Noronha gave a slightly different version of that episode in his memoirs. According to him it was only upon
Amorzinho’s death that the other mestres decided to hand over to Pastinha, because neither he nor his
brother Livino or Antônio Maré had the time to take care of the centre.^22 Although 20 years younger than
Pastinha, he claimed precedence over the latter, asserting he had already ‘been struggling in this baderna
[tumult or mayhem, and by extension capoeira] for eight years and for that reason we can say Noronha,
Livino, Maré and Pastinha’.^23 Since there was an issue between Noronha and Pastinha (who once gave a
beating to Noronha’s brother Livino in a roda) we should not be surprised by this difference in emphasis.^24
If Pastinha was therefore not the first to have recognized the need to organize an angoleiro community in
order to preserve the art, he certainly was one of the few mestres who dedicated the rest of his life to that
task. Initially, though, he was not that successful in achieving his aim. According to Pastinha’s own
assessment, upon the death of Amorzinho, in September 1942, ‘the Centre remained inactive, because it
was abandoned by all the mestres, which today are deserters.’ In 1944, Pastinha undertook a new attempt to
organize the centre. He managed to get initial support from students and some old angoleiros and started to
teach at the Workers’ Centre (‘Centro Operário’). Yet this attempt also failed because of ‘lack of
agreement’ among the mestres.^25 Personal rivalries being a common feature among capoeiras, this comes as
no suprise. Pastinha’s long withdrawal from capoeira in previous years might have constituted a further
obstacle for his recognition as a leader of capoeira Angola. It also explains why many younger mestres did
not know him until he took over the CECA in 1941.^26
In 1949, Pastinha launched a third, and more successful attempt. Ricardo Batista, an ex-instructor of
martial arts of the Civil Guard, asked him to reorganize the Centre. Pastinha now managed to establish the
Centro Esportivo de Capoeira Angola in the soap factory Sicool, where he was working as a watchman.
Training took place in the patio of the factory, located in Bigode, in the Brotas neighbourhood.^27 Here the
centre finally took off, supported by friends and neighbours. Now Pastinha succeeded in getting support
from famous mestres who were not his students. Canjiquinha took over the function of contra-mestre and
Gato became chief of the orquestra (mestre de bateria) of the CECA.^28 The making of the first T-shirts for
the group in yellow and black, the colours of Pastinha’s football team Ipiranga, bears testimony to that incipient
process of institutionalization. A further step was the formal registration of the CECA with the notary
public, on 1 October 1952. Its statute defined the objective of the centre as ‘to teach, to spread and to
develop, theoretically and practically, the stylish capoeira (‘capoeira de estilo’), the genuine ‘ANGOLA’,
which has been passed on to us by the primitive [original] Africans that disembarked here in the Bay of All
the Saints’.^29 It established a board of directors, a president, a vice’president, three secretaries, two
treasurers and a librarian-archivist. Students registered at CECA received identity cards issued by the
mestre.
The codification of Angola style: Pastinha’s teachings
If Bimba was a rather pragmatic teacher interested in concrete results, Pastinha liked to reflect, in
conversations or in writing, about capoeira. Although he received no formal education beyond primary
school, he published a short book about capoeira Angola and left several manuscripts, the most substantial
one subtitled ‘Metaphysics and practice of Capoeira’. He therefore became ‘the first popular capoeirista to
analyze capoeira as a philosophy and to worry about the ethical and educational aspects of its practice’.^30
M.Pastinha also gave many interviews that further help us to understand his teaching and his outstanding
personality. If his statements in songs, interviews or his manuscripts offer one of the first insights ever of
what a Bahian capoeira mestre thought about his art, they are however not easy to understand. Pastinha not
only expressed himself in a vernacular language, shaped by his social and regional background and the
152 PASTINHA AND ANGOLA STYLE