Capoeira Had Teachers and Textbooks Long Before Its Official “Rebirth”

WHY THIS ARTICLE

History credits Mestre Bimba, in the 1930s, with turning capoeira into a teachable method. The archives tell another piece: methodisation begins in 1885, in Rio. And five independent trajectories that converge cannot be five exceptions.

The manual nobody dared to sign

1885. Five years before the criminalisation of capoeiragem. An army instructor publishes the first technical manual ever devoted to the practice: O Guia do Capoeira ou Gymnastica Brazileira. It will be reissued in 1907. The author signs with three initials: O.D.C.

That anonymity is itself a document. A military man judges capoeiragem worthy of a manual — but too compromising to put his name to. The whole ambiguity of the practice's status lies in this paradox: esteemed enough to be codified, too sulphurous to be owned.

The text's material history adds an irony. The 1907 version, the only one accessible to researchers — held at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio and the National Library of Portugal — is not the original: it is an integral copy, made by hand in the 1920s, within the walls of the National Library, by one Annibal Burlamaqui. The future codifier of 1928 copying out the codifier of 1885: the written chain of transmission of capoeiragem, caught in the act.

For O.D.C., the thesis held in a title: capoeiragem was Brazilian gymnastics in essence.

The army, unexpected seedbed

The second man advances with his face uncovered. Ribas Cadaval, a “military hygienist”, does not intend his Brazilian gymnastics for civil society: he wants to make the nation's soldiers “the emulators of the Japanese, if not more agile and stronger”. His pragmatism cuts through the quarrels of purism: combine capoeiragem with jiu-jitsu techniques, to endow the country with a method superior to the Japanese one.

And he was not alone. As early as 1905, in the preface to the Portuguese translation of Hancock's Japanese Physical Training, Lieutenant Santos Porto encouraged the development of capoeiragem — “an excellent occasion to overcome the reluctance towards exercises of agility, which not only strengthen but multiply the means of defence”.

The military institution, supposedly the embodiment of the order that repressed the capoeiras, sheltered the most methodical promoters of capoeiragem. At the very heart of the army we find the distinction this whole history imposes: the capoeiras prosecuted, the capoeiragem esteemed.

The collector, the theorist, the cartoonist

The third man comes from the opposing camp. Mario Aleixo considers himself first and foremost a jiu-jitsu teacher. But Cyriaco's victory, in 1909, changes his gaze: he begins “to collect the forgotten blows of capoeiragem, in silence, without anyone knowing”. The result of that discreet harvest: the headbutt, the sweeps (rasteira, banda), the scissors (tesoura), the baiana and the mid-level kick enter his method. He even invents a movement he christens “guayamú” — after one of Rio's most celebrated maltas. A codifier's homage to the street gangs.

The fourth man, Raphael Lothus, carries a discourse unheard of among the mestres — and startlingly close to contemporary conceptions. For him, capoeiragem is “the game of the forests of Africa transported to Brazil”, rooted in two African dances practised on Brazilian soil: batuque and mandinga. His 1916 article rehabilitates African culture, refutes the accusations of black magic, restores the dignity of dances performed “in honour of the gods”. His biography is itself an argument of method: a notorious delinquent become an honest worker and influential propagator, Lothus is unrecoverable from the police archives alone — which would have retained of him only the delinquent, never the theorist.

The fifth, Raul Pederneiras, combines everything: journalist, cartoonist, poet, police delegate — and a capoeira himself, trained from childhood by watching a practice ground visible from his window. He gives public demonstrations with Aleixo in the 1920s. He approaches Cyriaco, after 1909, to methodise the game — a project the mestre's death interrupts in 1912. And he publishes, over more than thirty years, writings and sketches in the Carioca press. His masterpiece, “A defesa nacional” (Revista da Semana, 7 May 1921), is a small technical manual — the only one of its time to combine detailed descriptions and illustrations.

Five exceptions do not make five exceptions

Let us do the accounts. An anonymous soldier. A hygienist. A combat professional. A theorist of African origins. A journalist-cartoonist. Five roads — military, hygienist, sporting, cultural, journalistic — with no attested concertation, converging on the same enterprise: capoeiragem written, taught, drawn, methodised, decades before its official “rehabilitation”.

Each case, in isolation, could pass for an exception. But the probability that five independent trajectories are five exceptions is small. Their convergence establishes a social fact: a public, esteemed, transmissible capoeiragem existed in the Rio of the “prohibition”. It is one of the master exhibits in the case.

SOURCES

Archives and collections of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): Burlamaqui's copy of the O.D.C. manual; Lothus, R., “O que é a capoeiragem. Rehabilite-se esse jogo nacional”, A Noite, 9 Jan. 1916; Pederneiras, R., “A defesa nacional”, Revista da Semana, 7 May 1921; “Pela industria nacional”, A Rua, 12 Dec. 1915; A Rua, 11 Mar. 1920; “O jogo da capoeira”, Jornal do Brasil, 28 June 1931. — O.D.C., O Guia do Capoeira ou Gymnastica Brazileira, Rio de Janeiro, Livraria Nacional, 1907 (Instituto Moreira Salles / NL Portugal). — Hancock, H. I., Educação Fisica Japoneza, trans. Santos Porto and Radler d'Aquino, Rio de Janeiro, 1905. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part I, ch. C.1–C.5.

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HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Capoeira Had Teachers and Textbooks Long Before Its Official “Rebirth”. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 11. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/capoeira-had-teachers-and-textbooks-long-before-its-official-rebirth. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.