“Capoeira is sorcery of slaves longing for liberty, its beginning has no method and its end is inconceivable to the wisest of the Mestres”.
Mestre Pastinha.
On the 5th of April of 1889 Mestre Pastinha was born. Since last month I have been trying to pay a tribute to ‘Seu Vicente’, his life and work. The space constrains of a blog post will never allow justice to his devotion to Capoeira neither to the value of his legacy. Nonetheless, posting in english, and combining different sources, I hope to inspire our english-speaker-brothers in their quest for knowledge about our honourable Mestre and Capoeira in general.
With Mestre Pastinha, “for the first time we meet a Capoeira Mestre concerned with the capoeiristas’ spiritual and meta-physics aspects, paving the way to both the pedagogic and therapeutic side of our arte-e-manha (Capoeira)” (Decânio; 1997: 9).
Mestre Pastinha warns us: “Friends, the body is a great system of reason, behind our thoughts lies a powerful Lord, an unknown Wise”; calling attention to an embodied process of education through the practice of Capoeira. More then that, he acknowledges our bodies and not our minds as a ‘system of reason’. An approach that overcomes both the western mind/body dualism and the conventional systems of education. Lessons yet to be learn by most of our societies. (Pastinha, as cited in Decânio; 1997: 9).
The following video clip, produced by Contra-Mestre Marco Antônio (Capoeira Alto Astral Portugal), features images of Mestre Pastinha and English subtitled parts of the above cited manuscripts.
The next video was found quite recently in Brazil and features Mestre Pastinha playing with his students (among them João Pequeno e Bobó) for a TV documentary movie produced by the folklorist Alceu Maynard, in 1959. Unfortunately, the video has no audio.
What follows next is a small biography of Mestre Pastinha sourced from the Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais – http://www.ceao.ufba.br , and translated by me.
“Mestre Pastinha (Vicente Ferreira Pastinha), was born on the 5th of April of 1889 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
At the age of 8 he began to learn Capoeira from Benedito, an African elder. He stated he had learnt out of ‘rivalry’. Everyday he was told to go out and buy bread, and everyday a boy waited for him to pass by so he could start a fight with him. And every time he was beaten.
Benedito saw these fights from his house’s window. One day he called Pastinha and asked if he would like to fight the boy and win. In this way his training began in the living room of Benedito’s house. One day, finally, Benedito said that he was ready, that he could pass by that street again, but that he should wait until the boy started the fight. When he passed by the boy said: “Long time no see. Were you afraid?” Pastinha answered: “Yes, I was.” The boy started the fight – and lost. Pastinha studied with Benedito for 2 years.
Aged nearly 13 years he says he joined the Navy, where he spent 10 years and mastered “the whole marine art”. In 1941, at the Largo do Pelourinho, 19, he launched his academia “O Centro Esportivo de Capoeira Angola”. In 1964, he published a book about Capoeira called Capoeira Angola. In 1966 Pastinha travelled to Africa as a guest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil as part of the Brazilian delegation to the 1er Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar.
According to Jorge Amado, Pastinha had begun loosing his sight in 1962. Rego (1958: 287) says that in 1968 he was no longer able to play Capoeira, and that although in a state of decay academia was still open. When we met him in 1973 he was already blind, but by no means less lively then in Jorge Amado’s descriptions. He explained us that the Cultural Heritage of the City of Salvador took the building in which his academia had been, for restoration, and that he was living on a pension of seven hundred and few cruzeiros (Brazilian money at that time) per month. (In 1973)
Jorge Amado says: “For me, Pastinha is one of the great figures of Bahia’s popular life”. We have to agree. The City of Salvador should pay tribute to this simple man of fertile and live imagination, so representative of the whole culture and history of Bahia.”
oi
“TV documentary movie produced by the folklorist Alceu Maynard, in 1959″
Where does the year come from?
Thanks
Sven,
Sorry, “1959″ was a typing error. I double checked a few youtube posts by joao251179 ; bocaricacdo ; and TVcapoeiraAngola and all them are adopting 1950 as the right year. Two of them state that Maynard was the responsible folkloirst.
The first time I saw this footage, though, was in a symposium in Santa Catarina (Brazil), in 2006, and as far as I can remember the footage was presented by Luiz Victor, an student of Mestre João Pequeno, who had founded it during his fieldwork.
I hope this helps. Thanks for the ‘heads up’ with the year.
Axé!
Eurico
hey contra-mestre,
still really enjoying all your writing on these subjects.
Glad to be able to read it, thank you
Nice one Man! Thanks for your feedback. Lets keep in touch! Hope to see you soon in NZ.
Axé!
Amazing how the silent video…..is not silent at all!!
“the body is a great system of reason” – I like that. It reminds me of philosophers and linguists like Mark Johnson and George Lakoff who talk about “the embodied mind”.