included it in the final engraving. I do not want to suggest that his engraving escapes stylization and a
particular approach towards slave culture. Yet it would not have made much sense for Rugendas to exclude
the berimbau , an exotic instrument that appears in a number of other nineteenth-century engravings.
A further myth—always used to ‘explain’ the difficulty of writing capoeira history—is the suggestion that
Rui Barbosa, finance minister of the first republican provisional government after the overthrow of the
Brazilian Empire (1889) ‘had all the documents referring to slavery burned’.^11 This myth, particularly
popular in non-academic capoeira circles, is based on the fact that Barbosa really did implement the
destruction of files relating to slavery in his ministry. The most plausible explanation is that he wanted to get
rid of the official register of slaves, introduced by the ‘Free Womb’ law of 1871. Their destruction would
remove all evidence for slave owners wanting to claim compensation for the loss of their ‘property’, which
in any case the Abolition decree of 13 May 1888 had not granted. However, the documents reduced to ashes
represent but a tiny part of all archival records regarding slavery. As any student of history in Brazil knows,
hundreds of thousands of documents documenting slavery do exist in Brazilian archives and many
historians have been working with these sources over the last decades.^12
A number of other myths about capoeira circulate within the different spheres where discourses about its
history are elaborated. Many practitioners claim that capoeira is played to music, because during the times of
slavery it had to be disguised as a dance in order to fool the slave owners. Unfortunately all the early
sources on capoeira make quite clear that the masters were only too aware of the potential danger of
capoeira practised by slaves. Another popular story explains that capoeira uses mainly foot kicks because
slaves were chained together by their hands and had therefore only the feet left to use. Historical evidence,
however, suggests that slaves had their feet in shackles to prevent them from running away, leaving their
hands free to work.
What is the function of all these myths about the history of capoeira? As Roland Barthes asserted in his
classical study: ‘Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies
them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which
is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact’.^13 Thus the myth abolishes the complexity of
human actions, attributing to them the simplicity of ‘essences’, suppressing all dialectics and any pursuit
beyond the immediately visible. When capoeira practitioners therefore emphatically affirm that ‘capoeira
is—always—resistance’, they fail to consider the complexity of the insertion of their art into a wider
context and the dialectics of resistance and betrayal that were so important in both slave and post-
emancipation societies.
Myths are also paramount in the formation of identities. That function explains why mythical accounts
tend to simplify or ‘purify’ contradictory developments, grant them clarity and found them in nature and
eternity. Myths supports the narrative of what communities or nations decide to remember and they are
constructed in such ways that oblivion can be facilitated. It closes the gaps generated by ruptures and
discontinuities or even creates the myth of the forgotten and the anonymous in such a way as to make them
identifiable, to grant them an identity. Capoeira became instrumental in the formation of national, regional
and ethnic identities and in the interaction with these processes organized its own foundational myths and
transcendental meanings. Deconstructing the myths about capoeira history can contribute to free the art with
such a rich past and complex traditions from the rigidity that these versions of its origins and history
impress on it, and that can turn its practice into a superficial performance of platitudes. If capoeira has allowed
the construction of so many myths around it, this is due to the multiple ways in which it has acquired
cultural significance in different historical contexts.
As with all other myths, the ones about Capoeira history only make sense within a wider social and
cultural context. By tracing back how myths developed, I intend to show how central they were to the
8 COMPETING MASTER NARRATIVES