Capoeira Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
65 free Capoeira trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This capoeira trivia quiz covers the Afro-Brazilian martial art from its Bantu roots in Angolan engolo and its first mention as a crime in 1789, through the knife-carrying capoeira carioca of 19th-century Rio, to Mestre Bimba's capoeira regional, Mestre Pastinha's capoeira Angola, legalization under Vargas in 1937 and the art's global spread from the 1970s to UNESCO recognition in 2014. You will find questions on how the game is played: the roda and the bateria of berimbaus, pandeiros, atabaques and agogô; the ginga, aú, rasteira, meia lua de compasso and cabeçada; esquivas instead of blocks; the chamada and volta ao mundo; the batizado, apelidos and cordas; ladainha, louvação and corrido songs; and the philosophy of malícia, malandragem, mandinga and axé. There are also questions on the legends and pop culture, from Besouro Mangangá and Zumbi to Only the Strong, Eddy Gordo in Tekken and Black Panther. Some questions any first-week student could answer; others are for seasoned capoeiristas. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on capoeira, its mestres, music and instruments, and each explanation adds one further detail. Play, see your score, and share it with your roda.
30 of 65 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Capoeira is best described as what?
An Afro-Brazilian martial art and game
An Afro-Brazilian martial art and game is how reference works define it: players speak of 'playing' capoeira rather than fighting or dancing it, and a bout in the circle is called a jogo, a game.
Q 02Which Angolan combat game, nicknamed the 'zebra dance', is widely named as capoeira's ancestor?
Engolo
Engolo is played near the Cunene river in southern Angola. The painter Albano Neves e Sousa sketched it there, then saw capoeira in Brazil in the 1960s and proposed the link that scholars still argue over.
Q 03In 1789, what gave capoeira its first written mention?
A court case
A court case gives the first mention: in 1789 a man named Adão was arrested and punished for being a capoeira, the earliest known record of the word used for the practice.
Q 04One widely cited theory traces the word 'capoeira' to Tupi words meaning what?
Round forest
Round forest is the usual gloss: Tupi ka'a, forest, plus a word for round, meaning the low scrub where runaways could hide. Dictionaries call the origin uncertain, and rival theories point to Portuguese and Bantu words.
Q 05What was the violent street-fighting capoeira of 19th-century gangs called?
Capoeira carioca
Capoeira carioca takes its name from Rio de Janeiro, where rival gangs called maltas fought with kicks, headbutts, razors and clubs and terrorised the city in the later 1800s.
Q 06In a famous 1909 bout in Rio, the capoeirista Ciríaco beat a champion of which fighting style?
Japanese jujutsu
Japanese jujutsu was the art of Sada Miyako, who had been hired to teach it to Brazilian sailors. Ciríaco dropped him with a spinning rabo de arraia kick and became a national hero.
Q 07Legend says one feared Bahian capoeira fighter of the early 1900s escaped trouble by turning into what?
A beetle
A beetle gave Besouro Mangangá his nickname: besouro is Portuguese for beetle, and the tales say he took that shape and flew off whenever he was cornered.
Q 08In the outlaw years, some old mestres carried what to fix to the tip of the berimbau in a street fight?
A small blade
A small blade turned the instrument into a weapon: one old mestre recalled carrying a little sickle made to fit the tip, and another spoke of razors tied to the end.
Q 09Mestre Bimba's regional style was the first capoeira taught through what?
Set sequences of moves
Set sequences of moves, the sequências de ensino, drilled beginners in fixed attacks and defences. Bimba built his method because he felt capoeira was fading into folklore and losing its fighting edge.
Q 10What was the birth name of Mestre Bimba, founder of capoeira regional?
Manuel dos Reis Machado
Manuel dos Reis Machado was the last of his mother's 25 children. 'Bimba' came from a bet between her and the midwife over whether the baby would be a boy.
Q 11Because capoeira was still illegal, Bimba named his style what?
Luta Regional Baiana
Luta Regional Baiana means 'regional fight from Bahia'. Leaving the outlawed word capoeira out of the name let him teach in the open, and the style later became known as capoeira regional.
Q 12Bimba learned batuque, a related fighting-dance, from whom?
His father
His father, Luiz Cândido Machado, was a champion of batuque, a rough Bahian fighting game. Capoeira itself came at 12, from a ship’s officer known as Bentinho.
Q 13In 1937, what did Bahia grant Bimba's academy?
