Unit 7 · Circle and Ring

Portugal ruled Brazil as a colony from the 1500s until 1822. Portuguese owners forced millions of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. They made them work on sugar farms, in gold mines and in city houses. Brazil took in more enslaved Africans than any other country in the Americas.

Many of these people came from Central Africa, from lands around today’s Angola and Congo. Others came from West Africa. They brought their languages, songs, drums and games. In Brazil, they and their children made new traditions from them.

Capoeira is one of those traditions. It is an Afro-Brazilian art that joins music, a game between two players and fighting skill. Historians agree it grew in Brazil among Africans and their children. They still argue about which African games fed into it and where the name comes from.

Johann Moritz Rugendas was a painter from Germany. He traveled in Brazil in the 1820s. He drew cities, forests, farms and the people he met. Later, his pictures were printed in a book about his trip, published in 1835.

One picture has the title Jogar Capoëra, which means "to play capoeira" in Portuguese. It shows two Black men facing each other in the middle of a group. People stand around them and watch. One man plays a drum. Rugendas also gave the picture a French title that called it a war dance.

The picture is a primary source, a record made at the time. It shows that people played capoeira in a circle with music by the 1820s. But it was made by an outsider. Historians read it carefully, because a visitor may not have known what he was seeing.

Rio de Janeiro was Brazil’s capital for most of the 1800s. It was a busy port full of enslaved and free Black workers. City leaders feared groups of capoeira players on the streets. Police arrested people for playing capoeira, even before a national law named it.

Police wrote down each arrest in record books. The books list names, dates and the reason for the arrest. Historians have searched these books to learn who played capoeira. Many of those arrested were enslaved men. Others were free Black workers, and some were poor immigrants.

The records also name street groups called maltas. Two large groups in Rio were the Nagoas and the Guaiamuns. They controlled different parts of the city. Police records tell us about them, but they tell the story from the side of the police.

For more than 300 years, slavery was legal in Brazil. Enslaved people fought it in many ways. Some ran away and built free towns called quilombos. The most famous, Palmares, lasted for most of the 1600s.

On May 13, 1888, Princess Isabel signed the Golden Law. In Portuguese it is called the Lei Áurea. It was very short. It said that slavery in Brazil was ended. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to end slavery.

The law did not give land, money or schooling to freed people. Many former enslaved people stayed poor. They moved to cities looking for work. Many capoeira players were among them, and city leaders soon aimed new laws at them.

In November 1889, Brazil stopped having an emperor. It became a republic, a country led by elected leaders. The new government wrote new laws quickly. In 1890 it published a penal code, the book of laws about crimes and punishments.

One chapter of the 1890 Penal Code was about people it called idle, and about capoeira players. Article 402 said that doing capoeira in streets and squares was a crime. The punishment was time in prison. Leaders of groups could be punished more.

The law was written only two years after slavery ended. It aimed at an art played mostly by Black Brazilians. Police used it to arrest players for decades. Many historians see it as one way the new republic tried to control Black city life.

The 1890 law did not stop capoeira. In Salvador, in the state of Bahia, players met in backyards, at docks and at street festivals. Many worked as dock workers, market sellers or builders. Older players taught younger ones by playing with them.

Many capoeira histories say players used nicknames in those years. A nickname made a player harder to find in police records. Today many capoeira groups still give students a nickname. Groups describe it as a link to that past.

In 1940, Brazil wrote a new penal code. The new code did not name capoeira as a crime. After 50 years, playing capoeira in the street was no longer against the national law.

Manuel dos Reis Machado was born in Salvador in 1899. People called him Mestre Bimba. Mestre means master teacher in Portuguese. He said he learned capoeira as a boy from an African man who worked on ships.

In 1932, Bimba opened an academy, a school with a fixed room and set lessons. He called his style the Regional Fighting of Bahia. It later became known as Capoeira Regional. In 1937, the government of Bahia gave his school an official license.

Bimba’s academy had rules for students. It kept a list of members and held graduations. Many of his first students were university students and middle-class men. They brought capoeira into rooms that had once kept it out. In 1953, Bimba and his students showed capoeira to President Getúlio Vargas.

Vicente Ferreira Pastinha was born in Salvador in 1889. People called him Mestre Pastinha. He said he learned capoeira as a boy from an African man named Benedito. He also worked as a painter and a shoemaker.

In 1941, Pastinha opened the Sports Center of Capoeira Angola. It later moved to the Pelourinho, in Salvador’s old center. Capoeira Angola is the name for the older style. The name honors Angola, in Central Africa, where many enslaved people had been taken from.

