Looking for a form that synthetically expresses the complex  experience of the African diaspora? It might be capoeira. It is  a martial art posing as an innocent dance, and simultaneously  a ritual of spiritual initiation, with its own music, rhythms, and  instruments, notably the berimbau and the pandeiro. The former  is simply a bow fitted with a gourd resonator, brought to Brazil in  its mature form from Angola as the instrument of the enslaved  (after all, both lands, along with most of the Atlantic, belonged  to the domain of the Kingdom of Portugal under the Treaty of  Tordesillas). The path of the pandeiro, a close relative of the familiar  tambourine, was far more convoluted: it ran from Egypt through  the Middle East, along the Crusaders’ routes to Portugal and  onward across the Atlantic. Only in Brazil did the instrument reach  full maturity, becoming, in the hands of virtuosos such as Sérgio  Krakowski, a self-sufficient percussion set. Alexandre Lunsqui,  for his part, has proved that the archaic austerity of the berimbau  conceals experimental richness and unpredictability.