By Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares.
The party of order and disorder: capoeiras and the political struggle at the imperial court of Rio de Janeiro 1870-1890
The relationship between political parties and the capoeira maltas was widely explored in the press of the time.
In February 1873, in the illustration for the Revista Fluminense, Duque-Estrada Teixeira is acclaimed by his gang, razor in hand.
Creole Capoeira and Slave Capoeira
One of the most important cultural processes of that time was the emergence of what we call Creole Capoeira. Until about 1850, capoeira was a cultural form practiced by slaves, mainly Africans. The African condition was even more important than the slave condition, guided by the strong presence of freedmen and freedmen from the African “nations”. The maltas (as the capoeira gangs were called) fought among themselves for control of urban territories, to a lesser extent fighting the police forces and, even less (almost non-existent), confronting masters. We may say that slave capoeira, as we have termed it, evolved within the logic of colonial urban slavery, forming a specific – slave and African – reading of the city network.
These African slaves of the first half of the 19th century were immersed in a complex reality. The Royal, and later, Imperial Court mediated their gains within the monetized society by controlling the most important space of the consumer market of the time: the street. Those who controlled a certain piece of the urban fabric, also controlled who were the slaves who could profit from that stretch of the city, and which practices were in fact prohibited. These conflicts occurred during the day, when a multitude of slaves took to the streets, disturbing the vigilant eye of the police order created by King João VI. At night, when the shadows took over the dimly-lit city, the “mobs” clashed, vying for symbolic control over parts of the capital. It was not without reason that visitors were told not to adventure into the night of Rio de Janeiro, and even members of the military, although in groups, refused to patrol certain parts of the city.
Formation of maltas
Ethnic boundaries mattered little in the delimitation of these capoeira gangs. The maltas were defined by where they worked and lived, keeping in mind that many slaves lived far from their masters. But one “nation” stood out: the Cabinda, embarked on the northern fringe of the mouth of the Zaire River, who bore specific ethnic marks, different from those of Angola and Benguela.
The Slave capoeira was not a direct challenge to slavery – as was the case with the quilombos (maroons) – but the conflicts with the police order made it a challenge to the King’s State. It was not without reason that the punishment for slaves arrested for capoeira in the Calabouço prison at the Santiago End was the most severe: 300 lashes of the whip (500 lashes corresponded in practice to a death sentence). But, as for the institution of slavery, the slave capoeira rarely represented any threat.
The collapse of the Atlantic slave trade from Africa meant the swift end of the cultural basis of the slave Capoeira. In a few years the city’s best African workers were swallowed up by the coffee plantations, and the scope of Rio’s urban slavery, which had frightened foreign visitors, was reduced to a shadow. It is in this context that the Creole Capoeira emerged. Contrary to what the Paulista School of Sociology claimed, African slaves managed, within captivity, to forge vigorous institutions which deeply influenced the freedmen who occupied the working spaces left behind by urban slavery.
From 1850 onwards, we see the emergence of the Creoles, children of African slaves, born in Brazil, speakers of Portuguese by birth, believers in the Catholic faith – which did not prevent them from celebrating African rites. As Gilberto Freyre said in Sobrados e Mocambos, the “browns” among them were versatile, liminal, borderline, and capable of infiltrating the white lineages through godparentage and clientelism. These Creoles could be slaves or free, but it was the free and freedmen who were more inclined to use capoeira as a weapon of political assertion. They had no masters to point them out to the police gazes in the urban landscape, they could not be stigmatized as foreigners – which often happened to Africans – and they also often escaped racial stigmas through economic advancement.
In fact, at the turn of the 1850s to the 1860s, slave capoeira practically disappeared and free or freed creoles, and poor Brazilian or foreign whites, became the masters of the gangs. The police pages of the newspapers recorded this change almost imperceptibly, but we also observed that these Creoles were more difficult to catch in the police nets than the African captives. The heritage of urban slave culture seduced free people of all classes and colours.
It took an external factor for the versatility of Creole Capoeira to move onto the stage of elite politics. In December 1864, Paraguayan troops hijacked the steamer Visconde de Olinda, where the president of the Brazilian province of Mato Grosso was travelling. It was the beginning of the Paraguayan War – which in Paraguay is the Brazil War. As was natural in these times, the formation of an army for external conflicts demanded a hunt for “volunteers”. Creoles (who were generally black) were the main target: Brazilian nationals, free (slaves could not take their place in the army), young, entangled in urban marginality for the most part, with little connection to the bonds of patronage and paternalism that had dominated slavery, they were hunted down and thrown into prison, where they were recruited to the ranks of the armed forces.
The Paraguay War was a watershed in the country’s military history. Until then the internal security forces were the most requested by parliamentary governments. The few external conflicts of the nineteenth century did not cause a stir at Court. Now it was different. Brazil had been aggressed. One of the most important elements of Creole identity was the affirmation of the values of the native land, in contrast to foreign Africans or whites of the Europeanised bourgeois elite.
The war was a perfect opportunity for Creoles. The end of the war brought a revitalized army, strengthened in its dispute with the National Guard, its sub-officer corps filled with lower middle-class elements who had long since left slavery behind. Participation in the army made heroes of the day of the ex-marginals. Literature itself – thermometer of the vision of the literate elite, vide Antônio Cândido – changed its perception: from dangerous outcast, illiterate, racially undesirable, depraved by miscegenation, the “caboclo”, the Creole, the brown, the mestizo, the “fula”, the “goatie”, becomes a retreat of nationality, a mark of Brazilianness, the essence of the homeland root.
