Vicente Ferreira Pastiña: his early life till 1941Mestre Pastinha was born as Vicente Ferreira Pastiña in Salvador, 5 April 1889. Not much is known about
his family background. His mother, Maria Eugenia Ferreira, was a black woman from Bahia.^6 His father, a
Spaniard called José Pastiña, earned his living as a pedlar. Vicente’s initiation to capoeira arose out of his
need to defend himself. Of rather frail constitution, at the age of ten he was being bullied by a bigger boy
called Honorato from his neighbourhood in Rua da Laranjeira. One day, Benedito, an elderly African living
in the same street who had been watching his plight, offered to teach him a means of self-defence—
capoeira. According to some accounts, Benedito was a native of Angola.^7 After training for some months
with Benedito, Pastinha successfully gave a beating to the boy who had been harassing him. At the age of
12, Pastinha became an apprentice at the Brazilian Navy School in Salvador. We do not know if he
continued to see his teacher Benedito.
The whole episode of M.Pastinha’s capoeira apprenticeship raises a number of important issues. Did
Pastinha learn capoeira only from Benedito and how long did he train with the Angolan? Kay Shaffer, who
interviewed Pastinha in the 1970s, reports that Pastinha’s apprenticeship with Benedito lasted for two
years.^8 What exactly did he learn from him? At that time, Africans were but a small minority in the city of
Salvador. Since both Bimba and Pastinha were initiated into capoeira by Africans, is it not legitimate to
assume that they learned not only a heavily creolized form of capoeira, but also elements that were much
closer to its African origins? Rather than centuries of separate development in Brazil, this suggests that
links with Africa could be more recent and direct than Brazilian nationalists might be ready to admit. On the
other side, Pastinha’s teacher apparently did not use a berimbau, but only a drum. According to Ed Powe,
Pastinha even suggested that, at the time of his apprenticeship, this was generally the case in Bahian
capoeira. This would confirm the hypothesis that the association between capoeira and berimbau was a
fairly recent, Brazilian invention (see Figure 6.2).^9
Furthermore, the transatlantic slave trade having been abolished since 1850, it is likely that Benedito
came to Brazil as a young moleque, otherwise he would not have been alive at the beginning of the
twentieth century.^10 So how much did Pastinha’s African teacher know about combat games from his native
land and how much did he learn in Bahia? At the time he taught Pastinha, he was a ladino freedman, an
Figure 6.2 Mestre Pastinha playing the berimbau. Photo by Pierre Verger, 1946–7. By kind permission of the Pierre
Verger Foundation.
PASTINHA AND ANGOLA STYLE 149