In that context the Japanese victory over Russia, in 1905, contributed to the questioning, if not the
collapse of the previous stereotype of the effeminate oriental, and awakened Western interest in Oriental
martial arts, and in particular the Japanese Budo. Ju-jitsu masters started to travel around the world to show
their skills and challenge local fighters. As we are going to see in Chapter 5, this resulted in an intense
interaction between Eastern and Western martial arts. For Brazilian nationalists, these developments
confirmed the urgency to identify and develop a national fighting art, and once again they turned their
attention towards capoeira.
In one of the first extensive reports on capoeira published in 1906, the anonymous author L.C., like so
many others, picked up the comparison made earlier on by Mello Moraes between French savate, Japanese
ju-jitsu, English boxing, Portuguese stick fighting and Brazilian capoeira. The author (later identified with
Lima Campos) emphasized that the latter was the only one of these five ‘great popular fighting arts’ whose
essential merit resided not in attack but in defence, which allowed him to consider it superior to all the
others. Lima Campos traced the origin of capoeira back to the violent days of Brazilian independence,
where in the ‘constant clashes between nationalities’, the physically weaker (the ‘mixed-race’ Brazilians)
had to defend themselves against the aggressions of these with more robust constitution (the Portuguese):
Created by the inventive spirit of the mestiço, because capoeira is neither Portuguese nor black, [but]
mulatto, cafusa [mixture of Indian and black] and mameluca [mixture of Indian and white], that is,
cross-breed, mestiço; the mestiço having annexed, through atavistic principles and with intelligent
adaptation, the razor of the fadista from the Mouraria [popular, former Moorish neighbourhood] of
Lisbon, some danced and simian [monkey-like] movements of the African, and, above all, the
dexterity, the feline lightness of the Indian in the quick jumps from one side to the other and
forwards, weightless and unpredictable, and surprisingly, as a Royal tiger, backwards, but always
facing the enemy.^34Again, the slave origins of capoeira were negated or greatly diminished through the invention of an Indian
tradition, which had the advantage of appearing, at the time, more noble (as in noble savage) and truly
Brazilian.
These discussions among Belle Époque intellectuals were not merely academic, but reflected wider
concerns about nation building which also involved journalists, politicians and the army. During that same
year the Brazilian parliament debated conscription again, which army reformers had been asking for since
the establishment of the republic, and which was finally adopted in 1916. Both popular classes and liberals
opposed general conscription. For many, life in the barracks, far from constituting an elevating experience,
encouraged sodomy or made conscripts more likely to be cuckolded.^35 It therefore threatened rather than
enhanced the conscripts’ manhood. At that stage new military models of masculinity were imported from
abroad. The British Boy Scouts (founded in 1908) became widely popular in Brazil. Only then did military-
style training become more fashionable and even acceptable for the sons of the well to do.
The humiliating military defeat against Germany in 1870 had made the French military keen not only to
make gymnastics compulsory in schools but also to have the military involved in its teaching. The Ministry
of War fomented the unification of a national method of gymnastics, and this effort resulted in a number of
manuals teaching the ‘French method’ in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Brazilian military
adopted the French method in the 1920s, because they considered it the most suited for the ‘Latin
temperament’ of their people, of course only until a ‘truly national’ method for Brazilians was developed.^36
Anyone searching for a national gymnastics had, sooner or later, to address the issue of capoeira and how
to make it suitable for national objectives. As early as 1907 an anonymous officer of the army had published
COMPETING MASTER NARRATIVES 15