Playing with Origins: Racial Self‐Making and Embodying History in Togolese Capoeira

Abstract

This article discusses how contemporary expressive cultural projects in Lomé, Togo, highlight practices of racial self‐making emerging from urban African contexts through a martial art developed by enslaved Afro‐Brazilians in colonial Brazil. This specific case analyzes Nukunu, the country's first capoeira group, and their ideological constructions of self, people, and historical time. Through capoeira—as a practice that I suggest makes interventions into these three spheres—Togolese martial artists creatively leverage the historical ties across the Black Atlantic as ideological and embodied resources for facing the particular challenges of twenty‐first‐century neocolonial structures. By analyzing Nukunu's views on their own racial subjectivity as an extended history of racial oppression, as well as a reenactment of the Ewe ethnic group's origin story, I argue that Togolese martial artists radically reframe notions of self, peoplehood, and historical time through enacting and performing racialized diasporic forms.