African martial arts

[Ashley]

And what is the original country of that style?

[JusticeZero]

Capoeira does have roots in Africa. It is known that slave ships progressed along the coast of Africa over time for distance concerns, which dates most of the slave trade, in addition to the records of the time. In the Americas, there are a few places in which Capoeira-like martial arts popped up to varying degrees. All of those places have the commonality that they received a lot of slaves from the area now known as Angola.

Mestre Pastinha travelled to Angola at one time, I believe, looking for Capoeira in Africa. He returned emptyhanded, but there are arts in that area that have some passing similarities. I presume there is a broken line there and a lack of historical information to reconstruct what happened.

Dambe is, as I recall, Nigerian. which, while still being West Africa, is on the other side of the equator and are not neighbors.

[bushido_man96]

Ah, cool. Thanks for the info there. It isn't unlikely that Capoeira is something all its own that evolved after the arrival in the Americas.

[JusticeZero]

Right. Capoeira seems to have an ancestor in.. some unknown martial art or arts local to the Angola region of southeast Africa during that time. A number of other arts also seem to share that same ancestry - knocking and kicking, a couple of very rare, possibly now extinct kicking arts in the islands whose name escapes me and really shouldn't be in the Atlantic, the N'golo in Angola, etc. The exact details are lost to time, unfortunately; Brazil destroyed all their records from slave times, Africa wasn't keeping them, and the verbal history was consistantly being battered and embellished.

That said, Africa is actually quite full of martial arts, along with music and other such things that we never hear about because they really just don't get highlighted by the media here.

[bushido_man96]

Well, some of the earliest civilizations date to Africa, I believe, so it wouldn't be hard to believe that it has a rather rich Martial heritage.

[sensei8]

I think that Dembe is as about raw as any martial art can be; no external pretty fringes, just right to the point of the matter.

[Patrick]

Thanks for sharing this, Justice.

Patrick