A more Africa-centred perspective has also help to highlight some important links and continuities
between contemporary capoeira practice and Kongo/Angolan rituals and cosmology (see Chapters 2 and 7)
and also stimulated some new and original research on African combat games and the possible origins of
capoeira, such as the work by T.J.Desch-Obi, who maintains that capoeira and other African American
martial arts constitute ‘living African traditions in the Americas’.^83
The anxiety to prove African continuities or capoeira’s Angolan origins, however, ended up inducing a
number of scholars to neglect some elementary rules of academic research, such as the respect for the
statements made by the original sources. For some, Kongo/Angola has now become the mythical home of
all martial arts of the diaspora, to the point that these writers should be qualified Kongo—rather than
Afrocentric. Robert Farris Thompson, in his otherwise groundbreaking article on black martial arts of the
Caribbean, for example asserts that
The Kongo presence in the development of Afro-Cuban mani and bambosa in the nineteenth-century
dance-battles of Cuban blacks is manifest. According to Fernando Ortiz [...] every game began with a
chant in creolized Ki-Kongo. Two men battled to the beat of Kongo-derived drums called yuka.^84Unfortunately Ortiz never wrote that, since he was convinced that maní came from West Africa. He only
stated that the chants were sometimes in an African language, but usually in Creole and reproduced one
African chant whose origin he could not identify. Moreover, Ortiz only described the drums as vertical,
cylindric, made of avocado trunk, but did not call them yuka nor ascribed them a Kongo origin. In fact,
based on interviews with practitioners and his intimate knowledge of all things Afro-Cuban, the eminent
scholar explicitly attributed the origins of the maní combat game to the Gangá, more particularly the Gangá
Maní. Ortiz related that ethnic group to either the Mandinga or the Ewe—in both cases West Africa and
clearly not Central Africa. Current Cuban anthropology also locates the Gangá in contemporary Sierra
Leone.^85 As this example shows, to assume ‘Kongo-centric’ predispositions without adequate methodology
can lead to misinterpretation—if not outright manipulation—of original sources.^86
More recent academic research in the United States has suffered from similar ‘Kongo-centric’ bias.
T.J.Desch-Obi for instance emphatically asserts that the teacher of the late Bimba was from Angola, when
all primary sources in Brazil refer to that little known character only as ‘African’ (see Chapter 5). Desch-Obi
furthermore affirms that during the nineteenth century capoeira was called engolo in Brazil, and that
M.Pastinha ‘stated clearly’ that his instructor Benedito ‘taught him that capoeira came from the engolo
dance’.^87 To suggest there is evidence where there is none, is in my view, totally inappropriate to advance
further in what is an important discussion. This kind of unsubstantiated statement, not borne out by a any
serious evidence, might seem useful to reinforce the point about the Angolan character of capoeira. Yet in
the long run it will be counterproductive, since it contributes to discrediting the Afrocentric approach and
hinders a deeper understanding of capoeira history. There are sufficient facts to corroborate the Angolan
origins of capoeira—we do not need to invent any.
Prominent among contemporary Afrocentrists in this narrow meaning is Molefi Asante, who asserts ‘the
natural, psychic and spiritual unity of all people of African descent around a set of principles supposedly
derived from ancient Egypt’.^88 He teaches at Temple University, where his discipline of ‘Africalogy’ is now
well established. His wife and colleague Kariamu Welsh Asante has identified seven ‘aesthetic senses’
(polyrhythm, polycentrism, curvilinear, dimensional, epic memory, repetition, and holism) in what she
defines as ‘African dance’, based on the analysis of a range of dances in the diaspora, among which samba
and capoeira. In other words, she extracts the ‘African’ from what is already diasporic. In a PhD thesis
supervised by Molefi and Kariamu Asante, Kenneth Dossar took these seven ‘aesthetic senses’ as a point of
COMPETING MASTER NARRATIVES 25