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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture
and Stick Fighting: Reassessing Male
Violence and Virtue in South Africa
a
Benedict Carton & Robert Morrell
b
a
Department of History and Art History & African and African
American Studies , George Mason University
b
School of Education/Research Office, University of Cape Town
Published online: 18 Jan 2012.
To cite this article: Benedict Carton & Robert Morrell (2012) Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and
Stick Fighting: Reassessing Male Violence and Virtue in South Africa, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 38:1, 31-53, DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2011.640073
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2011.640073
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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 38, Number 1, March 2012
Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick
Fighting: Reassessing Male Violence and
Virtue in South Africa*
Benedict Carton
(Department of History and Art History & African and African American
Studies, George Mason University)
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 10:28 31 January 2014
Robert Morrell
(School of Education/Research Office, University of Cape Town)
Zulu soldiers are renowned for decimating a British army at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879.
This military victory not only entrenched a legacy of merciless conquest long attributed to
King Shaka, but also sensationalised the idea that Zulu men are natural-born killers. We
reassess this stereotype by scrutinising the ‘Shakan’ version of martial culture and its reputed
links to the formative encounters of Zulu men. One such experience involved boyhood exploits
in stick fighting, a mostly rural sport associated with fearsome warriors and masculine
aggression in South Africa. Using a gendered framework, we identify the customary
obligations and homosocial allegiances shaping hierarchies of patriarchy which regulated
stick fighting in a regional hotbed of competition, the Thukela Valley of KwaZulu-Natal.
Focusing on a century of dramatic transformations (early 1800s to early 1900s), we examine
overlooked vernacular expressions of stick fighting that reinforced the importance of selfmastery and ‘honour’, metaphors of manhood that bolstered kinship obligations during
social turmoil. We also highlight the sport’s sometimes unforgiving outcomes, including
ruthless retribution and painful ostracism, which combined with encroaching forces of white
domination to change rules of engagement and propel young men from their traditional
upbringing into labour migrancy. However, the ethos of stick fighting – namely learning
restraint – remained vital to the socialisation of boys.
Introduction
In South Africa stick fighting has long been a popular form of peer-based male socialisation. Zulu
boys in the countryside are among the keen exponents of this martial recreation, which moved
with migrant labourers into urban areas by the twentieth century. Many stick fighters, particularly
those in rural communities, revel in a sport that evokes the challenges of future manhood and
glories of bygone battlefields.1 Yet this pastime that has shaped generations of men has not been
assessed in historical terms. This article initiates such an examination by constructing an
*We dedicate this article to the memory of the late Glenn Cowley, a champion of scholars, publishers and ideas. We
thank Mike Mkhulu Kirkwood and Dingani Nkunzi Mthethwa for their early interventions and deft editing. Others
contributed valuable expertise and support, namely Johnny Clegg, Malcolm Draper, the late Monica Fairall, Sipho
Mchunu, the late Richard Nxumalo, the late Felix Nzama, Betsy Schmidt, and John Wright. Finally, we express our
gratitude to the National Research Foundation for financial support and the anonymous readers and editorial board of
JSAS for their incisive criticisms.
1 P. Alegi, Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Press, 2004), p. 9.
ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/12/010031-23
q 2012 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2011.640073
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 10:28 31 January 2014
32 Journal of Southern African Studies
analytical framework from diverse scholarship. We incorporate studies of manly honour and
multiple masculinities alongside research debunking the myths of ‘Shakan conquests’. Much of
the latter was published during escalating ‘black-on-black violence’ in South Africa that, for
many, revealed the disturbing legacies of ‘invented tradition’. It is tempting to assume, as some
of these valuable examinations do, that recreation in Zulu society predicated on intense clashes
entrenched a culture of war-mongering. We distance ourselves from this supposition and
emphasise instead the governing functions and normative restrictions of stick fighting.
