Mestre Pastinha

Vicente Ferreira Pastinha was born in Salvador, Bahia, on 5 April 1889, the son of a Spanish merchant and a Bahian woman who had been enslaved. By his own account, he began learning capoeira around age ten after an African man named Benedito saw him repeatedly bullied and taught him through observation and participation rather than formal instruction. In 1902 Pastinha entered Bahia's naval-apprentice school, where he studied fencing and music and reportedly taught capoeira to fellow apprentices. He left the service around age twenty and spent roughly two decades in various occupations—shoeshining, newspaper selling, mining, port construction—during the era when capoeira remained criminalized and its practitioners subject to policing.

Pastinha's decisive return to capoeira came through the circle of older practitioners associated with Gengibirra in Salvador's Liberdade district. In 1941 he took leadership of the Centro Esportivo de Capoeira Angola, or CECA, giving Capoeira Angola a highly visible institutional home. He established defined teaching roles for advanced practitioners, musicians, instructors, contramestres and mestres; adopted yellow shirts and black trousers associated with the Ypiranga football club; and placed music, singing, etiquette and ritual at the center of instruction. An ensemble of three berimbaus, two pandeiros, atabaque, agogô and reco-reco anchored his mature academy practice. His project did not preserve an untouched survival but rather translated distributed street and neighborhood practices into an academy while defending qualities he believed sportization could erase: play, malícia, beauty, continuity, individual expression and ethical responsibility.

Pastinha was also an author and recording artist. He published *Capoeira Angola* in 1964 from Salvador, a 78-page illustrated edition documenting the practice. A 1969 Philips LP, *Capoeira Angola*, credited to Mestre Pastinha e Sua Academia, recorded ladainhas, corridos and instrumental practice in long medleys and stands among the influential commercial capoeira albums of the 1960s. In April 1966 Pastinha led a Capoeira Angola group within Brazil's delegation to the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal—a journey that publicly connected Bahian capoeira with Africa and expanded CECA's symbolic reach at a moment when the academy was attracting artists, intellectuals, tourists and students.

The final decade of Pastinha's life brought material hardship. In 1971 the Pelourinho academy space was vacated during government-led work and was not returned to him. Contemporary newspaper records documented that by October 1971 Pastinha was already in difficulty. He lived with declining eyesight, illness and poverty while remaining a recognized authority in major Brazilian newspapers. Pastinha died in Salvador on 13 November 1981 at age ninety-two.

His teaching continued through students and through the broader Capoeira Angola community that was never confined to CECA. João Pequeno and João Grande became especially visible carriers of its lineages, while many other Bahian mestres maintained independent practices. The roda's transmission remained collective: mestre to learner, musician to singer, player to player. Pastinha's historical stature rests on how powerfully his academy, writings, recordings and public example articulated a way for Capoeira Angola to be practiced, taught and defended.