CARIBBEAN · ENDANGERED

ORIGINS & SOCIAL FUNCTIONS

The anthropologist Anca Bertrand (1966), a specialist of Antillean culture, described the bènaden as “a very beautiful and supple game of the bodies” and clearly distinguished it from boxing. As today, it was practised at funeral wakes, music and song accompanying the combat, the face the favoured target. Correcting an error in the thesis: the accompaniment is not the drum but the boulagèl, the vocal mouth-percussion, and hand-claps, the boulagèl being used precisely where the drum is absent, as at the wakes.

THE GAME

A sung hand game of rural Guadeloupe. Attack and defence are taken in strict turns. Decisively, the aim of the attacker was not to touch or strike the opponent, but to push him with the palm of the hand at the level of the chin so as to unbalance him: by the abrupt change of orientation of the head, the centres of balance are reached. The defender, rooted on his stances with no right to retreat, parries and dodges in rhythm.

PLACE IN THE FAMILY

The invitation to rupture, the dissociation of roles and the vulnerable position. The wrestlers do not hold the same status, one attacks, the other defends. The defender, facing the attacker with no right to give ground, is set in an uncomfortable position, at odds with the necessity of staying upright, and it is in this paradox, the thesis writes, that the interest of the game lies. To push rather than strike, to unbalance rather than wound: the whole art is the deliberate search for the breaking-point of the other's balance.

The thesis places the bènaden, with the batuque and the Malagasy tolona, among the games of a single dimension, here the horizontal pole of the touch, without the provoked fall. Its internal logic thus stands far from capoeira's; yet it shares with capoeira a deep structural foundation, the invitation to rupture, which binds it to the family despite its simplicity.

SOURCES

Anca Bertrand, 1966. · Olivier Malo, La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles, 1905–1984 [Capoeira and the Black combat arts: erased history, invisible techniques (1905–1984)], doctoral thesis in History, Université des Antilles, 2020.

HOW TO CITE THIS ENTRY

MALO, Olivier. Bènaden. In: The Atlas of the Black Combat Arts [online]. Black Combat Arts Institute, 2026. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/atlas-en/benaden [accessed date].

RELATED PRACTICES

→ Mayolè, Same Guadeloupean world

→ Manì, Striking game, alternating turns

→ Batuque, Attack and defence taken in turns