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

WHY THIS ARTICLE

This is the corpus's textbook case: proof, on a precise and dated object, that what we perceive as the essence of a tradition can be the result of a victorious redefinition. With, at stake, the question of method that must guide all research on traditions.

The instrument that did not exist

Close your eyes and summon a capoeira roda. Before even the bodies, a sound comes: the deep metallic vibration of the musical bow. The berimbau has become so consubstantial with the game that a capoeira without a berimbau seems a contradiction in terms.

Yet here is what the sources say. In the 1950s, Carioca capoeiragem — represented then by Sinhôzinho's school — “knew nothing of the use of these instruments presented as traditional”. In Rio de Janeiro, “this musical bow did not exist in the universe of the Brazilian game”. It was introduced into the capital by Manoel and Coronel, when they taught 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, the first championships and Cyriaco, only two men could draw a sound from the instrument supposed to embody the game's eternal soul.

“Barbarous and primitive music”

How did the berimbau reach Carioca ears? Through the tours of Bahian capoeira. And the press that announces them delivers, unintentionally, a precious document on the gaze it carried: “We shall also have another occasion to appreciate the barbarous and primitive music that accompanies the fight-dance, drawn from rustic instruments that resemble an Indian bow and are called berimbaus.”

Barbarous, primitive, rustic. The exoticising vocabulary says it all. Alongside the danced steps and the acrobatics, the berimbau was “the other attraction of this Bahian capoeira”. Its function, in the economy of the show, was precise: to attest to “African reminiscences still alive on Brazilian soil”. “The urucungo was of another age. To watch and hear it plunged one into an exotic universe, exterior to the known world. The change of scene was total, through the instrument's particular sonority, which pointed to Bahia and, further still, to ancestral times, before the advent of modern 'civilisation'.” The instrument operated as a sign of ancestrality — before operating as music.

What the argument does not say

A precision is required, for the argument is exposed to a misreading. It does not bear on the instrument's antiquity. The urucungo is attested in Brazil from far back, and its African origin is not in dispute. It bears on the obligatory association of instrument and game — that unwritten rule which holds that there is no capoeira without a berimbau. It is that rule, and it alone, that can be dated: Carioca capoeiragem — that of the championships of 1905 and 1913, of Cyriaco, of Sinhôzinho — was played without it, and managed perfectly well.

The figure of Sinhôzinho concentrates all the moment's ambivalence: “the master castigated the use of the berimbau, a means of diversion for evading the reality of combat” — while mastering it “almost like no one else”. For the Carioca tradition, the instrument was a matter of aesthetic choice. Not of the game's essence.

The immemorial has a date

The mechanism at work has a name: folklorisation. Bahian capoeira “represented a trace of the past preserved at the heart of modernity. It became all the more beautiful for it, since for many it pointed to another culture, another era, whose contours they could not truly draw.” Everything is in that last clause: the folklorised object is valued for the past it evokes — all the more prestigious for being vague — and not for the present it practises. The berimbau was the sonic operator of this folklorisation: each note certified the show's ancestrality.

Whence the lesson of method, which holds far beyond Brazil. The question “what is authentic?” is undecidable — it renews the quarrels of essence. The operative question is: which version imposed itself, when, through which channels, and at the expense of which others?

Guadeloupean mayolè and Martinican danmyé are still waiting for that question to be applied to them with the same rigour. Before their own “berimbaus” are invented for them.

SOURCES

Collections of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): Carioca press of the 1950s on the tours of Bahian capoeira. — 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 (“Berimbaus (ou urucungos) et pandeiros, un attrait supplémentaire”).

IN THE CORPUS

→ Rio's Capoeira Existed. Then It Was Erased.

→ Capoeira Was Not “Invented” — It Was Rewritten, Again and Again

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Berimbau: An “Immemorial Tradition” More Recent Than We Think. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 15. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-berimbau-an-immemorial-tradition-more-recent-than-we-think. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.