O Urucungo de Cassange. Book in Portuguese by the historian and capoeirist Dr. Bel.
Urucungo or Berimbau is the musical arc used in Capoeira. Josivaldo (Bel Pires) finds evidence of the use of this instrument before its popularization, thanks to rounds of capoeira. The last quarter of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century situate the work and the title Cassange is not exactly the region of Angola today where thousands of slaves from the Atlantic came to the Brazil, but a berimbau player and character from the eighteenth-century libretto Ataliba, the cowboy, by Piauí diplomat and writer Francisco Gil Castelo Branco. The arched format and the reference to Africa and Brazil function as metaphors for the African diaspora in its multiple expressions. The essay is divided into three chapters. In the first, entitled "Cassange et son arc musical", the epigraph recovers the description of the character of the series (republished later in the book) and, in the midst of a physiognomy riddled with prejudices common to the 19th century, he is reported that Cassange, "had been imported from Africa in his childhood and still kept the name of his homeland". Earth and man, united under the same name, are already alerting us to the attempt to transform human beings into mere elements of nature. It was a 19th century reading that included, among other things, the designation of African slaves according to region or port of origin, the invention of ethnonyms that barely defined origins and culture. With the man named Cassange as his guide, Josivaldo sets out in search of one of the musical arc in Brazil.
