Rio's Capoeira Existed. Then It Was Erased.

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The self-evidence that binds capoeira to Bahia is the product of a history. To reconstruct it is to expose a mechanism — the erasure of one version of a Black practice by another — which today threatens, elsewhere in the Caribbean, mayolè and danmyé.

The capital we forgot

Say the word “capoeira” before any audience, in Brazil or anywhere else. The images that surface will come from Bahia: the berimbau, the roda, Salvador, Mestre Bimba. The self-evidence seems beyond dispute. It has, however, a history — and that history begins with a reminder we have ended up losing sight of.

Rio de Janeiro was the capital of Brazil for nearly two centuries (1763–1960). Political, intellectual and cultural centre of the Empire and then of the First Republic, the city housed a very large African population whose cultural wealth had nothing to envy in the other regions of the country. By the end of the nineteenth century it had become a world crossroads of the fighting arts, where European wrestlers, Japanese instructors, champions from the French colonies and local capoeiras crossed paths.

And the facts line up with disconcerting clarity. It is in Rio that the first two technical works on capoeiragem appear: O.D.C.'s in 1885, Burlamaqui's in 1928. It is in Rio that the first two championships in history are held, in 1905 and 1913. It is in Rio that Cyriaco fells the Navy's jiu-jitsu instructor, in 1909, before a delirious theatre. And it is in Rio that the collections where this history awaits its readers still sleep — the National Library, the National Archives, the National Folklore Centre.

Rio was not one hearth among others. It was the place where capoeiragem was first written down, codified and publicly consecrated.

A capoeira without the berimbau

This Carioca tradition had a physiognomy of its own. One trait suffices to measure its distance from the discipline's current image. It knew nothing of the berimbau.

As late as the 1950s, Carioca capoeiragem — represented then by Sinhôzinho's school — was practised without the musical bow, which simply did not exist in the universe of the local game. It was introduced into the capital by two teachers, Manoel and Coronel, at Jayme Martins Ferreira's Academy of Capoeiragem. “They were the only ones who knew how to play it.” In the city of the first manuals and the first championships, the instrument perceived today as capoeira's eternal soul was a late import, mastered by two men.

How a tradition is erased

How could so dense a history disappear from collective memory? The chronology gives the first key: the erasure was a substitution. At the very moment when Carioca capoeiragem was dying out and its last masters disappearing, the folkloric capoeira elaborated in the 1930s by the Bahian intellectuals was spreading rapidly through the Southeast. It imposed itself in the collective imagination as the one and only capoeira — relegating the other versions to the rank of “unfortunate variants of the authentic practice”.

The channels of this diffusion can be identified one by one: the books, the documentaries, the films, the folkloric shows; a determined policy of the Bahia Tourist Office, which made capoeira an emblem of the destination; and above all the many Bahian teachers who had migrated to the Southeast, transmitting as one indivisible whole physical education, self-defence, sport and folklore.

One document measures the process's completion. In the folklorists' writings, “the Southeast of the country was becoming a periphery of Salvador”. Edison Carneiro thus writes in 1975: “The great capoeiras of Bahia […] emigrated to Rio de Janeiro are attempting to perpetuate the vadiação on Carioca soil.” Reread that sentence. Rio — the city of the first manuals, the first championships, of Cyriaco — is described there as a mere mission territory for the capoeira come down from the Northeast. The inversion of memory is complete.

A covering-over, not a destruction

The exact nature of the phenomenon matters, for it changes everything. This is not a destruction. The sources exist, intact, in the collections of the National Library of Brazil. It is a covering-over: the dominant historiography, built from Bahia and with Bahian categories, does not read them. Carioca history was not burned — it was rendered illegible by the triumph of another narrative.

The distinction has a practical consequence: a covered-over history can be restored. It suffices to change the documentary base.

And the mechanism reaches far beyond Brazil. One version of a Black practice elected, standardised, diffused by the cultural and tourist institutions; the other versions relegated, then forgotten: such is the general form heritagisation can take for a practice of the diaspora. For Guadeloupean mayolè and Martinican danmyé, which are entering today the age of their own heritagisation, this lesson is anything but academic. It is a warning.

SOURCES

Collections of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): Carioca press, 1905–1955. — Carneiro, E., Capoeira, Rio de Janeiro, Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1975. — 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. A.1–A.2.

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Berimbau: An “Immemorial Tradition” More Recent Than We Think

→ Mercado Modelo: Is “Tourist” Capoeira a Betrayal?

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Rio's Capoeira Existed. Then It Was Erased.. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 06. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/rio-s-capoeira-existed-then-it-was-erased. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.