Mestra Janja

Rosângela Costa Araújo, Mestra Janja, was born on October 4, 1959, in Feira de Santana, Bahia, into a white maternal family with no stated connection to Afro-Brazilian culture. She came to capoeira as an adult, after training in physical education, and describes abandoning that path the first time she entered the roda of the Grupo de Capoeira Angola Pelourinho (GCAP) in Salvador. From 1982/1983 she trained at GCAP under Mestre Moraes, also studying with Mestre João Grande and Mestre Cobra Mansa, while completing a History degree at UFBA. She stayed within the GCAP trajectory for roughly twelve to fifteen years (sources vary), rising to contra-mestra.

In 1995, after moving to São Paulo for graduate study at USP's Faculty of Education, she co-founded — together with Mestra Paulinha (Paula Barreto) and Mestre Poloca (Paulo Barreto), fellow GCAP-trained capoeiristas — the nucleus that became Grupo Nzinga de Capoeira Angola, named for the warrior queen Nzinga Mbandi Ngola. In 2001 the initiative gained formal institutional status as the Instituto Nzinga de Estudos da Capoeira Angola e Tradições Educativas Banto no Brasil (INCAB), headquartered in Jardim Colombo, a low-income São Paulo neighborhood. The Salvador nucleus reopened on April 23, 2002, when Paulinha and Poloca returned to Bahia.

In 1999 Janja created the Orquestra Nzinga de Berimbaus, dedicated to spreading the berimbau and its African origins; it released the CD "Nzinga Capoeira Angola" in 2003. She completed a master's and doctorate in Education at USP and a post-doctorate in Social Sciences at PUC-SP, publishing "É Preta Kalunga: a Capoeira Angola como prática política entre os angoleiros baianos — anos 80-90" (2015). Back in Salvador, she coordinated the Women's Department of SEPROMI (Bahia's state equality-promotion secretariat) and today is a professor in UFBA's Department of Gender and Feminism Studies and a permanent faculty member of PPGNEIM.

She leads the Rede Angoleira de Mulheres (RAM), a network of mestras, contra-mestras, and capoeiristas that, through talking circles and workshops, launched the "Respeita as Mina na Capoeira" campaign against machista, sexist, and LGBTphobic practices in the capoeira community — officially launched March 14, 2022, at the I Festival de Capoeira: Ancestralidade e Resistência in Salvador's Centro Histórico. She helped organize the VI Congresso Badauê de Mulheres Capoeiristas (Salvador, March 2007) and coined the phrase "Gingo logo existo" ("I ginga, therefore I am"), framing the basic capoeira step as a Black embodied epistemology.