HISTORY · BRAZIL

The Law That Banned Capoeira Set It Free to Become a Game

6 MIN READ

At the century's end, a Brazil embracing progress criminalised capoeiragem as gang disorder — and, by contingency, freed its ludic form to become spectacle and sport.

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Prohibition is read as capoeira's near-death. The thesis proposes a paradox: the criminalisation of the gang-form was the contingent condition for the elites and pedagogues to appropriate its ludic form.

Civilising the country

At the end of the nineteenth century, slavery was abolished and the First Republic proclaimed. Brazil had to embrace the era of progress and modernity, to civilise itself on the model of the European nations, turning its back on the colony and the Empire as symbols of a bygone archaism. In this reorganisation — social, political and economic — men were policed; vagrancy and criminality were combatted. Capoeiragem, here a deviant, delinquent practice of organised bands, was officially forbidden by law.

A contingent liberation

This criminalisation had, as a contingent effect, the appropriation of capoeira by the elites, the people and the pedagogues under its ludic form — as attested since the earliest colonial times. Capoeira left the ill-famed alleys and the taverns, and became a spectacle and a competitive wrestling.

Why it matters

The ban did not kill capoeira; it split it. By outlawing the gang-form, the law cleared the ground on which the game-form could be raised into sport and heritage.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (General conclusion: abolition, the Republic and the criminalisation of capoeiragem)

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Writer Who Turned a Crime into a Noble Art

→ The Prohibition That Wasn't

→ The Blade That Was Written Out of Capoeira

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Law That Banned Capoeira Set It Free to Become a Game. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 106. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-law-that-banned-capoeira-set-it-free-to-become-a-game. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.