This article begins with an evaluation of stereotypical views of Zulu men in the light of reappraisals of Shaka kaSenzangakhona’s early-nineteenth-century warrior feats, which
supposedly triggered a murderous phase of state building2 called the mfecane, or ‘disruptive
scatterings’. While academic scrutiny of the mfecane has exposed the limits of power and
cruelty in Shaka’s kingdom, this path-breaking critique has done little to overturn ingrained
conceptions of Zulu masculinity and its formative practices such as stick fighting. Indeed, this
sport continues to be seen as a primordial conduit for the patriarchal aggression fuelling South
Africa’s high rates of violence.3 There are at least two reasons why such a reading has proved
seductive. First, the notion of ‘invented tradition’ has bolstered an argument that combat-ready
Africans embraced lethal nationalism, even as they were cynically manipulated by traditional
authorities and white officials. In twentieth-century South Africa these leaders reinvigorated
exclusive ethnic identities like Zulu chauvinism in hopes of influencing colonial divide-and-rule
policies.4 Second, news coverage of the bloody interregnum between the ending of apartheid
and advent of democracy (1990–1994) has left a marked impression, particularly after reports
of attacks spotlighting the return of Zulu men ‘on the war path’ made world headlines.
While recognising the significance of these scholarly and media portrayals, we move
beyond them to situate stick fighting within a gendered framework that investigates the forms
of masculinity this sport promoted in Zulu societies and the relationships between violent
intra-community clashes and stick fighting. Our research encompasses political upheaval and
consolidation in nineteenth-century Zululand and Natal as well as industrialisation and
urbanisation in twentieth-century South Africa. How these transformations affected Zulu
boys and young men is illuminated in archival documents and oral testimonies, which suggest
that stick fighting long adhered to rules of competition that privileged rhetoric, honour and
defence. Such virtues of physical restraint, in turn, imbued Zulu masculinity with an ethos of
self-control that sustained family homesteads buffeted by royal Zulu fratricide, colonial land
appropriation and the dislocating effects of labour migrancy. During these turbulent periods,
displays of deference remained a key element of Zulu manhood in a repertoire of masculine
behaviours. While prominent Zulu men would typically obey a superior, for example their
king or chief, they would also demand respect from juniors. People failing to demonstrate
proper reverence – such as unruly youths – risked being punished as ill-disciplined outcasts
who invited the wrath of lineage ancestors, a dreaded fount of misfortune.5
2 M.R. Mahoney, ‘The Zulu Kingdom as a Genocidal and Post-genocidal Society, c. 1810 to the Present’, Journal
of Genocide Research, 5, 2 (June 2003), pp. 251 –68. This study promotes the idea that the early Zulu state
eradicated rival chiefdoms.
3 G. Kynoch, ‘Urban Violence in Colonial Africa: A Case for South African Exceptionalism’, Journal of Southern
African Studies [JSAS ], 34, 3 (September 2008), pp. 640–41. Also see A. Altbeker, A Country at War with Itself:
South Africa’s Crisis of Crime (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball, 2007) for more on violent crime in post-apartheid
South Africa.
4 S. Marks, ‘Patriotism, Patriarchy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness’, in L. Vail
(ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989), pp. 215–40;
N. Cope, ‘The Zulu Petit Bourgeoisie and Zulu Nationalism in the 1920s: Origins of Inkatha’, JSAS, 16, 3
(September 1990), pp. 433– 35. Marks and Cope drew on E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of
Tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 211– 62.
5 H. Ngubane, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine: An Ethnography of Health and Disease in Nyuswa-Zulu Thought
and Practice (London, Academic Press, 1977), pp. 77–89.
