Uncle Pascoal rewarded him one day by offering him a protection, that ‘only God could succeed in
deceiving [overthrowing] him’. The old African then taught him 65 prayers, including a range of Our
Fathers. Among the latter was one dedicated to Antônio Conselheiro, the famous charismatic leader of the
Bahian millenarian community Canudos. In other words, mandinga for Cobrinha Verde was more about
combining and joining spiritual energy rather than preserving one specific African tradition only. In his
autobiography he explains another procedure used to maximize his spiritual energy: ‘I was a man that had a
family, but I would not sleep with my lady. She slept there and I slept here so as not to break my forces.’^89
It is therefore inaccurate to assume that in the past mandinga had a rigid meaning—in the the meaning
shifted significantly over time and has become more secularized. M.João Pequeno sense of one particular
religious tradition—just as it is difficult to define it today. No doubt explained that ‘people today do not
understand [mandinga]; it was prayer, patuá’.^90 In its more secularized, contemporary meaning mandinga
became closer to cunning (malícia). M. Curió for instance said: ‘[Mandinga] is that, it’s shrewdness, it’s
you being able to kick the adversary and not doing it. It’s you showing that you did not give him a beating
because you did not want to.’^91
In summary, we should not assume that people from different religious backgrounds with different
motivations for play assigned a clear, unequivocal meaning to their practice. As is the case today, capoeiras
did not necessarily and absolutely agree on this point, and they did not need to in order to play with each
other. Despite a growing body of traditions—the corpus of songs was increasing with every new epic battle
fought by capoeiras in the streets of the city and the Recôncavo towns—no definitive agreement existed
over the overall purpose of the art, the adequate movements, the level of physical contact and what
techniques should be employed in a given context.
Practice was also diverse in respect to clothes worn, instruments and music played, or kicks used. The
absence of absolute consistency explains why competing contemporary styles can legitimately refer to style
markers such as playing with shirts or in bare torso, barefoot or with shoes, clapping hands or not. These
markers are all based in the tradition of capoeira.^92 The roda certainly provided a more ritualized space for
techniques that could be more lethal when applied in ordinary street fights. Yet under the circumstances of a
brawl nobody would listen to a mestre and there were no rules other than everything goes.
Capoeira as a weapon: troublemakers and tough guys
I did not study to be a priest
Neither to be a doctor
I did study capoeira
To beat up the [police] inspector
(Capoeira song, public domain)^93In Brazil, as elsewhere in the Americas, the violence of the conquest was followed by the violence of
coerced labour. The brutality of the colonization process resulted in violence being an every day feature of
society. To impose discipline on subaltern groups the colonizers resorted again to violence. No wonder
reactions against colonial authorities also took violent forms. Some scholars have insisted on the importance
of violence in the everyday culture among the free poor.^94 The sheer size of Brazil meant that authorities
seldom had the means to enforce order on the entire territory under their jurisdiction. All these
circumstances favoured the emergence, in colonial Brazil, of a social type known as tough guy (valentão).
THE CAPOEIRA SCENE IN BAHIA 115