What is Bungo Fu?
Humans have practiced martial arts in various forms since ancient times. Nearly 5,000 years ago, the Egyptian Pharaoh Menes began a systematic study of the fighting techniques used by the greatest warriors from Africa, India and the Middle East. About 1,300 years after that, the ancient Chinese began to develop the earliest forms of what is now known as Kung Fu. Since then, martial arts have spread across the globe and continuously evolved, as generations of masters have taken what they learned from their predecessors and combined those skills with ideas of their own. Today, for example, there are literally thousands of different types of Kung Fu, including well-known styles that practiced widely around the world, and other, more obscure forms passed on to only a few practitioners by their family members.
Bungo Fu is a product of such evolution. A Jamaican of Chinese ancestry had learned from his family a style of Kung Fu originally developed by the Mongol armies who ruled China during the 13th and 14th Centuries A.D. This style emphasized powerful trapping and breaking techniques useful in close-in combat. In his new homeland, the immigrant observed Jamaicans of African descent in the hills, practicing what at first appeared to be dances. As he watched more closely, he realized that they actually were practicing a martial art--the African foot-fighting techniques that also form the basis for Capoeira, the Brazillian martial art. He saw natural similarities between his Kung Fu and African foot-fighting, and decided to combine the best of each into a single fighting style. Thus, a new hybrid form of Kung Fu was born. Sifu Thompson, who learned the style from his uncle Garth, devised the name Bungo Fu, to denote its dual Chinese and African roots.
Sifu Thompson demonstrates some of the kicks in his repertoire. He has been studying kung fu for more than 40 years, and teaching for more than 20.
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