Dr Matthias Röhrig Assunção, University of Essex, Department of History
Dr Matthias Röhrig Assunção, a reader in history, has researched and published extensively on the history of slavery, popular revolts and plantation society in Brazil, and Latin America. Using a variety of research methods (including oral history) he has explored different manifestations of Afro-Brazilian popular culture, including the martial arts of the ‘Black Atlantic’. His last book, which provides a synthesis of the history of capoeira, underpins this research project (Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art, Routledge, 2005).
Dr Mariana P. Candido is specialized in the history of Angola from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Her current research examines the social and political effects of the transatlantic slave trade in Benguela and its hinterland. More broadly her interests include the history of slavery, forced migration and slave trade, the South Atlantic world, and the African diaspora. She is the author of Las redes de esclavitud en un puerto del Atlantic Sur: Comercio e Identidad en Benguela, 1780-1850 (El Colegio de Mexico Press, forthcoming), An African Slaving Port on the Atlantic World: Benguela and its hinterland (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and the co-author of Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora with Ana Lucia Araújo and Paul Lovejoy (Africa World Press, 2011). Since 2008, she is an Assistant Professor at the History Department of Princeton University.
The renowned capoeira mestre (‘Master’) Cobra Mansa (Cinésio Feliciano Peçanha, graduated mestre in 1984) has been performing and teaching capoeira for the last thirty years. He is the founder and president (1994-2004) of the International Capoeira Angola Foundation, an NGO based in Washington, DC, with a dozen affiliated groups in Brazil, the US, and Europe. M. Cobra Mansa holds a degree in physical education and has researched movements, music, lyrics and instruments of capoeira for many years. He is a well-known and highly-respected teacher of capoeira across the world and has given many workshops and talks in the US, Western Europe, Russia, Japan, and Latin America. He worked as a consultant for “Mandinga in Manhattan” (2005), a documentary about the globalisation of capoeira, and has performed as a leading musician on Audio-CDs of capoeira music. He also links permaculture to Capoeira Angola in his communal project “Permangola” in Bahia, Brazil.
Richard Pakleppa is an independent filmmaker. He was awarded a Degree in African Studies, University of Cape Town for a thesis on performance culture, political struggle and identity in the townships of Cape Town, 1983-86. Since 1990 he has made films incorporating oral history and storytelling in Namibia, South Africa and Angola. The documentary “Angola, saudades from the one who loves you” (2005) won best documentary award at the Three Continents Film Festival; at the Durban International film festival and at the Munich Documentary Film Festival. “Land, Fire and Water” (2009) gives voice to the San communities in southern Angola.
Dr Christine Dettmann, University of Essex, Department of History
The ethnomusicologist Dr Christine Dettmann is exclusively assigned to this project. She collaborates with the collection and the analysis of the fieldwork material.
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