Pastinha wanted to keep the old songs, rituals and slow games. In 1964, he published a book called Capoeira Angola. In 1966, he led a group to Dakar, in Senegal, for the First World Festival of Negro Arts. He died in Salvador in 1981.

Brazil has a government office that protects its history and culture. It is called IPHAN. In 2008, IPHAN listed two parts of capoeira as Brazilian cultural heritage. One was the roda, the circle where capoeira is played. The other was the work of the mestres who teach it.

In 2014, UNESCO added the capoeira circle to its world list of intangible cultural heritage. Intangible means it is not an object you can hold. It lives in songs, games and teaching. UNESCO is part of the United Nations.

These honors came 118 years and 124 years after the 1890 law. The same circle that police once broke up is now protected. Capoeira groups say that mestres and players, not laws, kept it alive in between.

In the 1970s, some Brazilian capoeira teachers moved to the United States and Europe. They taught in dance studios, colleges and community centers. By the 1990s, capoeira schools were open in many big cities around the world.

One teacher who moved was João Oliveira dos Santos, called Mestre João Grande. He had been a student of Mestre Pastinha in Salvador. He opened a Capoeira Angola school in New York City in the 1990s. In 2001, the National Endowment for the Arts gave him a National Heritage Fellowship.

Capoeira groups abroad often keep the Portuguese songs. Students learn Portuguese words to sing them. Many groups visit Salvador to meet the mestres. The circle that began in Brazil now meets in many languages, but the songs stay in Portuguese.

Greek writers said boxing joined the ancient Olympic Games in 688 BCE. Greek boxers did not wear soft gloves. They wrapped their hands and wrists in long leather straps. There were no rounds. A bout went on until one boxer gave up or could not go on.

In 1885, workers digging in Rome found a bronze statue of a seated boxer. Today it is called the Boxer at Rest. It was made more than 2,000 years ago. It is in the National Museum of Rome.

The statue shows leather straps wound around the boxer’s hands. It also shows a broken nose, cuts and swollen ears. Artists made the injuries on purpose. The statue is evidence that ancient boxing hurt the people who did it.

In the 1700s, boxing matches in England were called prize fights. Two men fought with bare fists for money. Crowds bet on the winner. Many towns saw the fights as disorder, and they were often against the law.

Jack Broughton was a champion boxer in London. He ran a building where fights were held, called an amphitheater. In 1743 he wrote seven rules for fights there. One rule gave a fallen boxer 30 seconds to come back to the middle. Another said no one could hit a man who was down.

Broughton also taught boxing to rich young men. For practice, he used padded gloves called mufflers. Real prize fights stayed bare-knuckle. Broughton’s rules guided English prize fights for nearly 100 years.

In 1838, English boxing adopted new rules called the London Prize Ring Rules. They replaced Broughton’s rules. A round ended whenever a boxer went down. There was no limit on the number of rounds. Fights could last for hours.

Prize fights were illegal in many American states. Fans rode special trains to secret places so police could not stop the fight. On July 8, 1889, John L. Sullivan fought Jake Kilrain near Richburg, Mississippi. They fought with bare fists in the summer heat.

Sullivan won after 75 rounds. It was the last heavyweight championship fought with bare knuckles under London rules. Mississippi later charged Sullivan for breaking its law against prize fighting. After this, top boxers moved to gloves and the Queensberry Rules.

The rules carry the name of John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry. A marquess is a high-ranking noble in Britain. He was a young sports fan who backed the new rules and gave cups as prizes.

The man who wrote the rules was John Graham Chambers. He was a Welsh sportsman who had rowed at Cambridge University. In 1866 he helped start the Amateur Athletic Club in London. It held contests for people who did not compete for money.

The rules were published in 1867. They were meant for amateur contests with gloves. Over the next 25 years, professional boxers took them up too. People still call boxing’s basic rules the Queensberry Rules.

The Queensberry Rules had just twelve short rules. They set each round at three minutes. They gave one minute of rest between rounds. They banned wrestling and hugging in the ring.

A fallen boxer now had ten seconds to get up, not 30. If he could not, the other boxer won. Rule 10 asked for fair-sized gloves of the best quality. Under older rules, a round could last a few seconds or many minutes.

The clock changed boxing. Rounds of equal length made bouts easier to follow and to judge. Gloves made the bare-knuckle prize fight look old. Most boxing rules today still use three-minute rounds for men.

