Black Combat Arts Institute.
AFRICA · WORLDWIDE
Lamb
A striking wrestling of the Wolof people of Northern Senegal — today the Dakar region — combining punches and wrestling techniques. Victory by a clean fall to the ground or three points of support on the ground other than the feet.
ORIGINS & SOCIAL FUNCTIONS
The wrestling of the Wolof people of northern Senegal — today the Dakar region — grown from village institution into a national spectacle, without ceasing to be the school of prestige it always was.
THE GAME
Punches combined with grappling: victory by clean fall, or three points of support on the ground besides the feet.
PLACE IN THE FAMILY
The lamb is the family's great mixed game — strike and wrestling fused — and its Senegalese career, from the sand of the villages to the stadiums, is the family's most visible case of a practice negotiating modernity without surrendering its internal logic: the fall still decides, the drum still opens.
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. Lamb. In: The Atlas of the Black Combat Arts [online]. Black Combat Arts Institute, 2026. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/atlas-en/lamb [accessed date].
RELATED PRACTICES
→ Mbapatt — Senegalese wrestling
→ Kokowa — Striking wrestling to the drums
→ Dambe — Wrestling with the fist, elsewhere
→ Butej — Senegalese confrontation games