for earlier periods. The theory that presentday combat games such as capoeira derive from tougher and more
martial African combat training is thus very hard to prove, and rather relies on questionable assumptions
about the insignificance of combat games in pre-colonial African societies.^84
Furthermore, one should not exclude other cultural forms from having had an impact on the formation of
Afro-American combat games. We also need to consider the dances that made use of elaborate bodily
techniques. Masquerade traditions existing throughout West Africa, for instance, often involve highly
acrobatic and dynamic movements. In the whirling dances of the Yoruba Egungun masquerade the mask
wearer ‘spins madly around the village’, executing dangerous movements, knocking people down and
occasionally even injuring them.^85 A systematic examination of these acrobatic dances might establish
further commonalities with Afro-American combat games and art forms.
In this section I will limit my discussion to some Central African forms that have been explicitly linked to
the origins of capoeira. European chroniclers have commented on martial skills amongst Angola’s inhabitants
since the Portuguese involvement in the area during the sixteenth century. According to Thornton, mock
combats were a ‘prominent feature’ of military reviews in Kongo/Angola, ‘just as drill might have been in
Europe’. Therefore, and despite my earlier insistence on the difference between the arts of war and combat
games, important links existed between both. Movements from the latter might be used in warfare, since
most Angolan (and I suspect more generally African) soldiers ‘relied heavily on personal maneuver as part
of their technique of fighting’.^86 Thornton has also drawn attention to one crucial piece of evidence from a
sixteenth-century Jesuit, who describes the abilities of the soldiers from the Ndongo kingdom as follows: ‘All
their defense consists of sanguar, which is to leap from one side to another with a thousand twists and such
agility that they can dodge arrows and spears’.^87
The Italian missionary Cavazzi also mentions sangamentos, but uses this word rather as a synonym for
military reviews through which Angolan rulers ensured their troops were well prepared and had the
necessary fighting morale.^88 Unfortunately, neither he nor any other chronicler provides more detailed
descriptions that would allow us to know more about the bodily techniques of military training. Accounts
insist on arduous physical exercise and the use of weapons, but not a single seventeenth- or eighteenth-
century author seems to mention the use of kicks or head butts. These accounts only allow us to conclude
that mock combats were a substantial aspect of military training, and since hand-to-hand combat was
central to the art of war, bodily techniques to avoid blows and attacks featured prominently in martial
exercises.
Given the lack of pre-colonial materials, capoeira adepts have tended to part from the present in their
search for the historic roots of the art. Since the 1960s capoeira has not only been linked to Angola, but
more specifically to a contemporary combat game called n’golo. As we have seen in Chapter 1, when the
Angolan artist Albano de Neves e Souza came to Brazil in the 1960s, he was struck by the similarities in
movements existing between capoeira in Brazil and n’golo he reported to have seen in Southern Angola. On
his return from Brazil Neves e Souza published a series of drawings of n’golo and capoeira (see Figure 2.3).
Only a brief statement of his hypothesis accompanied the illustrations:
N’golo, the Zebra Dance, is possibly the origin of the Capoeira, the fighting dance of Brazil. It is
danced at the time of the ‘Mufico’, a puberty rite for the girls of the Mucope and Mulondo regions.
The object of the dance is to hit your opponent’s face with your foot. A rhythm for the dance is beaten
by clapping hands, and anyone who attempts a [b]low while outside the marked arena is disqualified.
The ‘Angolan Capoeira’ in Brazil also has its special rhythm, which is one more reason to believe that
it originates with the N’golo. N’golo means ‘zebra’, and to a certain extent the dance originates fromTHE CONTEXT OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC 47