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
33
But, as Mxolisi Mchunu’s scholarship illustrates, if honourable behaviours were an
indispensable part of manly deportment, expressing their related attributes, discipline
(inkuliso) and respect (inhlonipho), was more discretionary – for they reflected evolving
relationships of power, as when assertive young men and women chafed at senior authority
that curtailed their autonomy.6 Inhlonipho, in particular, conveyed meanings that illuminate
both the sources of generational tensions and the rules of martial arts. It entailed the strict
requirement that youths honour elders through uncompromising practices of social
avoidance, making vigilant restraint a vital part of their advance to adulthood. In addition
inhlonipho included the injunction that personal ego be subordinate to homestead hierarchy,
which quarantined toxic conduct in tightly regulated peer activities and gender obligations.7
Our argument draws insights from John Iliffe’s sweeping survey of honour, ‘the chief
ideological motivation’ guiding African men to the ranks of heroes and householders.8 Heroic
honour, Iliffe writes, embodied the drama, scruples and bravery of warriors. Householder
honour, by contrast, was more quotidian, combining ‘patience, sobriety, wisdom’ with duty to
kin and cohort. The dynamics of pre-colonial Zulu society exhibited, or perhaps bridged, the
two sides of Iliffe’s dichotomous model. While (heroic) prowess was celebrated, the wellbeing of Zulu society depended on the reciprocal bonds supporting (householder) agriculture
in chiefdoms.9 The amabutho (regiments), a critical state institution, illustrates this point.
These military units trained some soldiers to safeguard the royal house but exhorted most
conscripts to maintain the discipline and respect that fostered work in homesteads. To this
end, the guiding idioms of the Zulu kingdom promoted subsistence – not ‘man-slaying’ –
with one particular metaphor, isibuko sikababa, inspiring herd boys (the proto-stick fighters)
‘to mirror’ the ‘gravitas’ of their father who oversaw homestead production.10 Thus all
people, young and old, were expected first to uphold life-affirming heroic and householder
traditions that preserved domestic security. In much the same way, valorous stick fighters
were expected first to protect themselves and pull back if an opponent lay defenceless, for
instance, if a contestant could not compete and so reverted to his primary identity as a noncombatant whose labour and fealty were essential to family and community.
Iliffe’s understandings of honour dovetail with Raewyn Connell’s notion of plural
masculinities, an explanation of gender formation that informs how we contextualise stick
fighting.11 Connell’s idea of masculinity assumes male identities are fluid and not dictated
solely by biology. This approach not only challenges sex role theory which fixes,
ahistorically, the range of acceptable gender behaviour, but also allows for simultaneous (and
competing) ways in which men exert authority over other men and over women. Connell’s
6 M. Mchunu, ‘Culture Change, Zulu Masculinity and Intergenerational Conflict in the Context of Civil War in
Pietermaritzburg (1987–1991)’, in T. Shefer, K. Ratele, A. Strebel, N. Shabalala, and R. Buikema (eds), From
Boys to Men: Social Constructions of Masculinity in Contemporary Society (Cape Town, University of Cape
Town Press, 2007), pp. 225 –40.
7 B. Carton, Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa
(Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2000); T. McClendon, Genders and Generations Apart: Labor
Tenants and Customary Law in Segregation-Era South Africa, 1920s to 1940s (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann,
2002).
8 J. Iliffe, Honour in African History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 1.
9 J. Cobbing, ‘The Evolution of the Ndebele Amabutho’, Journal of African History [JAH ], 15, 4 (October 1974),
pp. 607–31; J. Wright and C. Hamilton, ‘Traditions and Transformations: The Phongolo-Mzimkhulu Region in
the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in A. Duminy and B. Guest (eds), Natal and Zululand from
Earliest Times to 1910: A New History (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1989), pp. 49 –82.
10 Carton, Blood from Your Children, pp. 38–39. Isibuko sikaba appears in oral and written records: Testimony of
Mgidlana, 5 June 1921, file 56, notebooks, James Stuart Papers, Killie Campbell Library, Durban; Annexure A,
Deyi v. Mbuzikazi, 1 July 1897, SNA Minute Papers, 1/1/278 1962/97, 1/SNA, Pietermaritzburg Archives
Repository (PAR). The more contemporary phrase for isibuko sikababa is isithombe sikababa.
11 R.W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University
Press, 1987); R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005, 2nd edn).
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34 Journal of Southern African Studies
premise that masculinities have many features, including ancillary and oppositional variants,
has intensified scholarly debate over the true fount of male oppression. Some of these
disagreements focus on whether men instinctively subjugate women; or whether ‘hegemonic
masculinity’, prescribing appropriate male conduct, is a negotiated position entailing the
complicity of women. The controversies have been illuminating, if not determining. We enter
the fray through a social constructionist line of inquiry, arguing that men’s aggressiveness is
nurtured early on in martial play known by the cliché ‘boys will be boys’.12
There is no disputing that martial play was integral to stick fighting, a favourite activity of
Zulu herd boys who fenced with cattle switches to while away time in pastures (see Figure 1).
