“Who Was Afraid of Capoeira?”

WHY THIS ARTICLE

This article fixes the epistemological requirement of the whole field: to think racial power relations without turning them into a universal key. To do justice without simplifying. To honour without essentialising. And it supplies the test a simple dualism cannot even formulate.

An uncomfortable question

The question gives this article its title, and it was a Brazilian historian who asked it. Luiz Sergio Dias: “Who was afraid of capoeira? In the end, whom did it terrorise? Only the whites, the great landowners and the rich bourgeois? We think not. It suffices to recall that many Black slaves suffered aggression at the hands of the capoeiras, as did poor free men, Black freedmen and others. So — who was afraid of capoeira?”

The question is terrible for the dominant narrative. If the first victims of the capoeiras' violence were often Black — enslaved, freed, poor — then the image of a practice wholly raised against the white oppressor collapses.

And other facts resist the same narrative. From imperial Brazil onward, whites — Europeans and Brazilians — were an integral part of capoeiragem and of the maltas, those gangs that fought one another “for the control of urban spaces”: the front line ran between rival groups, not between colours. And many capoeiras hired out their services to the political parties as capangas — henchmen inserted into the electoral game of the powerful, not raised against it. The real fracture line was social and political as much as racial.

The tool and the doctrine

A distinction protects the argument from a misreading. To choose as one's analytical frame the power relations between the components of a society racialised for centuries is perfectly legitimate. Indispensable, even. “To transform it, however, into a totalising explanatory doctrine is not.” The border runs between the analytical tool and the universal key. The first illuminates; the second blinds. Karl Popper had named the slippage: a historicism that “mistakes interpretations for theories”. A reading grid, however fertile, does not become the law of history.

To invert is not to overcome

Then comes the deepest argument — the one that bears on what dualism does to thought. “To think the space of the Americas today in terms of a strict opposition between Blacks and whites is to reproduce the colonial discourse, founded on the differentiation and inferiorisation of the former to justify their enslavement by the latter.” For the creation of an “Other” different by nature was at the heart of the slaveholding enterprise — “a colonisation of the body by the discourse of power”, writes Michel de Certeau. Contemporary dualism preserves the structure of that discourse — two essences, two camps, an uncrossable border — and contents itself with reversing its values.

Now: “what must be refused, more than the essentialisation of one group or another, is the very existence of a hierarchisation of cultures, 'races' or social groups. The inversion of the scale of values sometimes observed in the Antilles or in Brazil is not scientifically receivable. For to invert is not to overcome.” To turn the hierarchy upside down is still to maintain it. The only victory over the colonial discourse is to leave its grammar.

This position is no theoretical parti pris: it belongs to postcolonial studies “not by ideology, but as the result of our research” — in refusal of the schemas that “tend to cleave the two worlds, colonisers/colonised, into a relation of simple domination/submission” (Coquery-Vidrovitch). The object itself demands it: capoeira proceeds from a triple hybridisation — between African areas on American soil, with European and Asian methods, between the hearths of Bahia and Rio. “All cultures interpenetrate; none is solitary and pure” (Said). It is understood from a “rhizome identity” (Glissant) — not from two boxes.

The test dualism cannot pass

There exists a fact that the Blacks-versus-whites narrative cannot even state without contradicting itself. In the early 1980s, Senzala and Olodum — fervent promoters of Black culture — were composed mainly of white members of the affluent classes, while “Blacks, consciously or not, were excluded from capoeira — defined, however, as one of the most authentic expressions of Brazilian culture originating in Africa”.

Whites promoting a Black culture from which Blacks are excluded: try formulating that paradox with two camps. Dualism fails. An analysis of interlaced power relations — racial, social, cultural — succeeds. The criterion for choosing between the two frames is therefore not moral. It is descriptive: one accounts for the facts, the other does not.

Such is the requirement the field of the Black combat arts takes up as its own: to do justice without simplifying, to honour without essentialising.

SOURCES

Dias, L. S., Quem tem medo da capoeira? Rio de Janeiro, 1890–1904, Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 2001. — Soares, C. E. L., Afro-Ásia, 21–22, 1998–1999. — Popper, K., The Poverty of Historicism. — de Certeau, M., L'écriture de l'histoire, Gallimard, 2008. — Coquery-Vidrovitch, C., Enjeux politiques de l'histoire coloniale, Agone, 2009. — Said, E., Culture and Imperialism. — Glissant, É., Poétique de la Relation, Gallimard, 1990. — Frigerio, A., “Capoeira: de arte negra a esporte branco”. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, General Introduction and Part III, ch. C.1.

IN THE CORPUS

→ “Did Slavery Not Live On?”

→ Saving Capoeira by Condemning the Capoeiras

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. “Who Was Afraid of Capoeira?”. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 16. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/who-was-afraid-of-capoeira. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.