Engolo (Zebra Dance)
Fighting game of Nkhumbi herders in southern Angola, attacking mainly with kicks. Known as the alleged ancestor of capoeira, but Matthias Röhrig Assunção calls it its cousin.
Quick Facts
AngolaCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Engolo (Zebra Dance)
Engolo, also called the zebra dance, is a fighting game of herders in the Cunene river area of southwestern Angola. According to Matthias Röhrig Assunção, of the many ethnic groups of the region only the Nkhumbi practiced it. It is fought in a circle with singing, clapping and humming, mainly with kicks, without strikes by hand or head and without holds. According to Assunção, the idea that engolo is the ancestor of Brazilian capoeira was started by the Luso-Angolan painter Albano Neves e Sousa on his first visit to Brazil in 1965, and Master Pastinha accepted it. According to him, T. J. Desch-Obi created the most elaborate version of the theory. On the basis of field research from 2006 to 2011, Assunção judges that a direct line cannot be documented and regards the two practices rather as cousins. According to Assunção, most former players had not played engolo since the start of the civil war in 1975. In Mucope, three groups formed in 2010 that began to play more systematically again.
History
In a peer-reviewed article in the journal Tempo from 2020, Matthias Röhrig Assunção describes engolo, or the zebra dance, as the main Afrocentric story of the origin of capoeira and examines it against sources and field research in southwestern Angola. According to him, the idea of engolo as an ancestor of capoeira was started by the Luso-Angolan painter Albano Neves e Sousa on his first visit to Brazil in 1965. Neves e Sousa saw and drew engolo in Mucope, a village by the Cunene river. He shared the hypothesis with capoeira masters in Salvador, above all Master Pastinha, who accepted it and began talking about engolo with his students. The folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo, a friend of Neves e Sousa since 1963, included a chapter on engolo in a book from 1967 and a description of engolo in the entry Capoeira in the 1972 edition of the Dicionário do folclore brasileiro. In the eighties, according to Assunção, the story was enthusiastically embraced by the capoeira group Angola GCAP, linked to the renewed Brazilian Black movement.
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According to Assunção, the most elaborate version of the theory was created by T. J. Desch-Obi, who in 1997 was the first researcher among engolo players in the Cunene area. Desch-Obi claims that engolo can be dated to the settlement of the Cunene floodplains before the 12th century. Assunção points out that no source before the testimony of Neves e Sousa from the fifties of the 20th century mentions engolo. According to Assunção, of the many ethnic groups of the region only the Nkhumbi practiced engolo. In his view, the umbrella group Nhaneca-Humbe is a colonial category of the missionary and ethnographer Carlos Estermann, and no other subgroup of it plays engolo. In the 19th century the Nkhumbi lived in an area that Portuguese sources called the kingdoms of Humbe, Camba and Mulondo, and their numbers fell sharply after wars, cattle disease and the famine of 1915. Flávio Gomes found in lists of refugees in Rio de Janeiro from 1810 to 1830 more than a dozen enslaved people labeled muhumbe, as the Nkhumbi call themselves to this day. Assunção concludes that engolo should not be understood as an ancestor of capoeira, which would be anachronistic, but as a member of the same generation, and he calls the two practices cousins.
How it differs
Unlike capoeira, engolo has no headbutts, holds or low ground play according to Assunção, and players often stay very close to the opponent. One can leave engolo simply by turning one's back, whereas in capoeira one must never turn one's back to the opponent or the center of the circle. The analogy between the two practices rests on preferential use of the legs to attack, especially the spinning kick, called meia-lua de compasso or rabo de arraia in capoeira. Engolo music shares with capoeira music the role of encouraging and restraining play, but differs greatly from the capoeira orchestra with several instruments and fixed rhythms. Assunção explains the absence of ground play by the places where it was played, for example a cattle enclosure covered in dung, and thinks the low play of capoeira probably developed later in the squares and on the piers of Brazilian port cities. According to him, a small number of enslaved Africans from the Cunene area was also taken to the French Antilles, where other kicking fighting games became established.