But as Ndukwana kaMbengwana, an oral historian of the Zulu kingdom pointed out in 1903, a
boy who received his original stick knew he held more than a weapon or switch. His stick
epitomised a customary obligation to shield his lineage resources from any harm, especially
the cattle his patriarch sacrificed when propitiating the ancestors (amadlozi). Ndukwana
elaborated on the dimensions of male socialisation underlying this responsibility: ‘Boys.
(Little boys) [sic] would go out with boys who herded calves, and so learn. Even a small boy
carries his stick – grows up with it. It would be cut for him by his elder brother’.13 Hence, the
stick served as a signifier of generational deference and homestead security; only under
certain fleeting circumstances did it symbolise something martial. Indeed, our evidence
indicates that from the beginning of the nineteenth century the sporadic sparring sessions of
herd boys conditioned them to labour – as opposed to battle – for patriarch, chief and king;
and later during white rule to work as ‘farm boys’, ‘dock boys’, ‘houseboys’, ‘mine boys’,
and ‘police boys’. With such emasculating paths to maturity, entrenched by settler power in
the twentieth century, it is surprising that Zulu men are still spoken of as preternatural
warriors. The reason may hinge on consistent depictions of their masculinity, obsessively
highlighting the traits of a bloodthirsty fighter.14
‘The Zulu Nation is Born out of Shaka’s Spear’: Warrior Masculinity in
South African Historiography and Liberation Politics
A stock figure in representations of Zulu culture is the merciless, spear-wielding tribesman in
combat. His caricature splashed across Victorian broadsheets following the massacre of
Queen Victoria’s forces at Isandlwana in 1879. Rapidly, he came to embody what many
Europeans feared most about the Dark Continent, an encounter with the natural-born killer.15
After the British defeat of the Zulu kingdom another image, implying partial domestication of
12 R.W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001); M. Kimmel, The
Gendered Society (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000); J. McKay, M.A. Messner and D. Sabo (eds),
Masculinities, Gender Relations, and Sport (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2000); J.W. Messerschmidt, ‘Becoming
“Real Men”: Adolescent Masculinity Challenges and Sexual Violence’, Men and Masculinities, 2, 3 (January
2000), pp. 286–307; R. Gilbert and P. Gilbert, Masculinity Goes to School (London, Routledge, 1998).
13 Testimony of Ndukwana, 11 September 1903, in C. De B. Webb and J. Wright (eds), The James Stuart Archive of
Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples, Volume 4
(Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1986), p. 378. This volume is part of The James Stuart Archive of
Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples (Pietermaritzburg,
University of Natal Press, 1976–2001, 5 Volumes), hereafter referred to as James Stuart Archive. Nguni stickmaking rituals: J. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei
(Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2006), pp. 128–29.
14 R. Morrell, “‘Of Boys and Men”: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies’, JSAS, 24, 4 (December
1998), p. 616; K. Shear, ‘“Taken as Boys”: The Politics of Black Police Employment and Experience in Early
Twentieth-century South Africa’, in L. Lindsay and S. Miescher (eds), Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa
(Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2003), pp. 109–27.
15 R. Martin, ‘British Images of the Zulu, c. 1820–1879’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1982), pp. 166 &
333–34; D. Wylie, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 2000).
35
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
Figure 1. Colonial photo of herd boy in ceremonial dress, ca late nineteenth century. Source: Pietermaritzburg
Archives Repository (PAR), South Africa, Photograph #C6735, Miscellaneous Photo Collection.
warrior manhood, began to circulate as well. Shorn of his blade, this stock figure was
portrayed as a half-lunging young man sporting the only martial symbol that white authorities
permitted in the post-conquest order, the weapon of a competitive stick fighter (see Figure 2
and Figure 3).
