The Prohibition That Wasn't

WHY THIS ARTICLE

How could a hundred years of research be wrong in good faith? By mistaking the police's point of view for the whole of reality. This article dismantles the source bias that produced the dominant consensus — and establishes the distinction that governs the reading of the entire corpus: the capoeiras are not the capoeiragem.

A sentence everyone repeats

Open almost any work on the history of capoeira. You will read some variant of this: “The public authorities took a clear and early stand against capoeira by outlawing it in 1890. This prohibition, which lasted until 1937, was accompanied by a veritable hunt for capoeiristas” (2009). Or again: “The practice of capoeira was forbidden from 1890 to 1937” (2018). From study to study the formula is handed down, cited, consolidated. It has become the chronological bedrock of the discipline.

And yet: a public capoeiragem championship is held in 1905. A legal, triumphant fight in 1909. Manuals are printed. Advertisements appear. Where is the error?

It is not in the facts. It is in the sources.

What the police sees — and what it cannot see

For decades, studies of capoeiragem have rested chiefly on police and judicial archives: grounds for arrest, convictions, the age, trade and origin of those apprehended. This material is precious. It restored to history entire populations that the official record ignored. But it has a structural limit: the police archives only what it pursues.

In these collections, only the criminal face of the practice appears — assaults with knives, razors, revolvers; deaths and injuries. Everything that unfolds legally, publicly, sometimes under the very supervision of the authorities, leaves no trace there. Such archives necessarily draw a violent, clandestine practice — whatever its overall reality may have been.

From that documentary fact to the conclusion that every playful form of the game had vanished for over forty years, there was only a step. The scholarship took it — sparing itself one elementary question: what would we see if we changed archives?

What the newspapers say

Another corpus existed. Immense, and largely unexplored. The mass press that develops and democratises at the end of the nineteenth century offers an unequalled observatory of popular culture in republican Brazil: O Paiz (founded 1884), Jornal do Brasil (1891), Revista da Semana (1900), Correio da Manhã (1901), A Noite (1911), Diário Carioca (1928). Entire collections sleep at the National Library of Brazil.

What do they contain? A capoeiragem championship in 1905, covered on the front page of the republican party's own organ. A public fight in 1909, won by a capoeira carried in triumph. Technical manuals published and republished — O.D.C.'s as early as 1885, reissued in 1907; Burlamaqui's in 1928. Commercial advertisements: “Fight of the national game (Capoeira)”. Capoeiras “inspected by the police” at the Spinelli circus in 1913 — and never arrested.

Each piece, in isolation, could pass for an exception. Their accumulation draws a massive social fact: during the “prohibition”, capoeiragem was exhibited, sold, taught and printed.

The word that blurred everything

It remains to hold the two corpora together: the repression, quite real, recorded by the police archives — and the public life, just as real, recorded by the newspapers. The solution lies in a shift of meaning.

At the turn of the century, the word capoeira ceases to designate specifically the practitioner of capoeiragem. It comes to name the vagrant, the delinquent, the criminal — sometimes individuals without the slightest connection to any illegal activity. It becomes an insult. O.D.C. noted it as early as 1885: “the best insult to frustrate a young man is to call him — Capoeira!” The historian Marcos Luiz Bretas described what the police category swept into its nets: “There filed past the blind, the lame, the scrofulous, all gathered under the egalitarian and discriminating mantle of capoeiras.”

The conclusion then imposes itself: capoeiras and capoeiragem are not synonyms. The repression of 1890 targeted the capoeiras — a police category of urban undesirables that could include men who had never performed a single movement of the game. It did not prevent capoeiragem — the bodily practice — from taking place in theatres, championships and newspaper columns. By confusing the police's word with the practice's name, the historiography turned a policy of social control into a cultural extinction.

Change your sources, change your history

Karl Popper warned against a historicism that “mistakes interpretations for theories”. That is exactly what happened here: the police's interpretation of the word capoeira was taken for a theory of the history of capoeiragem.

The correction does not consist in re-reading the same documents differently. It consists in changing the documentary base — and letting the new documents shatter the old frame.

The same work remains to be done elsewhere. From Guadeloupean mayolè to Martinican danmyé, the other Black combat arts are still waiting for someone to open their archives.

SOURCES

Press archives, National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): collections of O Paiz, Jornal do Brasil, Revista da Semana, Correio da Manhã, A Noite, Diário Carioca; “Circo Spinelli”, Correio da Manhã, 20–23 Jan. 1913. — O.D.C., O Guia do Capoeira ou Gymnastica Brazileira, Rio de Janeiro, Livraria Nacional, 1907. — Bretas, M. L., Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 20, 1991. — Popper, K., The Poverty of Historicism (Fr. ed. Plon, 1956). — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis in History, Université des Antilles, 2020, General Introduction.

IN THE CORPUS

→ A Championship That Was Banned — and Sold Tickets Anyway

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

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Prohibition That Wasn't. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 03. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-prohibition-that-wasn-t. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.