Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

68 CAPOEIRAGEM IN RIO DE JANEIRO
1828. As a result of sugar’s continued reliance on slave labour, half of the region’s 170,000 inhabitants in
1789 were slaves, three quarters of whom lived in rural areas. Though over half of them worked on estates
with more than 40 slaves, many others toiled on smaller units, usually dedicated to the production of
foodstuff to supply the city and port of Rio de Janeiro. 1 The growing diversity of agriculture in the province
of Rio de Janeiro reflected and sustained the development of its capital city.
If Rio de Janeiro acquired a more urban character after the arrival of the viceroy and his entourage in
1763, this was nothing compared with the transfer of the entire Royal Court from Lisbon in 1808. Escorted
by the British navy, grandees and lesser noblemen, accompanied by their families, civil servants and
domestics, embarked in Lisbon to escape the imminent arrival of Napoleon’s troops. It is estimated that
around 15,000 people from Lisbon disembarked in Rio de Janeiro, many to never return to Europe with the
king in 1822. Much has been said about how this 14-year-residence of the Portuguese royal family in the
wealthiest colony of the Empire shaped Brazil’s path towards independence. Days after his arrival, the
prince-regent, João VI, opened the colony’s ports—hitherto subjected to the monopoly of colonial trade
with Portugal—to free trade with ‘friendly nations’, principally Great Britain. Many other colonial
restrictions—establishing manufactures or printing books—were also lifted. Brazil therefore experienced
some economic benefits of independence before formally acquiring it in political terms in 1822.
This singular transmigration of a European court to the tropics has attracted considerably less attention in
terms of its significance for local society and urban culture. Until then, a tiny layer of bureaucrats, the sugar
planters of the captaincy who resided in the city, and the wealthy merchants constituted the Cariocan elite. 2
The last group was mainly engaged in the transatlantic trade, exporting colonial commodities, importing
slaves and a wide range of European goods, from tools for agriculture to luxury items. The newly
disembarked Portuguese nobles had to come to terms with this established elite. According to a recent study,
their strategy consisted in a ‘rigid orchestration of ceremonials’ to impose their hegemony on local society. 3
Despite conflicts with the native Brazilian and the established resident Portuguese elite, these two groups in
the end accepted not only these requirements of etiquette, but even sponsored the costly expenses of the court,
in return for titles of nobility and other ancien régime privileges.
Sophisticated European court life contrasted sharply with the social reality of a tropical colony. The city
had already become a pivot in the transatlantic slave trade and would continue to be so until 1850: almost
one million African slaves were disembarked in Rio during the first half of the nineteenth century. Many
were sold to plantations in the interior. Thousands, nevertheless, remained, and transformed Rio de Janeiro
into the city with the largest captive population in the Americas: almost 80,000 slaves lived there in 1849.
Despite the substantial migration of metropolitan Portuguese prior to independence, the proportion of slaves
in relation to the total population of the city rose, from 34 per cent in 1799 to 46 per cent in 1821. This
development took place in a period which historians of the Atlantic world usually refer to as the ‘Age of
Emancipation’. Since the free black and coloured represented another 20 or 30 per cent of its inhabitants,
non-whites always constituted a large majority of around two-thirds of the city’s total population. 4 As many
travellers observed, the streets of the new capital were crowded with Africans. Many likened Rio to an
African city.
Urban slavery presented a number of peculiarities when compared with plantation labour. Slaves in the
city executed a much wider range of tasks. They worked as gardeners and looked after animals in smaller
estates (chácaras) on the outskirts of the city. Others were domestics at the disposition of their owner. They
toiled as boatmen and sailors, helping to transport goods and persons. Porterage was one of the main slave
occupations in Rio, usually carried out in groups for the transport of bulky items. Porters made use of drums
and songs to work more quickly and harder. The use of porters was widespread, since even refuse and
excrement had to be carried out of the town houses and emptied on the beaches on a daily basis. Many other