Angolan Roots of Capoeira

During the nineteenth century African and Creole slaves living in port cities and surrounding plantations in Brazil developed a combat game called capoeira. Even though initially repressed by the authorities, it spread to the free lower classes during the nineteenth century, and to the rest of Brazil during the twentieth century. Capoeira has become one of the most-well known aspects of Brazilian culture and is now widely practiced by hundreds of thousands of people in every continent.

Capoeira consists of a combination of acrobatics, rhythms, combat, dance and theatrical performance, all of which maintain a distinctive Afro-Brazilian character. Just how many of its characteristics are 'African' is the object of much debate among capoeira practitioners, academics researching its history, and the wider public interested in the culture of the 'Black Atlantic' or engaged with diasporic issues.

Our research explores several traditions in south-western Angola, a region often identified as providing the 'roots' of capoeira because of the existence of instruments and movements similar to capoeira. There are several combat games which use alternatively kicks, hands, sticks and other weapons, techniques that are also present in historical capoeira styles. The project explores the music and lyrics that accompany these performances, and related dances and rituals practiced in some villages belonging to different ethnic groups of the Nyaneka family in that region.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded the project from June 2010 to December 2013. During this period, two fieldwork trips to Angola and one to Brazil were completed by the interdisciplinary team consisting of a historian, an ethnomusicologist, a distinguished Capoeira teacher and a renowned filmmaker. The collected data contributed to the making of the documentary and provides the basis for further scholarly analysis. Ethnographic fieldwork is complemented by a specialist historian who worked in archives in Angola and Portugal.

The project aims to assess the extent of continuities, and borrowing, but also of ruptures, changes and re-inventions in order to understand the 'creolization' process through which some specific African traditions merged and developed into something new, original and global. Moreover, the project has employed fieldwork methods which involve people in a transcultural dialogue. For instance, performers in Angola have reacted in uniquely illuminating ways when faced with instruments, movements and music that are linked to their own traditions.