Technique
According to Assunção, today's engolo players move in small hops, often in a side-on stance, jumping backward, forward and sideways, sometimes with one leg extended. They use general terms such as mussana (kick) and koyola (pull), but have no fixed technique names. Assunção observed three main types of attack: straight kicks, circular kicks and sweeps, among them a sweep to the knee, which in his view does not exist in capoeira. The main aim is to kick the opponent's face or upper body, and circular movements predominate. Headbutts, attacking arm movements and grabs are not used, and falls are rare. Jumps can be very high and are trained, for example, by leaping over cattle enclosures. Assunção did not see among today's players the kicks from a support on the hands that Neves e Sousa drew around 1955. The player Lumbolene from Humbe firmly denied that engolo was ever played with the hands on the ground, while other players claimed that experienced players used such movements in the past. Engolo is accompanied by clapping, humming and singing, and according to Assunção no musical instrument is used. The singer leads a verse, the spectators answer with humming and clapping, and there is no refrain.
Training
According to Assunção's informants, engolo was played mainly by adult men while herding, in the cattle enclosure of a homestead, on sandy riverbanks and on distant pastures in the dry season. It was not for children, whereas the khandeka slapping game was practiced from childhood, and most of those asked learned engolo only between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Neither family nor clan pushed anyone to learn, and every young man had to find his own motivation and an older man to teach him. Experienced players say that engolo is best learned by people with a light heart, that is, those who do not easily get angry after being kicked.
Ranks and progression
According to Assunção, formal recognition of engolo teachers apparently did not exist. His informants did not confirm Desch-Obi's claim that a formal title of master existed. For experienced players, some use the word munongo, which denotes an outstanding expert.
Competition
According to Assunção, the game begins with players clapping and humming, and one enters the circle with challenges and shouts until someone joins him. A player ends the game simply by turning his back or raising his arms and leaving the circle. Games are short and without a long opening ritual. Asked what engolo is, players most often answered engolo otchimamo, which according to Assunção is best translated as game, but can also mean dance, culture or custom.
Today
Assunção's account rests on interviews from 2006, 2010 and 2011 with about fifteen men and several women aged sixty to eighty, all of whom played engolo before the start of the civil war in 1975. Most of them have not played since 1975, the main exception being a group in Humbe, and in Mucope and Quiteve the arrival of researchers prompted a small revival. In 2010 three groups formed in Mucope that began to play more regularly and also gained younger men, whom the researchers saw playing in 2011. Capoeira master Cobra Mansa took part in four research trips to Angola in 2006, 2010, 2011 and 2015, and the project produced the documentary Jogo de corpo: capoeira e ancestralidade (2014).
Did you know
The central verse of engolo, known to every player, Wassanwa engolo kalilwa, means according to Assunção that in engolo nobody is mourned: a player who died was buried on the spot without a proper funeral and his opponent bore no responsibility. Another verse says that a zebra cannot be milked like a cow and that it does not graze but goes where it wants and kicks. An engolo player may be possessed by the spirit of a deceased relative who also played engolo, and must then undergo ritual initiation oktonkheka. English Wikipedia states that engolo is among the martial arts mastered by the Dora Milaje, the elite female unit of the fictional country Wakanda from Marvel comics.
Frequently asked questions
Is engolo the ancestor of capoeira?
According to Matthias Röhrig Assunção, the painter Albano Neves e Sousa began spreading this idea in 1965, and T. J. Desch-Obi defends it most elaborately. Assunção thinks a direct line cannot be documented and calls the two practices cousins.
Who played engolo?
According to Assunção, of the many ethnic groups of southwestern Angola only the Nkhumbi. Mostly adult men played it while working as herders, and most of those asked learned it between eighteen and twenty-five.
Do players kick from their hands on the ground in engolo?
Albano Neves e Sousa drew such kicks around 1955. Assunção did not see them among today's players, and players disagree on whether they were once used.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.