The Man Who Hated Slaves and Adored Capoeira

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The hegemonic paradigm of capoeira as a tool of slave resistance has an author, a date and a text: Luiz Murat, 1908. To read it in full — including its unbearable pages — is to understand on what ideological ground the myth was built, and why it had to be deconstructed.

An academician who fought capoeira duels

Luiz Murat (1861–1929) is no obscure chronicler: writer, politician, he was one of the founders of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. And he practised. One episode, absent from contemporary literature, shows it: Murat fought a capoeira duel against Sampaio Ferraz — himself a capoeira, and police chief charged with eradicating the crapulous capoeiragem of the streets in the early years of the Republic. The stake of the duel: their divergences over the policy to pursue against the maltas. Murat won.

Hold onto the scene: the academician and the anti-capoeira police chief settling their political dispute… in capoeira. The officially proscribed discipline served as an arena for the Republic’s elites.

The matrix text: 1908

In 1908, learning that the Navy is adopting Japanese jiu-jitsu, Murat writes to the Minister of War — whom he knows personally — a plea published in A Noticia (24 and 30 April), taken up by A Escola, then republished fifteen years later in the Jornal do Brasil. “The illustrious Admiral, Minister of the Navy […] intends to banish from his homeland the Brazilian gymnastics, in which are advantageously united all the other exercises, the jiú-jitzú, savate, the fist, the stick […] Who induced him into this error; who showed him the advantages of the Japanese game over ours?” For Murat, the importation of jiu-jitsu manifests “the degeneration of the nation” — that morbid propensity to imitate the foreigner instead of founding national greatness on things of one’s own.

So far, a nationalist plea. What follows is of another nature.

The unbearable pages

For the same text contains this, which must be quoted to understand the era — and the ground of the myth: “The lugubrious and nauseating holds of the ships cast onto our shores the African vomit, composed of elements that would perniciously influence our ethnic constitution […] The African race: it subalternised itself […] It accepted the yoke without revolt; divested itself of all dignity […] It knelt before the lord and worked to enrich him. It was a beast…”

The biological racism of the late nineteenth century speaks here without disguise — the very racism that, in Brazil, advocated European immigration to “whiten” the population. Murat was an abolitionist, the thesis specifies, “less from philanthropy than from modernism”: one does not build a modern nation on servile labour. And yet it is not toward Europe that Murat turns to regenerate the nation. It is to the heart of the Black population itself.

The Minas, Palmares, and the birth of the myth

Amid “this stupid race,” he writes, “another of worth stands out, strong, intrepid, fearless — the Minas. They, yes, are valorous: they founded in the seventeenth century in Pernambuco the republic of Palmares, which, for thirty years, resisted the invasions, the tenacious, incredible attacks of the whites.” And the weapon of that resistance? “One of the creative forces of the senzala’s apparatus of defence against the right of life and death the fazenda chief held over the slave was capoeira, the instrument that turned the terreiro into an arena…”

The thesis’s finding is decisive: “Luiz Murat’s discourse seems to have been written today, so similar is it to the historical narrative on capoeiragem, taught by the masters to their pupils.” The paradigm of capoeira-as-resistance “was born more than a century ago under the pen of Luiz Murat” — taken up word for word by Lothus and Aleixo in 1916, by Burlamaqui in 1928, by Pereira da Costa in 1962, down to the manuals of 2013.

Recognition by amputation

The founding myth of capoeira-as-resistance was thus born in a text that conjugates a cult of the Minas with contempt for the “servile mass” — homage to some propped up on insult to others. This is no awkward detail: it is the very structure of the operation. To erect capoeira as a symbol of the modern nation, Murat had to sort — noble ancestors on one side, an “African vomit” on the other. Recognition, from its birth, proceeded by amputation. A century later, the narrative of resistance circulates, orphaned of its context. To restore it is not to soil it: it is to give the field back the possibility of building on something other than that sorting.

SOURCES

Murat, L., “O jiú-jitzú e a gymnastica brasileira,” A Noticia, 24 and 30 April 1908; A Escola, Coritiba, Jul.–Sept. 1908; “Gymnastica brasileira. Taverna e o cortiço” and “Camaradagem e solidariedade,” Jornal do Brasil, 16 and 23 Aug. 1924 — National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro). — 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. B.1.

IN THE CORPUS

→ Saving Capoeira by Condemning the Capoeiras

→ Besouro de Mangangá, Mas Oyama, Ueshiba: Why Martial Arts Manufacture Gods

→ Did Capoeiras Win the War of Paraguay?

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Man Who Hated Slaves and Adored Capoeira. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 28. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-man-who-hated-slaves-and-adored-capoeira. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.