On September 7, 1892, John L. Sullivan fought James J. Corbett at the Olympic Club in New Orleans, Louisiana. Both men wore gloves. They fought under the Queensberry Rules, with three-minute rounds.

Sullivan was the famous bare-knuckle champion. Corbett was a former bank clerk from San Francisco. Newspapers called him Gentleman Jim. Corbett won in the 21st round and became the heavyweight champion.

The fight was held indoors, under electric lights, before a paying crowd. It was legal in New Orleans. The fight showed that a big title could be won with gloves, rounds and a referee under Queensberry Rules.

In 1880, the Amateur Boxing Association was founded in England. It was a governing body, a group that writes rules and runs championships. It held national amateur championships with gloves and short bouts.

Boxing joined the modern Olympic Games in 1904, in St. Louis, Missouri. All the boxers that year were from the United States. Olympic boxers were amateurs. Over the years, Olympic boxing added weight classes and new rules for safety.

Women boxed in exhibitions long before they could win Olympic medals. Women’s boxing first joined the Olympics in 2012, in London. Nicola Adams of Great Britain won the first women’s Olympic boxing gold medal, in the flyweight class.

In 1927, the New York Daily News started an amateur boxing tournament called the Golden Gloves. Winners got a small golden glove charm. The next year, the Chicago Tribune ran its own Golden Gloves in Chicago.

Arch Ward, the Tribune’s sports editor, helped run the Chicago tournament. Boxers came from Chicago neighborhoods, from towns in Illinois and from nearby states. Champions from Chicago and New York then met in an intercity match.

The Golden Gloves did not belong to schools. A newspaper ran it, and clubs and gyms trained the boxers. It gave young amateurs a place to compete close to home. Many later professional champions started in Golden Gloves bouts.

The NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, runs college sports championships. It held its first national boxing championships in 1932. For almost 30 years, college boxing drew big crowds. The University of Wisconsin had one of the strongest teams.

In April 1960, the NCAA boxing championships were held in Madison, Wisconsin. A Wisconsin boxer named Charlie Mohr was hurt in his final bout. He died several days later. His death shocked his school and the nation.

The University of Wisconsin ended its boxing team. The NCAA voted to stop its boxing championships after 1960. Today some colleges have boxing clubs run by students. They are clubs, not NCAA teams.

Every martial arts school has a safety routine. Students warm up and check the floor before they move.

1. Have a grown-up nearby who knows you are practicing.

2. Clear a space. Stretch your arms out and lift one knee. If you touch nothing, the space is big enough.

3. Bare feet are best on a mat. On a smooth floor, wear sneakers, not socks, so you do not slip.

4. Warm up for three minutes: march, swing your arms in big circles, and lift your knees.

5. Watch each move in the Dojo first. Try it slowly, then a little faster.

What helps: practice each move a few times on one side, then the other. Short, regular practice works better than one long try.

Stay safe: strikes and kicks go into the air, never at a person. Keep kicks at knee or belly height. Falls happen only on a mat or soft grass, with a grown-up. Stop if something hurts.

Capoeira players keep moving in the roda with a step called the ginga. The word comes from the Portuguese gingar, to sway. The music of the berimbau sets the speed.

1. Stand with your feet wide apart and your knees bent.

2. Step your right foot back on a slant. Bring your right arm up in front of your face.

3. Bring the right foot back to the wide stance.

4. Step your left foot back on a slant, with your left arm up in front of your face.

5. Keep going: back, middle, back, middle.

What helps: play music with a steady beat and step on the beat. Keep your knees soft.

Stay safe: clear a wide space with nothing to slip on.

Boxing under the Queensberry rules of 1867 used padded gloves and rounds. Its most common punch is the jab, thrown with the front hand.

1. Stand with one foot forward, feet shoulder-width apart, knees soft.

2. Bring both fists up by your cheeks, elbows in.

3. Push the front fist straight out into the air at shoulder height. Turn the fist so the palm faces down.

4. Bring it straight back to your cheek.

What helps: out and back on the same line, like a door sliding open and shut.

Stay safe: punch only the air. Stop just before your elbow is fully straight.

The cross is boxing’s straight punch with the back hand. It reaches farther than the jab because the hips turn.

1. Stand with one foot forward, fists by your cheeks.

2. Turn your back foot so the heel lifts and the toes stay down.

3. Let the back hip turn forward and push the back fist straight out into the air, palm down.

4. Bring the fist back to your cheek and turn your foot back.

What helps: imagine squashing a bug under the ball of your back foot as you turn.

Stay safe: punch only the air. Keep the front hand up by your face.