Condemned Before Being Read

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Before exposing Burlamaqui’s work, one must instruct his trial — for it is the trial, not the work, that dominates the literature. To dismantle it piece by piece is also to expose the three biases that still govern the historiography of capoeira.

The counts of indictment

“In 1928, Aníbal Burlamaqui (under the pseudonym Zuma) published an opuscule […] a series of blows and counter-blows of foreign wrestling, denaturing it […] The adoption of these guidelines was disastrous for the capoeira of our day, which lost its specific character” — Jair Moura, former pupil of Bimba, 1992. “His proposal completely erased the Afro-Brazilian traditions of capoeira […] Everything indicates that his approach owed more to the nationalist thought of the military, convinced of the cultural inferiority of Blacks and Africans” — Matthias Röhrig Assunção, 2014.

The thesis’s finding: “no information contained in the book allows one to draw these conclusions, on the contrary.” And an embarrassing piece enters the file: the same Assunção wrote in 2009 that one should “give Burlamaqui the credit for having forged the powerful myth of the quilombolas inventing capoeira from within.” From one article to the next, the eraser of Afro-Brazilian traditions becomes their mythographer. The fluctuation betrays the a priori judgement. A savoury detail: Moura’s reproaches to Burlamaqui — denaturing, foreign blows — are word for word those the 1930s addressed to… mestre Bimba, his own master. “There was a transfer of the stigma onto carioca capoeiragem.”

First bias: skin colour as verdict

Annibal Burlamaqui was white. In a worldview that aligns Black-tradition-authenticity on one side and White-modernity-denaturing on the other, this single datum suffices for the condemnation. The thesis does not deny that de-Africanisation existed — Lima Campos, for instance, refused capoeiragem any African origin in favour of “the inventive spirit of the mestizo,” straight from the racist theories imported from Europe. But it lays down the rule of method: “it is not possible to designate a man as a vector of this ideology solely from his skin colour. Elements, either in discourse or in acts, must allow such conclusions to be confirmed or refuted.”

And it administers the test by the absurd: the three largest capoeira groups in the world — Senzala, Abadá, Capoeira Brasil — were founded in Rio by Whites. “Should one conclude from their pigmentation that these propagators of capoeira to the four corners of the world are racist? Their actions and their discourses suppose the contrary.” Simone Vassallo already warned, as early as 2001, against these dichotomous analyses.

Second bias: the Rio–Bahia axis

Since the 1960s, Bahia has been redefined as “the place of preservation of a pure African identity,” Rio as “the symbol of modernity, of deculturation.” Everything that comes from Rio is judged in advance. To this is added a sociology of scholarly production: the majority of works come from Bahia, written by masters who were pupils of Bimba, “often bearers of an apologetic discourse concerning him” — who minimise Burlamaqui “to keep intact the cult of master Bimba, which they themselves in part created.”

Hence the forgetting of all that precedes the Bahian “revolution”: the championships of 1905 and 1913, Cyriaco, the academies of Lothus and Aleixo, Cadaval, military capoeiragem, the academies of Jayme Martins Ferreira and Sinhôzinho — and the cutting defeats of Bimba’s pupils in Rio, in the late 1940s. Down to the “decriminalisation” itself, whose date fluctuates by author — 1934, 1937, 1941: “proof of the difficulty of identifying the written trace, in the form of a decree or law, of the end of the prohibition, which, in the end, no doubt does not exist!”

Third bias: the absence of return to the sources

The last mechanism is the most banal and the most corrosive: “many researches do not rest on the study of primary sources but take up the discourse already produced on the subject.” The trial recopies itself from book to book. The picture is not uniform: Lácé Lopes documented the carioca vitality of the 1940s; former pupils of Bimba have produced objectivist works — the biography by Muniz Sodré, Abreu’s study of the Bahian rings, Jair Moura’s own carioca history; and Ana Paula Höfling (2012) shows that a surpassing is possible. But the a priori persists down to publications of 2019.

The lesson holds beyond Brazil: when the presumed founders of a field also control its historiography, the researcher’s first task is to reread the pieces the official narrative filed away without a follow-up. The 1928 book was one of them. The following articles open it.

SOURCES

Moura, J., in Capoeira, N., Capoeira: os fundamentos…, pp. 86–87. — Assunção, M. R., História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 21, 1, 2014; Antropolítica, 24, 2009, p. 32. — Vassallo, S. P., thesis EHESS, 2001. — Lácé Lopes, A., A capoeiragem no Rio de Janeiro, 2002. — Sodré, M., Mestre Bimba, 2002. — Abreu, F. J. de, Bimba é Bamba, 1999. — Höfling, A. P., dissertation UCLA, 2012. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part I, chap. D.1.

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Circle or the Ring: A 1928 Rulebook’s Hidden Choice

→ “Who Was Afraid of Capoeira?”

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Condemned Before Being Read. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 39. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/condemned-before-being-read. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.