The Nobel Candidate Who Rewrote the Bands of Rio

WHY THIS ARTICLE

After Murat, the second author of the myth. His procedure is not invention but retouching: marginalising violence, ennobling origins, moralising motives. And the thesis identifies his probable source of inspiration — the championship of 1905, of which his description of the maltas is the tracing.

A forgotten bill

Begin with the most astonishing revelation of his 1923 article, “O nosso jogo” — our game: “In 1910, Germano Haslocher, Luiz Murat and the one who writes these lines thought of sending a bill to the Chamber of Deputies making the teaching of capoeiragem compulsory in the official institutes and in our barracks.”

Reread the date: 1910. Twenty years after the criminalisation decree, three figures of the elite — two of them academicians — project making the practice compulsory in the institutions of the State. The bill came to nothing, but its very existence finishes off the account of a capoeiragem unanimously reviled until the 1930s. The man who writes these lines is no ordinary one: Coelho Netto, over a hundred works published, co-founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, its president in 1926, candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.

Lions and jackals

The heart of his enterprise: to purge the past of the maltas — and of the capangas — of their violence, still vivid in collective memory. His method holds in one image: “As lions are always accompanied by jackals, into the maltas of so many valiant men there slipped assassins whose sanguinary pleasure consisted in trying the knife in the bellies of their neighbours, disembowelling them.”

Netto does not deny the violence: he marginalises it. It becomes the deed of a few deviants — the jackals — while the chiefs, those lions, fight as gentlemen. And the guerrillas of the bands become duels of honour. The thesis’s verdict is clean: “Coelho Netto transformed by a double process the unreasoning violence into mastered violence and the collective expression of the former into a singular duel.” Now “no source attests to organised fights with two rows of spectators on either side. Duels between capoeiras did take place, but very often they were alone and weapons entered the dance, causing serious wounds.”

Where did his image of the maltas come from? From a show

Here the analysis turns troubling. That scene of a duel acclaimed by two camps, which the historical sources do not know — Netto had seen it. At the theatre. The 1905–1906 championship opened exactly thus: two troupes in the arena, two men who detach themselves, a bare-handed duel, the acclamations. The account in A Federação describes what Netto would describe: “Two groups divided into opposing camps. From each detached a member who approached his competitor swaying his body […] Each well-applied rabo de saia — was a wave of applause; each rasteira that made the competitor fall — was an ovation.”

“No doubt Coelho Netto had in the past attended this representation. For the description of the malta fights he gave in his article resembled, to the point of confusion, the spectacle of the popular capoeiras.” The history of the maltas according to Netto was not a memory of the streets. It was a memory of the theatre — the 1905 spectacle back-projected onto the nineteenth century. The myth did not merely rewrite the past: it replaced it with its staging.

Blue blood in the roda

A last operation: to ennoble. Netto lists the great men who practised — “eminent figures in politics, in teaching, in the army, in the navy” — down to “Juca Paranhos, who aggrandised the title of Rio Branco,” the viscount, president of the Council, architect of the Free Womb law of 1871. The intended effect is explicit: “The amateur capoeira could now inscribe his steps in those of the great men of national history. Shame faded in favour of a patriotic pride; the doors were at last open to the gentlemen.”

And to crown it, a foil: English boxing. “We who possess the secrets of one of the most agile and elegant exercises are ashamed to exhibit it […] Let us go and learn to throw punches — it is an elegant sport, because people practise it with gloves, with rents in dollars, and it is called boxing, an English name.” Marginalise the violence, replace the streets with the stage, ennoble the ranks, mock the foreigner: in four gestures, a Nobel candidate had endowed capoeiragem with a presentable past. It remained only to teach it — and he had even written the bill.

SOURCES

Coelho Netto, “O nosso jogo,” Jornal do Brasil, 28 October 1923; taken up in A.Z., “Gymnastica brasileira,” A Noite, 5 February 1926; “A capoeiragem,” A Federação, 8 January 1906 — National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro). — Soares, C. E. L., “A guarda negra,” 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, chap. B.2.

IN THE CORPUS

→ Saving Capoeira by Condemning the Capoeiras

→ A Championship That Was Banned — and Sold Tickets Anyway

→ The Princess’s Black Guard

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Nobel Candidate Who Rewrote the Bands of Rio. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 30. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-nobel-candidate-who-rewrote-the-bands-of-rio. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.