This embedded, multi-faceted stereotype of the Zulu warrior was jolted by an academic
controversy in the 1980s that overturned conventional knowledge of the mfecane
‘devastations’ attributed to the rise of Shaka. At the centre of the controversy, historian
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36 Journal of Southern African Studies
Figure 2. Spear-wielding Zulu warriors in the Battle of Isandlwana depicted in London’s Graphic, 15 March 1879.
A similar caricature titled ‘“At Bay’’: The Battle of Isandula’ was published in the Illustrated London News on 15
February 1879. This image appeared as a frontispiece in British and American imperial fantasy-and-adventure books
during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. See G. A. Henty’s The Young Colonists (New York,
Hurst & Co, 1900 [1885]). Rider Haggard made this literary genre famous by situating the fearsome, noble Zulu
warrior at the centre of dramatic plots: A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Context (New York, Routledge, 1995), pp. 232 –57.
Julian Cobbing rejected the concept of the mfecane, which he called an alibi for white racists
professing to save South Africa from the Zulu ‘man-slaying war-machine’. Cobbing sourced
details of Shaka’s ‘carnage’ to the fictitious accounts of early nineteenth-century white writers
who concealed evidence of European mercenaries trafficking in guns and, possibly, slaves.16
Other scholars traced mfecane upheavals to African chiefs outside Zulu control competing for
territorial supremacy and Griqua frontiersmen kidnapping people and seizing livestock.17 In a
similar vein, John Wright’s scholarship disputed the monstrous impact of Shaka, arguing that
the Zulu king assassinated some rivals but respected most allies and even enemies who
migrated away.18 Wright revealed that the trope of the death-dealing warrior obscured complex
relationships that buoyed Shaka’s power. This political process was the subject of Carolyn
16 J. Cobbing, ‘The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolombo’, JAH, 29, 3 (November 1988),
pp. 487–519. Other critical mfecane studies: C. Hamilton (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates
in Southern African History (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1995).
17 E. Eldredge, ‘Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800–1830: The “Mfecane” Reconsidered’, JAH, 33, 1
(March 1992), pp. 1–35.
18 J. Wright, ‘The Dynamics of Power and Conflict in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu Region in the Late 18th and Early
19th Centuries: A Critical Reconstruction’ (PhD Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1989); J. Wright,
‘Political Mythology and the Making of Natal’s Mfecane’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 23, 2 (1989),
pp. 272–91. See also D. Wylie, Myths of Iron: Shaka in History (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Press, 2006).
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
37
Figure 3. Zulu young man with his allowable fighting stick, ca early 1900s. Source: PAR, A131, Carl Faye Papers,
Box 4,.A.T. Bryant, ‘Olden Times in Zululand and Natal’, Plate 27 (original handwritten manuscript with annotations
by Bryant and Natal Native Affairs official Carl Faye).
Hamilton’s research, which again challenged the notion that Shaka was a far-reaching terror.
She illustrated that the Zulu state depended on a hierarchy with the top Amantungwa élites
rewarded royal cattle obtained in raids on chiefdoms just beyond the kingdom’s periphery.19
The bottom layer consisted of the majority of subjects, many of them denied Shaka’s patronage
and disparaged as Amalala, ‘dishonourables’ with ‘dirty habits’.20 But unlike the sceptics of the
mfecane, Hamilton did not dismiss Shaka’s reputation for authoritarianism; she exposed his
harsh gender regime which imposed heavy burdens on girls and women. Since single-sex
19 Hamilton, ‘Ideology, Oral Traditions and the Struggle for Power’ (MA Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand,
1985), pp. 260 & 317; Wright and Hamilton, ‘Traditions and Transformations’, pp. 70–73. C. Hamilton, Terrific
Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University
Press, 1998), pp. 42–71.
