Tonha Rolo do Mar

Tonha Rolo do Mar stands as one of the earliest documented female capoeira teachers in Brazilian history. A 2023 academic study by Ábia Lima de França at the Federal University of Bahia, analyzing 296 female capoeira mestras across Brazil and abroad, identified her alongside Mestra Sandrinha and Mestra Cigana as one of three possible pioneers of female mastery in capoeira.

Her specialty was the military technique of playing with knife and razor tied to a cord—the deadly art of the navalha. In Santo Amaro da Purificação, the heartland of Bahian capoeira, she taught the young Rafael Alves França, who would become the legendary Mestre Cobrinha Verde. In his own words, recorded in Marcelino dos Santos' 1991 book "Capoeira e Mandingas": "O meu mestre de jogar navalha no cordão, nas mãos e nos pés foi Tonha, apelidada de Tonha Rolo do Mar" ("My master of playing razor on the cord, in the hands and on the feet was Tonha, nicknamed Tonha Rolo do Mar").

This was the era when the navalha, the switchblade, and the faca were as much a part of capoeiragem as the ginga itself. Before the sportification of capoeira in the twentieth century, the razor was the capoeira's favorite weapon—a symbol of the art long before the berimbau achieved its current prominence. Tonha was a woman who had mastered this deadly craft and passed it on.

At the time of Cobrinha Verde's account, she was reportedly still alive and walking around with a machete in hand—a woman of fearsome capability. She had moved from Santo Amaro to the neighborhood of Tomba in Feira de Santana, Bahia, and after that, no further news of her exists. She vanished from the historical record, leaving behind only the legacy she transmitted through her students.

Tonha Rolo do Mar represents an important but often overlooked female figure in the traditionally male-dominated history of capoeira—a woman who taught men the art of the razor at a time when such skills meant the difference between life and death on the streets of Bahia.