A licence
A licence from the state education authorities made his Salvador academy an official school. Doctors and middle-class students came to enrol in an art long tied to the streets.
Q 21Which group's team won the Berimbau de Ouro capoeira tournament in back-to-back years in the late 1960s?
Grupo Senzala
Grupo Senzala began in 1964 with teenagers training together in Rio de Janeiro. Its young players took the Berimbau de Ouro in the contest's first two years.
Q 22Who is thought to have been the first to teach the art in Europe, in London in 1971?
Nestor Capoeira
Nestor Capoeira began teaching at the London School of Contemporary Dance in 1971, then kept giving classes as he moved on through other European cities.
Q 23Which 1993 American martial arts film puts capoeira at the centre of its story?
Only the Strong
Q 14After a 1953 presentation by Bimba, which president called capoeira 'the only truly national sport'?
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Vargas is reported to have said so after Bimba and his students performed for him in 1953. It was a sharp turn for an art that Brazil's penal code had listed as a crime six decades earlier.
Q 15Who founded a school in 1941 to cultivate the traditional capoeira Angola?
Pastinha
Pastinha had been away from capoeira for almost three decades when a former student took him to a Salvador roda in 1941, and the mestres there handed him charge of it. His school grew from that circle.
Q 16A leading Angola school's founder dressed students in yellow and black, the colours of what?
His favourite football club, Ypiranga
His favourite football club, Ypiranga, wore yellow and black. He had every student wear a uniform so that his capoeira school would look like an organised practice.
Q 17Who first taught capoeira to the boy who later founded the best-known Angola school?
An old African named Benedito
An old African named Benedito saw a bigger boy beating him in the street and offered him lessons at his house. After months of practice the boy won the rematch, and the bully became his friend.
Q 18Compared with capoeira regional, how is capoeira Angola typically played?
Slower and closer to the ground
Slower and closer to the ground is the Angola hallmark, because the style sets out to keep the older game, with its ritual and guile. Regional was a reform built for speed and fighting.
Q 19The painter Johann Moritz Rugendas gave his famous early picture of capoeira players which subtitle?
The dance of war
The dance of war is the subtitle on his print 'Jogar capoëra'. His own text is blunter: it calls capoeira a violent war game of headbutts in which knives were sometimes drawn.
Q 20In the last years of Brazil's empire, the 'Black Guard' of freedmen and capoeira fighters broke up which movement's rallies?
The republicans
The republicans were the target: the Guard stood by Princess Isabel and violently broke up republican meetings. The republic came anyway in 1889, and its new penal code soon outlawed capoeira.
Only the Strong stars Mark Dacascos as a Green Beret back from service in Brazil, who teaches capoeira to pupils at his old Miami high school and takes on the local drug gang.
Q 24Which heist film has a French master thief dance capoeira past a museum's lasers?
Ocean's Twelve
Ocean's Twelve gives the scene to Vincent Cassel's Night Fox, and Cassel could dance it because he practised capoeira himself. Four years earlier he had presented a French television documentary about the art.
Q 25How does UNESCO's 2014 listing say capoeira circle skills are learned?
By observation and imitation
By observation and imitation is the listing's own phrase. It adds that everyone in the circle is expected to sing, play the instruments and respect its code, with the master as guardian of the knowledge.
Q 26Which Fighting-type Pokémon, known in Japan as Kapoerā, fights in a style based on capoeira?
Hitmontop
Hitmontop fights while spinning on its head like a top, dealing out smooth, dance-like kicks. It evolves from Tyrogue, as do the kicker Hitmonlee and the boxer Hitmonchan.
Q 27What is the fundamental movement of capoeira?
The ginga
The ginga is the never-ending base step of the game. It keeps a player in constant motion and hard to hit, and nearly every kick, sweep and dodge is set up from it.
Q 28Capoeira's ginga takes its name from the Portuguese verb gingar, meaning roughly what?
Rocking back and forth
Rocking back and forth is close: Portuguese dictionaries define gingar as swaying as you walk. That rhythmic sway is one reason people who watch capoeira take a fight for a dance.
Q 29What is a cartwheel called in capoeira?
Aú
Aú differs from a gym cartwheel: the player goes over sideways with chest and eyes on the other player, often low with bent arms and legs, to slip a kick or find a better position.
Q 30How does a capoeira player chiefly deal with an incoming kick?
Dodging under or around it
Dodging under or around it is the rule: the dodges, called esquivas, take the head and body out of the kick's path and leave the player set to answer with an attack of their own.