A Championship That Was Banned — and Sold Tickets Anyway

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Official history has it that after the prohibition of 1890, capoeira vanished from public space until its rebirth in the 1930s. The press archives tell another piece. In December 1905, a public capoeiragem championship was held in Rio de Janeiro — announced in the newspapers, attended by large audiences, and never once interrupted by the police. This fact, ignored by the historiography, forces a reconsideration of the commonly accepted chronology.

A show that should never have existed

December 1905. Evening after evening, hundreds of Cariocas take their seats under the big top of the Marte grounds. The press has been announcing the event for days. The columnists are amused by the originality of the show. Bourgeois families rub shoulders with a popular audience drawn by modestly priced tickets. On the programme, an attraction billed as a novelty: a championship of national gymnastics (capoeiragem).

At first sight, nothing exceptional. Yet one detail turns this show into a historical enigma. For fifteen years, capoeiragem has been officially forbidden. Articles 402 to 404 of Decree no. 487 of 11 October 1890 provide prison sentences for its practitioners. It is on this basis that a chronology gradually imposed itself, becoming almost beyond dispute: after the prohibition, capoeira is said to have disappeared from public space, before being reborn under the impulse of Mestre Bimba in the 1930s.

How, under these conditions, could a public championship — announced in the newspapers, held several evenings in a row in the federal capital, open to all — take place without provoking the slightest police intervention? That question is the starting point of the inquiry.

The newspapers tell a forgotten article

The press archives held at the National Library of Brazil make it possible to reconstruct the event. From December 1905 onward, a “grand and splendid equestrian, gymnastic and acrobatic company” presents, every evening, a show whose main attraction is a capoeiragem championship. The six competitors are described as “valiant and intrepid artists of the genre”.

The vocabulary deserves precision. At this time, the word capoeiragem designates the bodily practice itself — game, fight or gymnastics — while capoeira can designate either the practitioner or, increasingly, a police category associated with urban disorder. This distinction, essential to reading the archives, is examined in more detail in another piece of this corpus.

The columnists also use the term valente. In republican Brazil it designates men famed for their physical courage, often drawn from the former maltas, the capoeirista gangs that had ruled the streets of Rio in the nineteenth century. The celebrated Nagôas and Guayamús bands had nonetheless been dismantled after the campaigns of repression launched from 1890 onward. Seeing these men become the stars of a paying show therefore surprises the journalists themselves. Capoeiragem, yesterday a matter of the streets, now enters a space of entertainment.

What this championship changes

The interest of the episode does not lie in its spectacle alone. It poses a historical problem. If the prohibition had indeed driven the practice out of public space, a championship held several evenings in a row in the capital ought to have triggered arrests. No police or press source mentions any.

That silence is not trivial. It compels us to distinguish two realities that the historiography has often conflated: the existence of a law, and its effective application. The simultaneous presence of a penal prohibition and a public practice does not mean the law of 1890 did not exist. It simply shows that its application was more complex than the traditional narrative allows.

Why had nobody noticed?

The answer probably lies less in the event itself than in the sources historians have used. For several decades, research on capoeira has rested mainly on police and judicial archives. These documents are exceptionally rich for knowing who was arrested, their trades, their neighbourhoods, or the forms of violence prosecuted by the authorities. But they carry a structural limit. They preserve only what the police pursues. A tolerated gathering, an authorised show, a practice momentarily accepted leaves, by definition, no trace in them.

The press archives offer another vantage point. They record what journalists see, what audiences attend, what makes an event in the city. Confronting them with the police archives, a more nuanced reality appears: while certain capoeiras were being arrested, capoeiragem could, in certain circumstances, be shown, applauded and commercialised.

An anomaly that forces the narrative open

The championship of December 1905 does not, by itself, suffice to write a new history of capoeira. It constitutes, however, what epistemologists of science call an anomaly: a solidly established fact that the dominant model struggles to explain.

The question, then, is no longer whether capoeiragem was forbidden — the statutes attest it — but how an officially proscribed practice could go on existing publicly, at times under the benevolent eye of the authorities. It is that contradiction that must now be explained.

SOURCES

Press archives, National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): A Noticia, 8–9 Dec. 1905; Gazeta de Noticias, 9 Dec. 1905; A Federação, 8 Jan. 1906; Revista da Semana, 17 Dec. 1905; Correio da Manhã, Jan. 1913. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis in History, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part I, ch. A.1.

IN THE CORPUS

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HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. A Championship That Was Banned — and Sold Tickets Anyway. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 01. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/a-championship-that-was-banned-and-sold-tickets-anyway. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.