Capoeira Angola and the Novels of Jorge Amado (Essay‪)‬

During a stay in Brazil a couple of years ago, my wife, son, and 1 were invited to a Sunday afternoon open house at the private religious school where one of her nephews is enrolled--an afternoon of barbecue, guarana (Brazil's favorite soft drink), beer, fellowship, and light entertainment on what might once have been a basketball court. The first item on the program, in which the nephew, Pedro Paulo, performed, was a Nashville-style line dance complete with cowboy hats and jeans and hand-clapping, performed to music by Dolly Parton. The second, however, was a little more in keeping with our setting: several young people and two or three adults formed a ring within which two boys, dressed in white trousers and tee-shirts, circled each other with fluid, graceful movements in what appeared to be a pantomime of fighting involving cartwheels, handstands, and pretend kicks to the head. This dance, if that's what it was, was performed to the sounds of several percussion instruments, all appearing to be of African origin--a tall drum, a tambourine, a variety of hand-held instruments, and what I already knew because of my interest in Brazilian music to be a berimbau, a single-stringed musical bow. (1) I learned that this display of dance, ballet, wrestling, martial art--for it resembled all of these--was called capoeira and I looked forward to telling my friends about it when we returned to Tennessee. The first person I told when I was back on our campus said, "Oh, yes, they do that every Thursday afternoon in front of the library." I have since learned, of course, that capoeira is known and practiced internationally, not just in Brazil, is the subject of innumerable books, and has turned up in a number of films. (2) Capoeira is believed to have originated sometime in the 17th century among escaped slaves, who established in the jungles of northern Brazil, in the states of Pernambuco and Bahia (pronounced Ba-E-uh) discreet communities known as quilombos. The most famous and important of these, Palmares, was established between 1600 and 1605 (Taylor 96) and successfully resisted many attacks by Dutch and Portuguese colonists, who were attempting to reclaim their property, for most of a century. Tradition has attributed Palmares' strength to two charismatic leaders, King Zamba Gunga and his successor Zumbi (Zoom-BEE), during whose sway capoeira is thought to have evolved. Though there is no agreement among historians about the origins of the word, one popular notion is that it derives from a term describing a type of interwoven stick and mud fortification used at the time (Taylor 32, quoting Holloway).