Fighting for Honor is the story of engolo, a martial art that began in ancient Angola. The study adopts an Angolan perspective to explore the origins of this unique martial art and its spread to the Americas. Furthermore, it uses Biafran traditions of martial arts as a counterpoint to engolo and to explore the interactions between African martial art traditions in the Americas (p. 3).

The book is divided into five chapters. In the first two chapters, Desch Obi focuses on the African martial arts traditions of the Kunene and the Igbo. In the chapters that follow, he examines the ways these traditions continued (and changed) in the slave communities of North America, the French Caribbean and urban Brazil. According to Desch Obi, African-derived martial arts became a crucial rallying point for the restoration of collective selfhood, freedom and honor in the slave communities of the Americas. Martial arts instilled in their practitioners a code of ethics that fostered individual strength and discipline, often in defense of community honor. At the most basic level, ‘community’ included fellow maroons, performance circles and closed societies; however, the skills honed within these ‘circles’ could also be applied in defending against the indignities and abuses that plagued colonial slave societies more generally.

The first chapter establishes a foundation for much of the rest of the book, focusing on the little-studied region of southern Angola, with special emphasis on the Kunene ‘martial arts complex’ that included archery, rock throwing, stick fighting, head butting, slap boxing and foot fighting. Because of its unique characteristics, foot fighting (engolo) draws particular emphasis in Desch Obi's account. Here, the author argues that the inverted kicking techniques of engolo artists were a reflection of the much broader cosmological paradigm of kalunga. By standing on their hands, engolo fighters mimicked the inverted world of the ancestors (kalunga), drawing power from the deceased, a power that manifested in a variety of kicks, leg sweeps and evasions.

Using linguistic evidence, Desch Obi argues that engolo can be dated to the ‘settlement of the Kunene floodplains sometime before the twelfth century’, the root word *-gol meaning ‘to bend a joint, twist, or bend over’ (p. 38). Desch Obi then shows how ritual specialists, kimbandas/ngangas, adopted the inverted engolo posture as a part of their therapeutic repertoire, drawing upon the spiritual power of ancestors in their healing. As early as the seventeenth century, documentary evidence exists for such practices in Kongo, and much later among the Pende, also in northern ‘Angola’. Desch Obi suggests that ‘from these ancestral specialists the art may have spread to the general population’ (p. 39). Finally, he ties these splinters of evidence to ethnographic work done in the 1950s by Albano Neves e Sousa and to his own field research of the 1990s, both of which demonstrate a highly developed Kunene martial arts complex centered on engolo.

Broadly speaking, the connections made by Desch Obi are compelling; however, the evidence ultimately does not bear out his more specific claim that engolo was unique to the Kunene. The only documented evidence of engolo practices in Angola during the era of the slave trade emanates from descriptions of ritual specialists in northern Angola, far from the Kunene heartland. This would suggest that the ‘cognitive core’ of engolo proliferated across Central Africa and was not necessarily peculiar to the Kunene, confounding attempts to determine specific ‘origins’. Nevertheless, Desch Obi insists that it was the Kunene engolo that informed a variety of martial arts in slave communities of the Americas, including knocking and kicking in North America, ladja in the French Caribbean, and capoeira in Brazil.

Historians, in particular, will be frustrated by the gap between evidence and analysis that persists throughout the book. Desch Obi's speculative language is the clearest indicator; the book is chock full of conditional verbs, such as ‘could be’, ‘might be’ and ‘may have’. Other uncertainties and equivocations are buried in the nearly 100 pages of endnotes. Desch Obi explains that he is less interested in documentary evidence than embodied memory: ‘the movement of the body was the text of the common African’ (p. 226). Perhaps, but where Desch Obi does rely on documentary evidence, he does not inspire full confidence. For example, he writes that African American ‘women were frequently wrestlers’ in the South Carolina low-country (p. 84). This claim is entirely unsubstantiated in the text, and the endnote provides only a single anecdotal reference. Similarly, on two occasions, Desch Obi claims that North American blacks were present in Brazilian ‘capoeira societies’ as early as 1812, continuing through the 1860s (pp. 170, 210). Again, he provides no evidence in the text, and the endnote simply cites a secondary source. Wanting to substantiate this fascinating possibility of connection between African Americans, Afro-Brazilians and Central African-derived martial arts, I consulted the book in question, only to find that two American free blacks were jailed in Rio in 1812 for a street altercation that the arresting officer first documented as ‘capoeira’, which was then scratched out and replaced with the word ‘pancada’ (‘brawl’). There is nothing to indicate that these two men were members of ‘capoeira societies’, let alone that other African Americans remained involved in ‘societies’ through the 1860s.

Setting aside Desch Obi's tendency to overstate his evidence, Fighting for Honor still makes crucial contributions to our understanding of African continuities and changes in the Americas. Desch Obi reminds us that the traditions of engolo literally lived in the bodies of those martial artists who performed ladja, capoeira, etc. These ‘living traditions’ served various roles across history, passing from one generation to the next, but the common threads that tied them all together were the inverted kicking style and the persistent claims to human dignity, respect and honor. By recognizing the expressions of Central African tradition embodied in the unique fighting moves of African-descended peoples in the Americas, Desch Obi ‘assures that the honor fought for and hard-won in the state of bondage will not be lost in their historical legacy’ (p. 217).