Capoeira Is Not Alone in the World

WHY THIS ARTICLE

This article presents the result on which the entire field is founded: capoeira belongs to a technical family. The decisive point is the chosen foundation — the similarity of the games, not the shared history of slavery alone. That is what makes the category a scientific instrument, and not a mere commemorative grouping.

A question nobody was asking

Capoeira is singular — everyone agrees. But is it unique in the world? The question seems incongruous. The thesis asks it, and the comparative study answers: no. Capoeira belongs to a family that includes mayolè and bènaden (Guadeloupe), danmyé (Martinique), batuque (Brazil), tolona (Madagascar) and manì (Cuba). That family now has a name: the Black combat arts.

The decisive point is the category's foundation. It rests, “more than on sociohistorical similarities (Black populations, slavery, the slave trade), on the technical similarity of the games in question” — “similar foundations and principles of play, without equivalent in the field of the martial arts and combat sports”.

The nuance is capital. Grouping these practices because they were created by deported populations would have been legitimate, but fragile: a shared history does not guarantee kinship of forms. The criterion adopted is more demanding — the ludomotor structure, that is, the way the game organises bodies, roles and outcomes. Shared history then becomes the explanation of the kinship. Not its criterion.

Why did this kinship remain invisible to more than a century of research? Four reasons conspire: observers specialise in a single practice; the body is a recent object of study, approached mostly as a surface for socio-political stakes; in Brazil, the technical analysis of capoeira passes for biological reductionism; and the rare technical studies describe only the visible gestures, never the principles that organise them. No one saw the family, because everyone was looking at only one of its members.

The stick duel and the Brazilian game

The thesis sums up the stakes with a deliberately provocative question: “what could be more different from Brazilian capoeira than the Guadeloupean stick duel (mayolè)?” Everything separates them in appearance — the weapon, the ocean, the century. Almost nothing separates them in depth.

Mayolè is a centuries-old duel, bare-handed and with the stick, attested as early as 1683 by the colonial regulation that bans it. Its weapons were prepared weeks in advance — wood chosen, hardened in fire, “loaded” with maman-bila powder. And against the limitless violence of the slave system — burnings, amputations, lashes — “the duels between enslaved Black people were policed. The violence was mastered.” Its very name is an archive: mayombo in Moreau de Saint-Méry, “Mayombé meaning god” in the stick duels observed at Boma, in the Congo — mayolè in Guadeloupe.

Bènaden, its Guadeloupean sister practice, is the method's textbook case. By its internal logic it stands far from capoeira — only the pole of the touch exists in it. But it shares with capoeira the principle of the invitation to rupture, “the deep structural foundation on which capoeira rests”: “like its Brazilian counterpart, bènaden is entirely built on this dynamic.” And the similarity of its call to the break with capoeira's chamada is “astounding”.

The formula that sums it up holds for the whole family: “simple techniques and complex principles of play.” The kinship plays out at the level of principles — not on the surface of forms.

The tour of the family

Martinican danmyé presents the complete profile: “kaleidoscopic internal logic and sporting principles”. The drum announces the spectacle; danced improvisations and acrobatics follow; then the rhythm changes, and the fighters seek blows and throws — “one of the wrestlers lifts his adversary and overturns him on the ground, acclaimed by the crowd” (Michalon, 1987). Its swayings, filmed by Katherine Dunham in the mid-1930s, recall the ginga.

Brazilian batuque is attested since at least the early nineteenth century. In 1916 the master Raphael Lothus described it as intrinsically bound to capoeiragem — “the game of the forests of Africa transported to Brazil”.

Cuban manì, now extinct, “possessed the full set of structural foundations of the Black combat arts”. It combined punches and kicks, and belonged — with capoeira, danmyé and Réunion's moring — to the family's most complete circle: the games of double dimension, vertical and horizontal.

Malagasy tolona, finally, extends the category to the Indian Ocean. The family espouses the very geography of the deportations: the Caribbean, South America, the Indian Ocean.

A family in the act of dying

The inventory closes on an observation that changes the nature of the project. “These complex or paradoxical duels, by the very fact of that complexity, have disappeared (Cuban manì) or are on the point of dying, like Guadeloupean mayolè and bènaden. The moment has perhaps come to inscribe these Black combat arts in a double process: a redefinition of their ends and techniques, and a preservation of their deep, extra-ordinary ludomotor structure. To heritagise with lucidity and intelligence…”

To found the category. To document its members before extinction. To preserve their structure without betraying them. That is, precisely, the mission of the Black Combat Arts Institute.

SOURCES

“Règlement de MM. le comte de Blénac et Bégon sur la police […]”, 13 February 1683. — Moreau de Saint-Méry. — Flamme, J., Dans la Belgique africaine, Brussels, 1908. — Michalon, J., Le ladjia : origine et pratiques, Paris, Éditions Caribéennes, 1987. — Lothus, R., A Noite, 9 Jan. 1916 (National Library of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro). — Ortiz, F. (on manì). — Malo, O., Une tradition guadeloupéenne défigurée, Master's thesis in History, Université des Antilles, 2012. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Opening, sections B.1–B.3.

IN THE CORPUS

→ Winning by Falling, Touching Without Touching

→ The Enslaved Duelled by Rules — in a System That Had None

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Capoeira Is Not Alone in the World. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 08. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/capoeira-is-not-alone-in-the-world. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.