. 104 With all due respect to the important fieldwork Desch-Obi carried out, I think that this like
many other conclusions remains entirely unproven and rather seems to derive from his afrocentric bias to
insist on African continuities and homogeneity despite contrary evidence.
If n’golo and its supposed cognates among other groups (for whose existence Desch-Obi does not provide
one single piece of evidence) really constituted such a central institution in Western Bantu societies and have
always represented a core aspect of puberty rituals, why have they not been described by others? Desch-Obi
simply omits that the existing anthropological literature does not even acknowledge its existence and that
Estermann, who witnessed and provided very detailed descriptions of puberty rituals among the Nyaneka,
does not even mention n’golo, and only refers to wrestling among boys or other forms of fighting among
related groups. 105 Other authors highlight different forms of combat and dances associated with rites of
passage. The early twentieth-century description of the Ovimbundu by W.D.Hambly, for instance, only
refers to wrestling among boys. 106 A more recent study on the Cabinda mentions dances and fights between
boys and girls, rather than anything similar to n’golo. 107 The detailed study of the Bangala of the Upper
Congo River by J.H. Weeks insists on the paramount importance of stick fighting to settle quarrels between
families, towns and even entire districts. 108 All these accounts provide further evidence for the variety of
combat games and traditions in the Kongo/Angola region. 109 They also lead us to raise a number of
questions. How widespread was the use of kicking and head butts as a separate combat form before and
during the centuries of Portuguese colonial rule? How did it evolve in recent years?
T.J.Desch-Obi seems to have overlooked one crucial reference from the Portuguese ethnographer
Augusto Bastos, who wrote in his account of the Benguela district at the beginning of the twentieth century:
The Quilengues have an exercise, which they call ómudinhu. It consists in prodigious jumps in
which they throw the legs into the air and the head downwards. It is accompanied by strong hand
clapping. 110
Bastos’ description provides unique and strong evidence for the existence of a combat game with close
formal resemblance to the kicks in capoeira, but he also seems to make clear that ómudinhu was very
specific to the Quilengues, and not, as Desch-Obi assumes, widely and exclusively practised in the rest of
the Benguela district.
The problem is that there are so many other possible ancestors for capoeira and the other combat games of
Plantation America. In 1935, Artur Ramos was already drawing attention on the impact of ceremonial
dances on Afro-Brazilian folklore and singled out the cufuinha from the Lunda as a possible ancestor of
capoeira. 111 Contrary to most other twentieth-century accounts of combat games by European observers in
areas already subjected to colonial rule, this war dance and mock combat has been described in its precolonial
aspect, prior to the integration of the Lunda into the Portuguese Empire. We owe this account to
Henrique de Carvalho, a Portuguese soldier, explorer and administrator charged with a diplomatic mission
to the independent Central African state of Lunda, to obtain a treaty allowing Portuguese establishments in
the area. 112 He reports that cufuinha happened on a number of occasions, such as affairs of war, proofs of
courage, the distribution of honours and the distribution of posts. According to Carvalho, dancing and
jumping on the tips of the toes figured prominently in cufuinha, as well as pantomime and mock combat:
The one who will dance, pulls his cloth up, tightening it between his belt and body so that the legs can
move freely. He draws his big knife, holds it firm, and then, slightly crouching, with his legs bent and
handling his knife from one side to the other, some times imitating stabs towards the ground, and
turning his knife either upwards or downwards, dances in jumps, moving forward and backwards,