The British traveller Henry Koster provided us with an early description of these men in Northeastern
Brazil, that also links them to the use of mandinga discussed above.
These valentões were men of all casts, whose whole business consisted in seeking opportunities of
quarrelling; they attended all festivals and fairs, and their desire was to become so famous for courage
as to render the knowledge of their presence on these occasions sufficient to keep in awe any other
individuals who might wish to create disturbances, considering themselves privileged to revenge their
own and their friends’ injuries; but they would not allow any quarrel in which they were not
concerned. Two roads cross each other at about the distance of one league from Jaguaribe [in
Pernambuco], and at this spot [...] some of these men often stood, obliging all passers-by either to
fight them or to dismount, take off their hats, and lead their horses whilst they were in sight. These
men wore round their necks strings of green beads, which had either come from the coast of Africa,
hearing the wonderful property of conveying in safety their possessors through all descriptions of
perils, or were charmed by mandingueiros, African sorcerers, [...]^95Although Koster refers here to a rather rural context on the outskirts of a town, valentões were equally
present in Brazilian cities. After the breakdown of the Empire, and its centralized bureaucracy, the
development of clientelistic networks by local strongmen provided a favourable context for the
development of urban ‘tough guys’.
How violent was Bahian capoeira then in the period under consideration here? There is no easy answer to
this question, since the association of capoeira and violence occurred for a number of reasons and in
different contexts. Old mestres usually insist that there was no violence in the former rodas, or at least much
less than in contemporary capoeira. Yet in the first decades of the twentieth century, capoeira appeared in
elite dominated public opinion rather in another light. It was then primarily associated with violence and
street fights. At least until the 1930s notices on capoeira figure in Bahian newspapers under the rubric crime
or disorderly behaviour of young males, inevitably described as tough guys (valentões) or troublemakers
(desordeiros). One could argue that this reflects elite perception of popular culture. Yet the association of
violence and capoeira is undeniable in Bahia, even though the musical and playful aspects already described
seem to have been more accentuated than in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.
Even a mestre such as João Pequeno, renowned today for his emphasis on rituals, reckons that ‘what
brought me to capoeira was the desire to be a tough guy’.^96 Many mestres from the old guard tell their
audiences episodes where their expertise in the art helped them in a violent confrontation in the street,
although most usually stress the rather exceptional character of that sort of fight. We therefore need—for
the sake of analysis—to establish a basic distinction between violence as a result of playing capoeira and
violence arising in other contexts, where capoeira techniques were only used after a conflict had broken out.
Furthermore, individual fights ought to be distinguished from more collective forms of violence, such as the
neighbourhood brawls referred to by Querino.
From all existing sources it is clear that practitioners resorted to capoeira techniques as a means of self-
defence in any situation of danger. For example, in a brief note entitled ‘Armed with a machete and a
cudgel, they attacked an unhappy porter’ a newspaper related the case of a porter who used capoeira to fight
off an attacker and eventually took his weapon. But when the assailant hired two desordeiros to hit him he
could not manage to escape and was left ‘bathing in blood’.^97
The recent work of A.Liberac Pires, based on criminal records, sheds more light on the links between the
culture of violence and capoeira in the city of Bahia. The problem is that nobody was arrested in Salvador
for practising capoeira—despite the existence of articles 402–403 in the 1890 penal code specifically
116 THE CAPOEIRA SCENE IN BAHIA