INDIAN OCEAN · EXTINCT

ORIGINS & SOCIAL FUNCTIONS

A combat of the Highlands of Madagascar, in the Merina and Betsileo world of the central plateau — attested and then extinguished, one of the Indian Ocean's erased practices. Its memory survives in the descriptions of travellers and in the kinship its signature blow maintains with the whole inverted-kick lineage of the family.

THE GAME

Combat of the Malagasy Highlands waged exclusively with the feet and the legs: to strike and to unbalance without ever using the hands. The signature blow is the heel launched with the back turned to the opponent, in the manner of a kicking horse.

PRINCIPLES OF PLAY

The unequal start, sought on purpose. To renounce the hands is to hand oneself a deliberate handicap — to fight with half one's means so that the leg alone must carry the duel. To reinforce the difficulty rather than reduce it, and make of the self-imposed constraint the very ground of virtuosity, is the paradoxical disposition the thesis identifies across the Black combat arts.

PLACE IN THE FAMILY

Diamanga occupies a distinctive place in the family: a game of the lower body alone, where the whole art is invested in the leg. Its back-turned heel is the near-relative of the inverted kicks of capoeira and of the Angolan engolo — the same family of blows delivered from a body momentarily turned away or overturned, illegible to the adversary.

SOURCES

Olivier Malo, La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles, 1905–1984, doctoral thesis in History, Université des Antilles, 2020.

HOW TO CITE THIS ENTRY

MALO, Olivier. Diamanga (Daka). In: The Atlas of the Black Combat Arts [online]. Black Combat Arts Institute, 2026. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/atlas-en/diamanga-daka [accessed date].

RELATED PRACTICES

→ Engolo — Kicks only, the inverted heel

→ Capoeira — The heel launched back-turned

→ Moringue — Combat of the feet and legs