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Capoeira spent its
formative years in slavery. The history of the art goes back more than five
hundred years, to when the Portuguese began to capture Africans to work in
Brazil. The exact origins of Capoeira are both unclear and largely unstudied by
academic historians, but a number of elements have come to be accepted.
It is obvious that
Capoeira is a mingling of many different cultures, as Africans who called
wildly different regions "home" were mixed together as slaves.
Capoeira might, at least in some part, simply been a way for them to
communicate with each other culturally. Certainly the culture of the slave
masters influenced its formation as well, establishing for example the common
language, Portuguese, that everyone knew.
Capoeira might have
been a form of self-defense against the slave masters, or a way of settling
disagreements between the slaves themselves, or it might have been carried
almost directly from older African traditional dances. It is definitely a
fighting art, and one practiced by those who were watched and owned, and that
means it hid itself. It hid violence in dance, and trickery and cleverness in
playfulness.
Zumbi
One of the oldest
Capoeira stories is of a quilombo named Palmares. When a slave
escaped his masters, he or she had two paths to follow: Either run south to
another country, or make his or her way to one of the escaped slave communities
hiding in the jungle or mountains. These communities, which ranged from small
hidden settlements to collections of several villages, were constantly under
attack by those who wanted to recover their slaves or simply combat the
rebellion implicit in the quilombos, societies of
escaped slaves, existing at all.
The largest and most
famous quilombo was Palmares. Its first recorded
leader was named Ganga Zumba. He ruled for a very long time through numerous sieges
by the Portuguese, who, despite their determination, never seemed able to more
than scratch the surface of Palmares. The settlements were well hidden, and were protected
by warriors skilled in Capoeira who could move silently through the mountainous
jungle.
Finally, the
Portuguese resorted to offering Ganga Zumba a deal: If he led his people down out of the mountains
to some awful, desert valley that the Portuguese had set aside for them, every
single citizen would be granted their freedom. Despite the obvious manipulation
to eliminate Palmares as a thorn in the side of the slave-masters, many of
the escaped slaves, including Ganga Zumba, were so tired by decades of being repeatedly attacked
and invaded, were willing to accept the bad deal.
Ganga Zumba accepted, but one of
the citizens of Palmares, Zumbi, passionately refused to submit to the Portuguese. He
was able to get most of the people of Palmares behind him, and in the end, because Ganga Zumba refused to break his
word to the Portuguese, he alone with just one village of Palmares moved to the offered
valley. Seeing just how much they had been taken advantage of, however, he
realized what a mistake he had made and gave his life to convince those who had
followed him to return to the mountains and follow Zumbi.
Zumbi brought the war down
from the mountains to raid the towns of the Portuguese, turning the tide and
making it critical to the masters to end Palmares. In desperation, they hired a famous mercenary, Domingo
Jorge Velhos, who led a large army toward Palmares, even dragging
cannons through the jungle. The escaped slaves, seeing the high stakes of the
battle, burned their fields and villages and retreated to a central fortress.
After days of siege and fighting through clever traps laid by Zumbi's army, Domingo Jorge Velhos finally broke into
the fortress and massacred most of the people of Palmares. Zumbi escaped, but was
tracked down in the jungle and shot.
The Portuguese
believed that after decades, they had finally destroyed the largest and
greatest quilombo. They
underestimated, however, the power that Zumbi had had as a symbol and leader; the few survivors of
the siege gathered together under a youth who had run with Zumbi in his final escape.Palmares lasted as a smaller
force for many more decades, and was never found or completely eradicated.
Indeed, it outlasted the end of slavery in Brazil.
ABOLITION
In Brazil, the end of
slavery in 1888 brought an extremely troubled time of transition. What was a
former slave to do in the new society? Where to find jobs, and how to live
alongside former slave-owners and other former slaves? Those who could find no
work settled into crime as a way of life. Those who were skilled in Capoeira
used it to advance themselves, and became leaders of gangs, enforcers, and
ruffians. Because outlaws practiced Capoeira, Capoeira became outlawed.
The punishments for
practicing Capoeira were severe; Capoeiristas had their achilles tendons cut. To practice, one had to hide behind an
alias. The custom of appelidos, nicknames, traces
to hiding one's identity in illegal rodas so the police
couldn't track you. The navalha, or barber's
straight razor, became an iconic weapon of the Capoeira, hidden somewhere on
his person to flash out unexpectedly and lethally. The ideal of malícia became embodied
in o malandro, the rogue, an
archetypal figure who was not simply a criminal but a mastermind of the con
art. Always smooth, always perfect, commanding the respect and love even of his
victims, he fueled the underworld.
Over time, under
intense legal persecution, Capoeira receded until it was alive and well in only
a few cities: Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador. |
