The State That Forced Capoeira to Become a Sport

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Sportivisation is often told as a natural maturing of capoeira. The thesis shows it was imposed — a political demand to objectify a game whose logic resisted the stopwatch and the point.

A forced march

At the end of the 1960s, the sportivisation of capoeira at forced march, willed by the State, redefined the activity. After bitter debates, the rulebook adopted at the beginning of the 1970s obliged practitioners to objectify capoeira to meet the requirements of competition.

The teachers who renewed it

The young Bahian pedagogues who had migrated to the Sudeste, in continuity with the old carioca and Bahian masters, now bound into one indivisible whole: physical education, self-defence, sport and folklore. The renewal was theirs; the objectifying demand was the State's.

Why it matters

To make capoeira a sport was not to complete it but to constrain it — to force a kaleidoscopic game to render itself as countable points. The rulebook is a political document before it is a technical one.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (Part III, on the State-driven sportivisation and the rulebook of the early 1970s).

IN THE CORPUS

→ 3 July 1931: The Rulebook That Forbade Winning

→ Contemporary Capoeira Is Neither Carioca nor Bahian

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The State That Forced Capoeira to Become a Sport. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 55. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-state-that-forced-capoeira-to-become-a-sport. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.