“Did Slavery Not Live On?”

WHY THIS ARTICLE

How does a bodily practice become a political cause? The decade 1970–1984 allows a precise answer — and explains everything that followed: the UNESCO inscription, the academies on five continents, and the road now open to mayolè, bènaden and danmyé.

What the dictatorship achieved

Let us begin with an uncomfortable observation. At the end of the 1960s, Brazil's military state imposes a forced-march sportivisation of capoeira. The regulations adopted in the early 1970s oblige its objectification: measurable criteria, points, categories. And it works: “Thanks to a coercive policy, the State succeeded where Burlamaqui, Sinhôzinho, Bimba, their contemporaries and their followers had failed.” Half a century of codification projects carried by enthusiasts had come to nothing. State constraint succeeds in a few years.

Adhesion is general: the old Bahian masters of the regional and the angola, the new generation, the Senzala teachers — encouraged by the National Sports Council and by the boxing federations that then governed the discipline. The global spirit of the age does the rest: “The teachers and capoeiristas, carried by an incredible Bruce Lee and the success of the Asian martial arts, transformed capoeira into the Brazilian martial art.”

By the end of the 1970s, contemporary capoeira — a hybrid of Carioca and Bahian styles, shaped by the Asian fighting arts — reigns. Two groups, Olodum and Senzala, carry this “double and opposite movement of spectacularisation and reinforcement of the combative dimension”. But these two groups are also something else: “the reflection of the calling into question, at the end of the 1970s, of a Brazilian society presented as a racial democracy, but which in fact discriminated against Blacks socially, politically and culturally.” That contradiction is about to tip everything over.

The paradox nobody could ignore any longer

The context, first. The dictatorship is running out of breath; many masters reject the federal model, “all the more rejected in that it had been imposed by the military dictatorship”. And the whole world is moving: “the generalised decolonisation then concluding in Africa and the Caribbean, the civil-rights movement of Black Americans, the creation of the Unified Black Movement (MNU) in 1978, the emergence of a critical reflection on the slaveholding past of the European and American nations.” In Brazil, the social finding is brutal: Blacks remain “victims of glaring inequalities in housing, health, work and education. Did slavery not live on?”

It is then that a documented paradox erupts. In the early 1980s, Senzala and Olodum — fervent promoters of Black culture — are composed mainly of white members from the affluent classes of Rio and Salvador. “Blacks, consciously or not, were excluded from capoeira — defined, however, as one of the most authentic expressions of Brazilian culture originating in Africa. There lay the paradox.”

The researcher Alejandro Frigerio formulates it bluntly, apropos of an illustrated manual of the period: “The message is very clear: Capoeira as culture belongs to Blacks (and here only the basic movements, and others already obsolete) and Capoeira as sport (with more complex techniques) belongs to whites.”

Culture for the Blacks. Sport for the whites. Brazilian racial democracy, summed up in the page layout of a manual.

A conception that overarches all the others

The answer to this paradox was the birth of a new conception of capoeira. And its exact nature deserves attention. The political conception that appears in the early 1980s “does not add itself to the developmentalist, sporting and cultural conceptions. It overarches them and transforms their deep meaning, on the basis of a radical, racialised critique of the world, Marxist in inspiration.”

The distinction is essential. The previous conceptions had stacked up, each adding its layer of meaning. The political conception retroactively redefines every layer: sport, culture, the development of the body become the terrains of one and the same struggle for equality.

Its ambition is explicit: “to allow Afrodescendants, and the culture of which they are the guarantors, to be treated on an equal footing. This project passes through a complete overhaul of the school — the place regarded as the most powerful tool for the reproduction of inequality.” Capoeira enters the school as a “postcolonial struggle in the service of a revalorisation of Black culture”, transformed “into a site of memory of the slave trade and of slavery: an open book on the atrocities suffered by Blacks and on their valour”.

1984, the point of no return

The thesis halts its inquiry in 1984. The choice is itself a statement: by that date, the transformation is accomplished, irreversible. Everything that follows unfolds in the wake of that decade — the inscription of capoeira on UNESCO's heritage list in 2014, the academies on five continents, down to the university quota laws of 2012. Capoeira has ceased to be merely Brazilian and become an art of the worldwide Black diaspora.

And this bifurcation sketches, for the other members of the family, a horizon that is now practicable: the political and theoretical road that mayolè, bènaden and danmyé can take in their turn.

SOURCES

Frigerio, A., “Capoeira: de arte negra a esporte branco”. — Areias, Frigerio, Tavares (1980s productions). — IBGE, “Desigualdades Sociais por Cor ou Raça no Brasil”, Estudos e Pesquisas, no. 41, Nov. 2019. — Lei nº 12.711, 29 Aug. 2012. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part III, ch. B–C and General Conclusion.

IN THE CORPUS

→ “Who Was Afraid of Capoeira?”

→ A Memory Without Thought?

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. “Did Slavery Not Live On?”. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 09. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/did-slavery-not-live-on. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.