They Modernised Capoeira, Lost, Then Embraced the Tradition They Had Mocked

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Two corrections to the received account: the Bahian schism proceeds from an import of the Carioca sporting model, and its outcome was the victory of neither camp. To understand this genesis is to understand why the quarrel, never closed, went global.

A fracture nearly a century old

Push open the door of a capoeira academy in Salvador, Paris or Tokyo. You will inherit a division soon to be a century old: Regional on one side, Angola on the other. The fracture seems so constitutive of the discipline that one would think it born with it — sprung from Bahia, among Bahians, for Bahian reasons.

The sources tell another piece. They oblige us, first, to break a habit: that of telling the regional histories of capoeira as parallel trajectories — Rio here, Bahia there, each on its own road. These histories are “interlaced, interconnected with one another”. In São Paulo, the first capoeira to fight in competition came from the federal capital. And it is the Carioca sporting model — championships, matches, rulesets — that is exported to Bahia in the 1930s. The formula holds in five words: “Carioca capoeiragem and Mestre Bimba, interconnected.” The Regional, so often presented as a purely Bahian upwelling, is also the fruit of an import.

How a schism is born

On this imported model, Manuel dos Reis Machado, known as Bimba, builds his dominance. He organises bouts between his school and other capoeiras. At first, the latter adhere to the competitive project. Then “Mestre Bimba's undivided dominance obliged them to abandon these championships and to build their own competitions on different criteria”.

Note the mechanism: it is not, at first, a doctrinal disagreement that creates the split. It is an asymmetry of results. The permanent losers desert the winner's terrain — and found their own. The doctrinal disagreement comes afterwards, and it bears on the very definition of the activity. Are blows and throws part of the game? “Was it not preferable to suppress, for the sake of absolute effectiveness, the cadenced steps and the intertwinings of cooperating bodies, as Mestre Bimba wished?”

This fracture line intersects another, observed at the same moment in Rio, where bodily technique serves as an instrument of distinction “between poor and rich, Blacks and whites” — certain journalists distinguishing an “older” form of body (that of the Blacks of the favelas) from “another, more modern and worthy of interest” (that of Sinhôzinho's pupils), to the point of wanting to ban steps judged “simian”. Beneath the technical quarrel, everywhere, the same question: what body must legitimate capoeira have?

The reversal

Late 1940s. Bimba and his pupils take the step their sporting logic called for: facing the Cariocas in the very heart of the capital. The result: “The Bahians, after suffering stinging defeats, abandoned sporting competition and preferred to it the more 'traditional' capoeira they had until then decried.”

Reread that reversal. The champions of modernisation, beaten on the sporting terrain they had themselves promoted against the “ancients”, adopt the opposing camp's position. The retreat belongs to the general movement: defeats against jiu-jitsu, the reverses of Bimba's pupils, the rise of Northeastern folkloric capoeira in the capital — down to the disappearance of ring capoeiragem in the mid-1950s.

Who won? Neither the “moderns” nor the “ancients”. The capoeira that then conquers Brazil and the world is neither the pure sporting Regional nor the old fighting capoeiragem: it is Bahian folkloric capoeira — berimbau, roda, songs — elaborated in the 1930s by the intellectuals and diffused by the Bahia Tourist Office and the migrant teachers. One material detail measures this victory by covering-over: in Rio, the berimbau did not exist in the universe of the game; introduced by Manoel and Coronel at Jayme Martins Ferreira's Academy, it was mastered by them alone. The element held today to be capoeira's essence was, in the capital, a novelty of the 1950s.

As for the quarrel, it never went out — it changed scale. At the symposia of 1968–1969, partisans of capoeira-as-folklore and capoeira-as-combat “agreed on the need to sportivise the activity but tore each other apart on the regulatory aspects”. In filigree, always the same question, untouched: technically, what is capoeira? The Bahian schism was not resolved. It was globalised.

SOURCES

Collections of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): Carioca and Bahian press of the 1930s–1950s; Diario de Noticias (distinction of “forms of body”, 1930s). — Carneiro, E., Capoeira, Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1975. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part II, ch. C.1–C.2 and D; Part III, ch. A and B.

IN THE CORPUS

→ Without the Gracies, No Modern Roda

→ Rio's Capoeira Existed. Then It Was Erased.

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. They Modernised Capoeira, Lost, Then Embraced the Tradition They Had Mocked. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 14. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/they-modernised-capoeira-lost-then-embraced-the-tradition-they-had-mocked. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.