Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

10 Africa and African America
movements guided by the tempo of the music, the combatants maneuver in
ways that are reminiscent of the ginga (Portuguese; from gingar, “to sway,
to waddle”). When an opportunity develops, they kick, punch, and eyegouge.
When one lifts the other and throws him on his back, the winner is
proclaimed. There are regional variants of the play, the most striking being
the bloody ferocity of combative ladjia in the south versus the dancelike
performance of damié in the north. The various regional forms of Martinique
have been successfully compared to the kadjia of Benin, a similar
ritualistic form of activity practiced in conjunction with agricultural ceremony,
but one that emphasizes grappling and throwing actions rather than
the striking, kicking, and gouging of the New World form. A combat form
of kadjia, designed for use when a warrior loses his weapons, incorporates
a wider range of techniques.
In Venezuela, broma (literally, “just joking”) is played among Venezuelans
of African descent, particularly in the coastal city of Curiepe. Contemporary
broma does not maintain a structured curriculum, accepting a
variety of new influences at the whim of practitioners. The traditional
essence of the style, however, consists of kicks, head-butts, and sweeps.
Other African Caribbean and South American fighting arts such as
maní (Cuba), chat’ou (Guadeloupe), and susa (Surinam) may already be
extinct. The same may be true of the last vestiges of a similar African American
art that had at least one surviving master in the 1980s.
The art of “knocking and kicking” developed in the southern United
States. According to Jackson Jordan Jr. of North Carolina, a master of the
style, it was widely practiced by African Americans, particularly in the Carolinas
and the Georgia Sea Islands, during his youth at the turn of the twentieth
century. One hundred and fifty years earlier, Henry Bibb, a runaway
slave from Kentucky, reported that slaves were forced by their masters to
fight. In these contests, “The blows are made by kicking, knocking, and
butting with their heads; they grab each other by their ears, and jam their
heads together like sheep” (1969, 68). Bibb may well be describing the core
repertoire of knocking and kicking. His description also may be the best
surviving description of this martial art.
Just as little is known regarding susa, an activity reported from Saramakan
Maroon groups in Suriname (Dutch Guyana) by Dutch sources in
the late seventeenth century. The obviously martial activity was accompanied
by percussive music (drumming and hand-clapping). The goal of the
“game” was to knock down one’s opponent. The folk history of this group,
whose members claim African and African Indian descent, remembers susa
as a dance derived from an African martial art called nsunsa.
The African martial arts in the Americas obviously share a common
set of characteristics. It has been suggested that similar features developed