The First Capoeira Manual Was Signed by a Man With No Name

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The Guia do Capoeira is the founding text of the discipline’s entire written tradition. Its author, its anonymity, its icy reception in 1885, its opportune reissue in 1907 — and even the far-fetched story of how it survived — everything, in this ten-page pamphlet, tells the exact place of capoeiragem in Brazilian society. And its two dates turn a single book into an instrument for dating a society’s gaze.

Three initials that are not a name

On the cover of the first technical manual ever devoted to capoeiragem stand three letters: O.D.C. — the dedicatory formula Offered, Dedicated and Consecrated (à distincta mocidade, “to the distinguished youth”). The author himself remains without a name. But he describes himself: a “distinguished officer of the Brazilian army, master of all weapons, instructor of soldiers and most skilled in defensive gymnastics or the true art of the capoeira.”

A military instructor, then — and his world can be reconstructed: the arms assaults of the second half of the nineteenth century, those training grounds reserved for army and navy officers where savate, chausson and capoeiragem were sometimes scheduled side by side. It is from this culture of the duel — conventions, equality of adversaries, banishment of raw violence — that his capoeiragem proceeds.

Why sign nothing: 1885 and the maltas

The anonymity is nothing coy. To grasp it, one must restore the exact year. Thanks to a source recovered by the research — a review published in the Gazeta de Noticias of 21 February 1885 — the first edition can be dated firmly to 1885, and not to 1907 as long believed.

And 1885 changes everything. At that date the maltas — the armed bands of capoeiras — are still a living, violent reality in the streets of Rio; the word capoeira is a brand of infamy. To propose, in that climate, a national gymnastics built on capoeiragem was an idea very nearly lunar — out of step with its time to the point of seeming absurd. Publicly defending the practice when it was synonymous with criminal bands would have been dishonouring. Hence the three initials in place of a name: the author judges capoeiragem worthy of a manual, yet far too compromising to sign. The whole ambiguity of the practice’s status is held in that paradox: esteemed enough to be codified, too sulphurous to be owned.

“A most curious work”

The book’s reception is itself a document — and the very review that lets us date it. The Gazeta de Noticias of 21 February 1885 receives “the first instalment of a most curious work,” notes that the author “conserves his anonymity,” credits him with a profound command of the material, and reports his stated aim: to raise the Brazilian gymnastics “from the abjection in which it lies,” elevating it, as a singularity of the homeland, alongside English boxing, French savate and German wrestling. The reviewer then takes care to add that the title Guia do Capoeira does not mean the work concerns “the game vulgarly known as capoeiragem, so in vogue among the troublemakers of the streets.”

Everything is there: the recognition of competence, the sheer incongruity of the proposal — “most curious” — and the closing precaution, careful to dissociate the book from “the game of the street troublemakers.” In 1885, the idea of a national gymnastics founded on capoeiragem was unreceivable.

The same book, twenty-two years on

Here the two dates become a single argument. What was unpublishable in 1885 had become fashionable by 1907 — and the mechanism of that reversal is precisely what the twin editions let us read.

Between the two dates, the world had turned. The maltas had been dismantled by the repression of the 1890s; by 1907 they were no more than a bad memory. And above all, the first public capoeiragem championship had taken place in 1905–1906, followed by Cyriaco’s triumph over the navy’s jiu-jitsu instructor in 1909. Capoeiragem was ceasing to be the mark of notorious criminals and becoming a sport in its own right. So a publisher reissued the manual in 1907 — the same text, unchanged, that the 1885 review quotes word for word, which is how we know the two editions are one work. The book had not changed. Society had.

This is what makes the Guia more than a founding text: a single work, held to two dates, becomes an instrument for dating the social gaze upon capoeira — its passage from the infamous to the respectable. What a society refuses to print, and what it consents to reissue, measures the distance it has travelled.

An irony of preservation completes the story. The 1885 original is lost. The surviving version — held at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio and at the National Library of Portugal — is not the original at all: it is a complete copy, made by hand in the 1920s, within the walls of the National Library, by one Annibal Burlamaqui. The author of the second manual (1928) copying out the author of the first: the written chain of transmission of capoeiragem, caught in the act.

A lost golden age

The pamphlet’s content surprises by its melancholy. O.D.C. does not describe the capoeiragem of his own day: he mourns the one that came before. “The capoeira of the past, famous for the richness of his varied movements — offensive and defensive — was prudent and a friend of order. […] Slow and successive degeneration begins to destroy the beauties of this patriotic Gymnastics through the absence of the last notable masters. […] Today, the capoeira is represented by vagabond disgrace.”

A golden age set before the 1850s, a decline through the disappearance of the masters, an unworthy present: from the very first manual, capoeiragem is written in the register of the regretted past. The research confirms the substance: a playful capoeiragem did exist in the first half of the nineteenth century — European chroniclers attest to it — before being supplanted, in the collective imagination, by the knife-fighting of the streets.

Four blows, two guards, fifty centimetres

The manual’s technique is of a military sobriety: four offensive movements — a punch, a slap, a kick to the “virile parts,” and a rasteira (sweep) in two versions, old and modern; two guard positions; four modes of displacement; strategies for reaching the eyes and the throat. Down to the spacing of the stance in first position: between 40 and 50 centimetres.

This basic, pragmatic capoeiragem is the one Rugendas painted and Thomas Ender sketched in the nineteenth century. The wide-amplitude movements balanced on the hands — the future rabo de arraia — do not appear: they “probably arose within the maltas,” among the young men who devoted their time to the street game. The manual destined this method for the “distinguished youth,” to defend themselves “without the aid of weapons and with the natural resources of arms, head and feet” — against whom? Against the armed capoeiras of the streets. The founding paradox closes as early as 1885: capoeiragem taught to respectable people so they might protect themselves from the capoeiras.

SOURCES

ODC, O Guia do Capoeira ou Gymnastica Brazileira, Rio de Janeiro, Livraria Nacional, 1907 [1885] (Instituto Moreira Salles; National Library of Portugal) — quotations pp. 1–4 and front cover. — Gazeta de Noticias, Rio de Janeiro, 21 February 1885, p. 1 (National Library of Brazil), first-edition dating. — Rugendas; Ender, Th. (19th-c. iconography). — 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. C.1.

IN THE CORPUS

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

→ The Prohibition That Wasn't

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The First Capoeira Manual Was Signed by a Man With No Name. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 32. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-first-capoeira-manual-was-signed-by-a-man-with-no-name. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.