PDF Manuscritos de Mestre Pastinha - "Caderno Albo"

Mestre Pastinha (Vicente Ferreira Pastinha) was born in Salvador in 1889 and died in 1981 in the same city. He is recognized as one of the greatest masters of capoeira in the capital of Bahia, and later posthumously, will be considered one of the greatest icons of Brazilian capoeira. Mestre Pastinha, unlike many poor and often illiterate masters of that time, knew how to write sensibly and had recorded part of his daily life, his thoughts and his deep philosophical reflections which he had in mind in a journal entitled "Quando as pernas fazem mizerêr ”, subtitled“ metafísica e prática da capoeira ”.

Here are about 200 pages of his life experience that have been preserved from oblivion and destruction. In addition to providing reflections on the practice and ethics of capoeira, the manuscripts offer poetry, songs and even several drawings illustrating certain aspects of capoeira angola that could not be expressed in their bodily essence with the writing.

Preserved for decades by Mestre Decânio and digitized in 2003 by Hilton Bruno de Almeida Sousa, a capoeira practitioner known as "Teimosia".

Download the PDF for free by clicking here.

"Mestre Pastinha wrote his thoughts in a bound notebook, which he affectionately called "caderno", in allusion to the fact that his manuscripts (handwritten notebook: in Portuguese "caderno") and his drawings (album of drawings or simply " albo" in the Afro-Brazilian capoeira dialect in which the old Bahian capoeiristas spoke).

As will be verified by examining the texts of the Master of Capoeira Angola, the spelling he used is the phonetic transcription of the popular Bahian language, which I allow myself to call the “Afro-Brazilian dialect of capoeira”, which Waldeloir Rego analyzes with perfection in his book "Capoeira Angola".

Angelo Augusto Decanio Filho - Master Decanio