The Knight-Errant of Capoeiragem Was White

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Lothus is a limit-case that tests every grid: a poor White man of the maltas, expert with the knife and the rabo de arraia, passionate defender of enslaved Black culture, dead a criminal. Neither the police archives nor the racial narrative can contain him. That is exactly why he must be told.

A portrait written the day after a drama

“Raphael Lothus was an original type. Tall, nervous, strong, vigorously strong and more still: of a feline agility and a connoisseur of a game still more terrible than ‘jiu-jitsu’ — the game of the capoeira, of which he was a teacher.” This description — one of the only ones that survive of the mestre — appears in A Noite on 3 September 1917, under the title “Cavalleiro andante da capoeiragem”: the knight-errant of capoeiragem. It is written on the occasion of his death. The day before, after a quarrel, Raphael Pereira da Silva, called Raphael Lothus, shot dead a tram driver — then turned the weapon on himself.

The other side of the maltas

His trajectory disturbs the received narrative from the outset: Lothus was neither military nor bourgeois — nor Black. “He was a man of the people, a former industrial agent, reconverted into a physical education teacher in the favoured circles of the city.” Young, he was “regularly arrested for vagrancy and acts of delinquency.” He “represented the other side of those armed bands, the one composed of poor Whites, of Brazilian or foreign origin,” who shared with their creole and African peers “the same misery and the same spaces” (Soares).

It was in the streets, in contact with the elders, that he learned the subtleties of the national struggle — “expert both in the handling of the knife and in the execution of the rabo de arraia.” Then the ascent: the delinquent became Raphael Lothus, gymnastics teacher at the College of Nitcheroy, fine connoisseur of European gymnic currents and of Greek philosophy, respected by all. Without ever shedding his violence: he continued to frequent the police stations for acts of brutality. At last, he killed, and killed himself. “The life and death of Raphael Lothus illustrate the tortuous path of the capoeiras of the First Republic, impossible to reconstitute in its complexity from the police and judicial sources alone.”

The White man who defended the Blacks’ dances

For his principal legacy is theoretical — and stunning in its modernity. In his 1916 article, “O que é a capoeiragem. Rehabilite-se esse jogo nacional,” Lothus holds a discourse “unheard of in the milieu of the mestres, and close to contemporary conceptions”: capoeiragem is “the game of the forests of Africa transported to Brazil,” rooted in two African dances practised on Brazilian soil — the batuque and the mandinga. And he rises in defence: the discredit cast on these dances, accused of black magic and sorcery, is a calumny — “they were only dances performed in honour of the gods.” Lothus “rehabilitated African culture, refuted the fallacious accusations and gave cultural value back to these dances.”

Pause on the image: in 1916, a former White ruffian of the maltas pleads in the press for the dignity of the African cults — while the academicians Murat and Netto, defenders of the same capoeiragem, sort between good and bad Blacks. The Black-versus-White narrative does not know where to file Lothus. Nor does the narrative of a capoeiragem ashamed of its African origins: its most ardent African genealogist was this poor White man.

A man no single archive contains

The Lothus case is no curiosity: it is an argument. One and the same man was notorious delinquent, honest worker, theorist of origins, teacher of the elites — not successively, but simultaneously in layers. The “plural men” of the 1913 championship find in him their most complete incarnation, down to his tragic end that brings back at a stroke all the violence his success seemed to have left behind.

No single source could grasp him: the police archived his brutalities, the sports press his expertise, the cultural press his theory, the judicial chronicle his death. All had to be crossed to find the man. It is the demonstration, by a life, of what the thesis establishes by method: the history of capoeiragem is read in no single archive. The knight-errant well deserved that service.

SOURCES

“O tragico caso de hontem em Nitcheroy. Cavalleiro andante da capoeiragem,” A Noite, 3 September 1917; Lothus, R., “O que é a capoeiragem. Rehabilite-se esse jogo nacional,” A Noite, 9 January 1916 — National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro). — Soares, C. E. L., “‘A negregada instituição’: os capoeiras na Corte Imperial, 1850–1890.” — 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.4.

IN THE CORPUS

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

→ “Who Was Afraid of Capoeira?”

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Knight-Errant of Capoeiragem Was White. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 35. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-knight-errant-of-capoeiragem-was-white. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.