Dialogue of musical bows: Capoeira Mestre Cobra Mansa from Brasil with the berimbau and an Angolan mbulumbumba player Balthazar Tchakota, August 2010.

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.

Angola

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.

Filmmaker Richard Pakleppa captures daily life in the rural area of Cunene, Angola, August 2010.

Project research

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.

Professor Matthias Röhrig Assunção, Principal Investigator

• Professor Matthias Röhrig Assunção - University of Essex

Dr Mariana P Candido, Co-investigator

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 Fronteras de Esclavización: Esclavitud, Comercio e Identidad en Benguela, 1780-1850 (Colegio de Mexico Press, 2011), An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the co-author of Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora with Ana Lucia Araújo and Paul Lovejoy (Africa World Press, 2011). She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History at the University of Kansas.

Dr Christine Dettmann, Senior Research Officer

Dr Christine Dettmann was the Senior Research Officer of the project until 2013. She now holds a chair in Ethnomusicology at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München in Germany and continues to be a visiting fellow at the History Department of the University of Essex.

• Dr Christine Dettmann - Hochschule für Musik und Theater München
• Dr Christine Dettmann - University of Essex

Cobra Mansa, Capoeira Consultant

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. Mestre 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, Filmmaker

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 Mariana Candido

Project co-investigator, Dr Mariana Candido (University of Kansas) has published various articles and books about the history of the slave trade, focusing on the relationship between the Angolan port Benguela and Brazilian ports. With the financial support of this project, her fieldwork and research has led her to Portugal and Angola too.

Her recent publications include:

• 'Slave Trade and New Identities in Benguela, c. 1700-1860’, Portuguese Studies Review', 19, 1-2 (2011), pp. 43-59.
• 'Dona Aguida Gonçalves marchange à Benguela à la fin du XVIII siécle', Brésil(s).Sciences humaines et sociales, 1 (2012), pp. 33-54.
• 'Marriage, Concubinage, and Slavery in Benguela, ca.1750-1850', in Slavery and Africa and the Caribbean: A History of Enslavement and Identity since the 18th century, eds. Nadine Hunt and Olatunji Ojo (London, New York, I.B. Tauris, 2012).
• An African Slaving Port on the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland, (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Professor Matthias Röhrig Assunção

• 'Stanzas and Sticks: Poetic and Physical Challenges in the Afro-Brazilian Culture of the Paraíba Valley, Rio de Janeiro”. History Workshop Journal, 77 (April, 2014). Advance Access available at History Workshop Journal
• 'Capoeira, art créole.' Cultures-Kairós – Revue d’anthropologie des pratiques corporelles et des arts vivants, Dossier “Capoeiras. Objets-sujets de la contemporanéité”. Maison de Sciences de l’Homme, Paris Nord, 2012. ISSN: 2261-0758 Read 'Capoeira, art créole' on Cultures-Kairós
• 'Capoeira, arte crioula'. Cultures-Kairós – Revue d’anthropologie des pratiques corporelles et des arts vivants, Dossier “Capoeiras. Objets-sujets de la contemporanéité”. Maison de Sciences de l’Homme,Paris Nord, 2012. Read 'Capoeira, arte crioula' on Cultures-Kairós
• 'History and Memory in Capoeira Lyrics from Bahi, Brazil', (.pdf), in N Priscilla Naro, R Sansi-Rosa and DH Treece (eds), (New Yor: Palgrave, 2007), Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic, 199-218.
• More publications by Dr Matthias Röhrig Assunção

Media

• Jogo de Corpo. Capoeira e Ancestralidade / Body Games. Capoeira and Ancestry. Documentary Film, 87 mins. Nyaneka/Portuguese, Portuguese and English subtitles. The DVD is now available for sale.
• Body Games trailer on Youtube (English)
• Jogo de Corpo trailer on YouTube (Portuguese)

Press releases and interviews

• Interview BBC World News 15 December 2014
• Report by Angolan Public Television (TPA) about the project, broadcasted 3 April 2015
• Essex History lecturer's film picks up award at Zanzibar International Film Festival
• International Award for film on Angolan roots of capoeira
• Body Games premiere at Zanzibar International Film Festival
• Interview with Angola Roots of Capoeira team for Rádio Nacional Angola (.m3u file) (interview in Portuguese by Carla Cristina with Matthias Röhrig Assunção, Mestre Cobra Mansa and Christine Dettmann during their first field trip; first broadcast 7 October 2010)

Related project websites

• indiegogo crowd funding campaign for Jogo de Corpo documentary
• Angolan Roots of Capoeira blog
• Angolan Roots of Capoeira Facebook page