Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

THE CONTEXT OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC 61
Figure 2.7 Africans and their descendents in the Americas used head butts in a range of combat games and fighting
styles. ‘A negro fight in South America’ [Venezuela]. Engraving from Harper’s Weekly, 15 August 1874. Frede Abreu
Archive, Salvador
maní was mainly practised on Cuban plantations, not so much in the cities. That might explain why there
are some explicit references to plantation slaves using similar techniques of avoiding blows when they
decided to confront their masters. Thus, when 17 Lucumies (the Cuban designation for slaves of Yoruba
origin) rebelled on the plantation Purísima Concepción in 1832, the overseer reported that he tried to subdue
them with his machete,
[…] but I was not able to strike a blow, because the Negroes did not come straight forward, nor
attacked, but were always jumping, dancing and administering blows with their machetes, it was not
possible to confront one, because two or three appeared behind, and in such a manner that I could
never wound one Negro […] 137
Techniques to avoid blows were thus not limited to captives from Kongo/Angola, experts in the art of
sanguar, but seem to have constituted a more widespread skill among slaves from West Africa as well.
Despite its likely West African origins, maní offers a number of important parallels with capoeira, both in
its formal aspects (played in a circle, with similar instruments, strikes embedded in a basic rhythmic
movement) and its cultural meaning (multiple social functions, corresponding to the various modalities of
the game, the role of ‘witchcraft’, and the importance of deception). These similarities support the view that
African-derived combat games in Plantation America shared a number of common features independently
of their West African or Central African origins, and that similar ritualized contexts could make use of quite
different fighting techniques.
Eventually a single technique could be at the core of a particular type of combat. Head butting—an attack
of paramount importance in capoeira—was used as an exclusive technique in a duel among two black free
men in a village on the Venezuelan coast (see Figure 2.7). According to a newspaper report, the two were
‘rivals for the affections of a dusky belle’, and