Saving Capoeira by Condemning the Capoeiras

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Myths have no author, we like to believe. Capoeira's has authors — names, dates, newspapers. To follow it to its source is to identify a mechanism that will repeat itself throughout the history of the Black combat arts, down to today's heritagisations: the recognition that transforms, and amputates, what it celebrates.

A minister, some Japanese instructors, and a poet's anger

In 1908, the Brazilian Navy recruits Japanese jiu-jitsu instructors to train its apprentice sailors. In the press, a man of letters is indignant. Luiz Murat writes: “The illustrious Admiral, Minister of the Navy, appears to wish to introduce jiu-jitsu as an implement of skill in the physical education of our sailor […] and means to banish from his fatherland Brazilian gymnastics, in which all the other exercises are advantageously combined — jiu-jitsu, savate, fisticuffs, the stick […] Who induced this error in him; who showed him the advantages of the Japanese game over ours?”

For Murat, the import of jiu-jitsu is the symptom of a “degeneration of the nation”: that sickly propensity to submit to the foreign instead of valuing what belongs to the national. And the battleground is not chosen at random: the military institutions, guardians of the nation, its values and its culture. To defend capoeiragem in the Navy is to defend the very body of the country.

So much for the defence. But this defence has a counterpart — and it is the counterpart that makes the case so instructive.

The tavern and the cortiço

For according to Murat, capoeiragem itself is degenerating. Where? In two “depraved and insalubrious” spaces: the cortiços — the precarious dwellings that housed Rio's working poor — and the taverns, “places of mental alienation” where the practice's virtues yield to immorality. His sentence falls: “The tavern and the cortiço. These are the symbols of the decadence of capoeiragem.”

The hygienist reasoning closes like a trap. To be saved, capoeiragem must be purified — that is, extracted from the popular spaces where it actually lives, torn from the men who actually practise it. The defence of the practice proceeds by the condemnation of its practitioners.

Remember this mechanism. It is only beginning.

Rewriting the past of the maltas

The myth's second author works in another register: no longer space, but time. Coelho Netto undertakes to rewrite the history of the maltas — the capoeirista gangs that had ruled the streets of Rio in the nineteenth century, and whose very name evoked urban terror.

Under his pen they become well-regulated micro-societies, endowed with internal tribunals: “In the quarters of Vintèm and Nhéco councils would sometimes gather in which the crimes and faults imputed to certain troublemakers were severely judged. Confessed thieves were immediately expelled, and murderers who could not justify by self-defence the crime for which they were denounced were expelled — and at times even handed over to the police by their own chiefs.”

Netto also summons recent history: Princess Isabel's “Black Guard” — made up of confirmed capoeiras — defended abolition and the tottering monarchy. He draws a moral portrait: “money was not the sinew of war; civic values were.”

Let us be fair. Netto was counterbalancing an image of barbarity that two decades of repression had engraved in people's minds. The corrective had its value. But his narrative omitted a harder datum, which the sources restore: many capoeiras hired out their services to the political parties as capangas — henchmen charged with assaulting opponents and intimidating voters, at a time when the vote was neither open to the illiterate nor secret. The violence of the maltas was not merely a black legend to be corrected. It was a political fact, embedded in the very functioning of the electoral system of the Empire and the First Republic.

The myth did not lie by invention. It lied by subtraction.

What a consecration costs

Let us do the accounts. In the writings of Murat and Netto, the Black capoeiras become models of moral and physical virtue on which to found a strong nation. The symbolic gain is real — a marginalised practice accedes to the rank of heritage. But something disappears in the operation: the African origins, the street culture, the real men — their taverns, their cortiços, their capanga contracts, their world.

Symbolic elevation and documentary amputation go hand in hand. This is the first occurrence of a mechanism destined to repeat itself — one we will meet again, in other guises, every time a Black practice is celebrated by those who do not live it.

SOURCES

Press archives, National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): Murat, L., Jornal do Brasil, 24 Apr. 1908; “Gymnastica brasileira. Taverna e o cortiço”, Jornal do Brasil, 16 Aug. 1924; “Gymnastica brasileira. Camaradagem e solidariedade”, Jornal do Brasil, 23 Aug. 1924; Coelho Netto, Carioca press. — Soares, C. E. L., “A guarda negra: a capoeira no palco da política”, Textos do Brasil, 14, 2008. — 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. B.1–B.2.

IN THE CORPUS

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HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Saving Capoeira by Condemning the Capoeiras. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 04. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/saving-capoeira-by-condemning-the-capoeiras. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.