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.
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. Nascimento Grande was an intensely feared Capoeira in Recife who led his band through the Carnaval each year and disappeared in the early 1900′s; some say he was finally killed in a police raid, others that he simply moved to Rio de Janeiro and lived out his life under another identity. Manduca de Praia, an older Capoeira, always dressed in the utmost elegance and had, it was said, twenty-seven criminal charges against him – all dropped because of the influence of the politicians who secretly employed him.
Slowly, Capoeira was extinguished even in Recife and Rio de Janeiro. There were left a few legendary Capoeiras like Besouro Manganga, who was said to have corpo fechado - invincibility – and was finally betrayed and killed with a knife that had been specially blessed to be able to harm him. When Capoeira finally became legal and even a celebrated part of Brazil’s heritage.