Frisked by the Police, Applauded by the City

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The second capoeiragem championship in history has stayed in the shadow of the first. Yet it says more: in 1905 a capoeiragem championship was an extravagance; in 1913 it is one bill among others. This article restores the event, the six men who made it — and what their trajectory reveals of Republican Brazil.

Six names on the bill

Rio de Janeiro, 23 January 1913. The Correio da Manhã reports on the previous night’s show: “There debuted yesterday, in the popular circus of Figueira de Mello street, the capoeiragem bouts of the troupe recently assembled for a tour of North America, of which Bexiga, Marinheiro, Moleque Olavo, Cannela Fina, Pequeno and Patricio, famous masters of capoeiragem, form part.”

Read slowly. A troupe of capoeiras. Assembled for a North American tour. Presented as an ensemble of “famous masters.” Within the Circo Spinelli, one of the capital’s great venues. The article carries a photograph — the six competitors pose. They are Black. They correspond exactly to the image the word capoeira then carries: men of African origin, of modest condition — and, for several of them, notorious criminals. Everything the classic account of a capoeiragem persecuted until the 1930s makes unthinkable is gathered on this bill.

Moleque Olavo, two lives in one man

The most famous of the six was Olavo José Coutinho, called Moleque Olavo. His path is worth pausing on, for it is the key to everything. On 16 July 1911 — eighteen months before the championship — armed with a revolver stolen from a shop employee, he tried to murder one of his enemies, João de Estiva, firing twice. One of the bullets lodged in the head of Nicolas Miselli, a sixteen-year-old minor who was an unwilling witness to the settling of scores. The boy died at the Misericórdia hospital. Olavo was arrested, taken to the House of Detention, condemned. This was no isolated act: as early as 1907, at eighteen, he and his band assaulted two individuals with head-butts and navalhas — the characteristic modes of the maltas.

And in January 1913, the same man is on the bill of the Circo Spinelli, bound for North America. How to hold the two together? The thesis answers: these capoeiras were “plural men.” According to circumstance, the opportunities offered or created, they took on now the role of criminals driven by score-settling and gain, now that of honest workers respectful of republican values. Neither angels of folklore nor beasts of the crime pages: men who, within an economic, political and social system reluctant to integrate them, found ways to transcend their daily reality. One of those ways was called sporting spectacle.

Frisked, never arrested

A detail from the Correio da Manhã of 20 January concentrates the whole legal situation of the event: the championship capoeiras are “inspected by the police” — revistados pela policia. The police are there. They know who these men are; they frisk, they check. And they arrest no one. The competition advertises itself without disguise: “Struggle of the national game (capoeira),” runs the publicity — the proscribed word, printed in a newspaper, to sell tickets. Twenty-three years after the decree of 1890, the “prohibition” had taken this form: a surveillance that framed the spectacle instead of preventing it. A Epoca could run, on 28 January, the headline of the “sensational capoeira bout” — the sensation is in the hall, no longer in the scandal.

What these men wanted

A silence of the sources speaks as much as their words: in the clippings devoted to the championship, the competitors’ skin colour is almost never mentioned. This silence is no distracted omission. The capoeiras of 1913 did not aspire to be perceived as different; they did not ask for separate spaces in which to express themselves freely, but for access to the venues that had been refused them. “If a political project drove them, it consisted in being treated on an equal footing” — equality understood, in this early twentieth century, as the absence of specific treatment, for specific treatment then referred to a “natural” difference always mobilised to exclude.

The parallel with the French Antilles lights up the strategy. After 1848, “to the time of the conquest of liberty succeeds that of the pursuit of equality” (Dumont); sport there was a “quest for assimilation” — the hope, for men of colour, “of crossing the limits of assignment, men to be judged on their qualities and not their pigmentation.” To judge this strategy as a renunciation of the affirmation of a Black identity is to commit an anachronism: at the time, the differentialist discourse was the weapon of a white elite anxious to preserve its privileges — and those who refused to share the play-spaces were the white sportsmen.

From curiosity to banality

There remains the finest measure the comparison of the two championships allows. In 1905–1906, the competition had aroused curiosity, then unfeigned enthusiasm; it was “the sensational note of the week,” discussed in every enlightened circle. In 1913, success is there — but attention falls away, the eulogies grow rare. Not that the event failed: it had become almost banal. In seven years, capoeiragem-as-national-struggle had entered the cultural landscape of Rio, on a par with the Greco-Roman wrestling championships.

This lightning normalisation is not explained by the championships alone. Between the two, one Saturday in May 1909, a coffee porter felled the Navy’s jiu-jitsu instructor within the Pavilhão Internacional — the most important event in the history of twentieth-century capoeiragem, which made the national struggle self-evident. By 1913, all that remained was to frisk it at the door. And to applaud it.

SOURCES

Press archives of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): “Circo Spinelli,” Correio da Manhã, 20 Jan. 1913 (“Revistados pela policia”; “Luta do jogo nacional (capoeira)”); “No Spinelli. O campeonato de capoeiragem,” Correio da Manhã, 23 Jan. 1913; “Circo Spinelli. Sensacional luta de Capoeira,” A Epoca, 28 Jan. 1913; photograph of the six competitors. — Dumont, J., L’amère patrie, Fayard, 2010. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part I, chap. A.1.

IN THE CORPUS

→ A Championship That Was Banned — and Sold Tickets Anyway

→ The Champion Who Refused to Fight a Black Man

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Frisked by the Police, Applauded by the City. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 23. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/frisked-by-the-police-applauded-by-the-city. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.