Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

78 CAPOEIRAGEM IN RIO DE JANEIRO
prisoners, soldiers and sailors. Often the complicity of sentinels helped prisoners in their attempts to escape.
Soares’ work also highlights the Navy arsenal as the site where the ideas of the Atlantic Revolution spread
to new social groups, both slave and free. Since plantation slaves also were imprisoned here, the arsenal was
furthermore a location through which capoeira practice possibly spread to the interior. 46
In contrast to the common belief that capoeira ‘comes from the plantations’, there is not much evidence
for its practice on rural estates. Statistics suggest that few slaves from that background were ever arrested for
this reason. There were ‘hundreds of maroons, runaways, rebels’ among the slaves transferred to Rio’s jails
from the interior, but only one of them had been arrested for capoeira. 47 Yet this does not necessarily mean
that capoeira was completely unheard of in plantation areas. The French journalist Charles Ribeyrolles
provided, under the heading ‘Games and Dances of the Negroes’, one rare account of capoeira practice on a
fazenda of the Rio de Janeiro province, in 1859:
Saturday evening, after the last working task of the week, and on holidays that give idleness and rest,
the blacks have an hour or two of the evening for dancing. They assemble in their terreiro, calling,
gathering and inciting each other, and the celebration starts. Here it is the capoeira, a kind of Pyrrhic
dance, with daring combat evolutions, regulated by the Congo drum; there it is the batuque, with its
cold or indecent postures which the urucungo, viola with thin cords, accelerates or contains; further
away it is a frenzied dance where the gaze, the breasts and the hips provoke. It is a kind of inebriated
convulsion one calls the lundu. 48
This is a rather late account and thus an original dissemination from Rio cannot be excluded. Pol Briand, in
his critical appraisal, even casts doubts over whether Ribeyrolles is describing what he saw himself or rather
reproduces information from other books to write his own account of a ‘generic’ plantation. The problem is
not, as many capoeira practioners believe, that records do not exist or have been burned. In fact, a number
of historians have written monographs about the coffee plantations of the Paraiba valley based on substantial
primary sources, and none of them seems to have come across capoeira as a significant manifestation.
However, various towns in São Paulo apparently outlawed capoeira ‘or any other kind of fight’ during the
1830s and 1850s. A municipal law from Cabreuva, for instance, banned the ‘practice or training of the game
named capoeira’ from ‘streets, squares, public houses or any other public space’. Slaves were to suffer a
penalty of 20 lashes instead of paying the fine. 49 It has to be said that these laws were often simply copied
from a central model, usually that of the capital city. Yet despite these reservations, we should not entirely
discard the idea that capoeira existed in the interior of the provinces of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during
the nineteenth century. Given that many combat games in the Caribbean took place on plantations, it seems
logical that similar practices also happened on Brazilian estates. Evidence for the twentieth-century interior
of Bahia suggests that these rural forms were however much less complex in terms of movements and
rituals than their urban counterparts. 50
Ribeyrolles highlighted the coexistence of three manifestations slaves liked to indulge in their free time—
capoeira, batuque, and lundu. Specific instruments accompanied each of them. Yet, just as in Rugendas’
account, he assigns a Congo drum to capoeira practice, and the music bow (berimbau or uricongo) rather to
the batuque dance. Other sources described a similar coexistence of the ‘combat dance’, capoeira, and the
‘love dance’, batuque, on the main squares of Rio de Janeiro. 51 Thus capoeira in Rio de Janeiro, when
practised as a friendly modality, could clearly be associated with other slave diversions. In that form it
enjoyed a more general acceptance among the lower classes in general and Africans and Afro-Brazilian in
particular.