At the same time, the part of the elite that shared the battlefields had cultivated bonds of camaraderie with their comrades in arms: they were no longer degenerate blacks, they were ex-combatants, heroes of the fatherland. The bonds forged in a struggle are rarely broken. And this army was now changed forever.
Another cartoon from the Carioca press of the time about the relationship between politicians and capoeira maltas.
In January 1878, the magazine O Mequetrefe features the conservative party politician Duque-Estrada Teixeira in full negotiation with the “Flor da minha gente” malta.
Capoeira as a party
Politics during the Second Reign (1840-89) of the Brazilian Empire has traditionally been seen as the exclusive arena of the slaveholding elite (José Murilo de Carvalho, 1996). The censorial vote, parliamentarianism, and conciliation are read as perfect instruments for perpetuating economic power. The oligarchisation of high politics has its roots long before the Republic. But this view ignores the profound process of politicisation of Brazilian society in the last two decades of the Empire. The expansion of the press, the growth of the urban middle class, relations with Europe, the crisis of the slaveholder mentality, the emergence of socialist ideology, among other factors, accentuated the process of politicization of all classes.
The Creoles, coming out of capoeira and returning from the War, could not be alien to the wider process. They adapted to the high politics of the elites, forming the micropolitics of the streets. Those who returned found a changed landscape: new chiefs, new characters, new territories. The labour market dominated by the immigrant seemed more important than the market of goods in the street. The category of “slave for hire” became decadent, outdated, and the city was flooded with products from shops that served the thousands of immigrants from abroad but also from the interior of the Empire.
The new merchandise had a name: the vote. Like the militias of present-day Brazil, the capoeiras of 150 years ago realised they must transit in new corridors of power to ensure their return to some form of control. The new political elites also changed. The discourse against slavery lost its subversive character and gained support in public opinion. There even was a faction of the Conservative Party that declared that the question of slavery (“the servile question”) must be resolved by ending the institution, albeit slowly, gradually and surely, while another part still supported its continuity.
This emancipationist discourse, even if in the short term it did not result in change, had a clear ideological impact. The overthrow of slavery in the US, which led to a civil war, was a tragedy difficult to erase. Sectors of the black population clearly felt that raising this banner was attractive. The imperial family itself used its annoyance with slavery as a counterfactual asset, making the image of the sovereign Pedro II stand apart from the politicians of the landholding elite who dominated parliament.
This is not to say that there were no free men practicing capoeira enrolled in the militias fighting the abolition campaign. But both – pro and con – were allied with the Conservatives in the two factions into which the Party was divided. The work of Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos shaped the established view of the elite of the Conservative party (O tempo saquarema: a formação do Estado Imperial, 1999). This elite not only defined the route followed by the party, but influenced all political life in the country, even the republicans. It was natural that the Party felt the winds of the new times after the two wars that tore the American continent apart between 1861 and 1870.
Capoeiras of the Conservative Party followed the partnership forged on the battlefields. Similarly, the Second World War would politicize Brazilian officialdom in such a way that, in only twenty years after the end of the war, they would seize power and dismantle the whole constitutional and institutional edifice erected by the democracy of 1946.
The partnership followed the same means as on the battlefield: by violence. The Party that assumed the nickname Party of Order was accused by public opinion and the press in general of protecting disorder in order to guarantee its electoral gains. The open vote – which would be eliminated by electoral reform only in 1934 – was the perfect field for abusive manoeuvres by the owners of power. Of course, corruption was part of the bargain. By explicitly gang-raping liberal voters, the gangs gained a passport to impunity in their territorial domain. It was the beginning of an alliance of organised crime with political power, something still chronic in the landscape of Rio de Janeiro.
The initial leader in the Conservative Party was a classic character of the political fauna. Duque Estrada Teixeira belonged to a traditional political family, the usual oligarchy of the Carioca scene, but at the same time he was given to populist impulses, such as learning the “noble art” in the precincts of the Largo de São Francisco Law School in São Paulo. In the country of the bachelors he made a rapid political career, but it would be in 1872 that he set the stage. Directing personally the gamg of the parish of Glória, the celebrated Flor da Gente, he became a legend in the political landscape of Rio, openly defending his “henchmen”.
The use of men from the “lower classes” as a clandestine fighting force was nothing new. In rural areas it was the norm. What was new was the recruitment of free men in urban areas outside traditional client networks, such as the patriarchal family, and that they acted exclusively in electoral disputes. These urban thugs were quite different from rural henchmen because these individuals had political interests that were taken into account by the owners of power, such as the issue of slavery and the popularity of the monarchy.
Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares is a History graduate from UFRJ, with a Masters and PhD from UNICAMP/SP.
Bibliography
Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares. Negregada Instituição: os capoeiras na Corte Imperial 1850-1890. Rio de Janeiro, Access, 1999.
José Murilo de Carvalho. A Construção da Ordem-Teatro de Sombras. Rio de Janeiro. Relume Dumará-UFRJ, 1996.
Ilmar Rohlof de Mattos. O tempo saquarema: a formação do Estado Imperial. Rio de Janeiro, Access, 1999, 3a edição.
