Fortunately Pastinha could rely on a handful of well-placed friends. As we have seen, a number of
intellectuals and artists strongly empathized with his struggle to maintain a ‘pure’ version of capoeira. At
that time, many of them sympathized with communism or more generally the left. For that reason they
could not always be of great help: Edison Carneiro for example had to hide from police during the Vargas
dictatorship and was again banned from public posts after the 1964 military coup.
Pastinha was a close friend of writers Wilson Lins and Jorge Amado, sculptor Mário Cravo and painter
Caribé (to whom we owe some of the most beautiful capoeira drawings). Wilson Lins entered politics and
became an MP, later President of the Bahian Assembly, President of the Bahian Academy of Writers, and
Bahian Secretary of Education. He, and other middle-class ‘sportsmen’, such as Atlídio Caldeira and Dr
José Colmenero, trained with M.Pastinha and eventually assumed the presidency or other posts within the
CECA.^63
During the 1960s Jorge Amado turned out to be the most popular and celebrated Brazilian writer. Not
withstanding his leftist past and the years lived in exile he also became the official chronicler of the city and
its inhabitants. He was an unconditional admirer of Pastinha and made him figure prominently in his
writings.^64 Amado thus contributed to consecrate the old teacher as an icon of Bahian and hence Brazilian
culture:
Mestre Pastinha, master of capoeira de Angola and of Bahian cordiality, human being of high
civilization, man of the of the people with all its wit, is one of the great of Bahia, one of its illustrious,
one of its obás [Yoruba ruler], of its chiefs. He is the first in his art; he keeps the tradition and
transmits it; master of dexterity and courage, loyalty and fraternal conviviality. In his school, at the
Pelourinho, Mestre Pastinha constructs Brazilian culture, from the most real and best kind.^65It was thanks to this little network that Pastinha managed to obtain some official support, and, in 1955, a
space for his academy in the colonial building at 19, Rua Gregória de Mattos, located on the famous
Figure 6.5 Mestre Pastinha’s group in a Bahian neighbourhood; the uniforms inspired by football jerseys. Photo by
Pierre Verger, 1946–7. By kind permission of the Pierre Verger Foundation.
PASTINHA AND ANGOLA STYLE 159