The Cartoonist Who Learned Capoeira from His Window

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Pederneiras is the fifth pedagogue of the file — and the most singular: he combines every possible vantage point (the childhood window, the police station, the stage, the press). His aborted project with Cyriaco is one of the great “what ifs” of the discipline’s history.

Every vantage point

Few men will have seen capoeiragem from so many windows — literally and figuratively. As a child, his own looked out on a training ground of the popular capoeiras: he learned by watching. As an adult, Raul Pederneiras became journalist, cartoonist and poet of the First Republic — and police delegate in Rio, a function that made him rub shoulders, from within, with the criminal milieu where the national struggle developed. He was moreover a capoeira himself, “a fine connoisseur of its technical subtleties.”

The observer did not stay behind the glass. In the 1920s, he gave public demonstrations to promote the discipline alongside his friend Mario Aleixo — thus at the charitable sports festival of the Villa Isabel F.C. grounds, on 13 March 1920.

The Cyriaco project

His most ambitious attempt remained a dead letter — and it is one of the great missed appointments of this history. After the victory of 1909, Pederneiras met Cyriaco “in order to systematise capoeiragem and set up lessons.” The mestre “accepted the project and was working on its realisation when his premature death put an end to the initiative” — it is Pederneiras himself who reports it, in 1931. Imagine for a second what nearly existed: a methodical school founded as early as the 1910s, with the national hero himself as master — two decades before Bimba. The systematisation of capoeiragem did not lack for wills. It lacked for time.

Thirty years of writings and sketches

His major contribution lies elsewhere: “his writings and sketches published in various carioca newspapers over a period of more than thirty years.” In a majority-illiterate country, his drawings — unprecedented and realistic — were the principal popular vector of diffusion of the technique. The centrepiece: “A defesa nacional” (Revista da Semana, 7 May 1921), a veritable little technical manual — the only one of its time to associate detailed descriptions and illustrations, and the third link of the written tradition after O.D.C. (1885/1907) and before Burlamaqui (1928).

An erudite who climbed onto the stage, a policeman who defended the “outlaws,” a caricaturist who archived gestures: Pederneiras closes the circle of the five pedagogues — and proves, once more, that the capoeiragem of the “prohibition” was transmitted in broad daylight.

SOURCES

Pederneiras, R., “O jogo da capoeira,” Jornal do Brasil, 28 June 1931; “A defesa nacional,” Revista da Semana, 7 May 1921; A Rua, 11 March 1920 — National Library of Brazil. — Dias, L. S., Quem tem medo da capoeira?, 2001 (on the delegate function). — 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. C.5.

IN THE CORPUS

→ Capoeira Had Teachers and Textbooks Long Before Its Official “Rebirth”

→ “One Against Half a Dozen”: The Illustrated Manual of 1921

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Cartoonist Who Learned Capoeira from His Window. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 37. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-cartoonist-who-learned-capoeira-from-his-window. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.