20 Testimony of Madikane, 27 May 1905, James Stuart Archive, Volume 2, p. 55.
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38 Journal of Southern African Studies
regiments (amabutho) largely served the royal house as agricultural workers, Hamilton
reasoned, Shaka’s real authority hinged on the production of followers, with males tending
cattle and females tilling fields. The latter shouldered the most onerous tasks, growing the food
that fed the kingdom.21 Hamilton borrowed elements of a theory of women’s oppression
elaborated by Jeff Guy in his materialist study of ‘social formation’ in Southern Africa. He
posited that homestead patriarchs dominated Zulu society through their control of labour by
determining when daughters could marry and when wives could reproduce.22
By the 1990s, this notion of domesticated Zulu masculinity, coupled with critiques of
Shaka’s ‘empire-building’, seemed set to recast a notorious chapter of South Africa’s past. But
at this juncture such revisionist ideas were overshadowed by bloody turmoil threatening
negotiations to end apartheid. South African and international journalists – many of whom
were unaware of this historiographical turn – revivified the mortally wounded warrior
stereotype. They depicted the internecine rivalries of the 1990s as a horrific throwback. In the
media (re-)rendering, vengeful Zulus and their modern Shakan representatives, Mangosuthu
Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, were pitted against ‘age-old’ Xhosa foes aligned with the
African National Congress (ANC).23 Pretoria’s security forces either stoked the hostilities or
refused to intervene, especially when Inkatha ‘impis’24 in townships drilled for war with
‘traditional weapons’. Even the Weekly Mail, which avoided sensationalising civil conflict,
described the impi in cultural-biological terms. They were a mob of mindless marauders, the
newspaper reported in 1991, quoting an Inkatha man who boasted: ‘The Zulu Nation is born
out of Shaka’s spear. When you say “Go and fight”, it just happens’ (see Figure 4). Around this
time the headline ‘black-on-black violence’ came to stand for something atavistic that ‘just
happens’, a spontaneous effluent of Shaka’s volcanic birthright.25 Some scholars countered by
identifying another factor igniting martial Zuluness: the hidden hand of colonialism which (re)invented ethnic prejudice to blunt the forces unifying African resistance. One cited example
of this chauvinism was Inkatha’s version of Zulu pride.26 With research elsewhere on the
continent questioning the idea that men naturally repressed women,27 gender analyses of
South Africa were inflected by a liberation struggle that linked Zulu patriarchy to settler
‘divide-and-rule’ policies. Perceived through this lens, academic studies of Zulu masculinity
were considered naive flirtations with a reactionary conspiracy hatched between white Natal
élites and the house of Shaka. This collaboration in the 1920s had invigorated the Zulu
monarchy and its fledgling organ, Inkata kaZulu, to rally support for what scholars in the
1980s called backward-looking tribalism, a platform aimed at stemming the radical ANC’s
appeals to the working class.28
21 Hamilton, ‘Ideology’, pp. 422–23. Some enlisted young women gave auxiliary support to male regiments:
S. Ndlovu, ‘A Reassessment of Women’s Power in the Zulu Kingdom’, in B. Carton, J. Laband and J. Sithole
(eds), Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present (New York, Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 111 –21.
22 J. Guy, ‘Gender Oppression in Southern Africa’s Precapitalist Societies’, in C. Walker (ed.), Women and Gender
in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town, David Philip, 1990), pp. 33 –47. See also S. Hanretta, ‘Women,
Marginality and the Zulu State: Women’s Institutions and Power in the Early Nineteenth Century’, JAH, 39, 3
(November 1998), pp. 389 –415.
23 S. Taylor, Shaka’s Children: A History of the Zulu People (London, Harper Collins, 1994). Critiques of ‘Zulu
violence’ playing to stereotype: L. Segal, ‘The Human Face of Violence: Hostel Dwellers Speak’, JSAS, 18, 1
(March 1992), pp. 191–92 & 199–202.
24 Impi means war, but in the 1980s the term was a synonym for Zulu nationalists who killed opponents of Inkatha.
25 Weekly Mail, 30 August – 5 September 1991; Taylor, Shaka’s Children, pp. 356 –70.
26 G. Hamilton and G. Maré, An Appetite for Power: Buthelezi’s Inkatha and South Africa (Bloomington, Indiana
University Press, 1987).
27 R. Morrell and L. Ouzgane, ‘African Masculinities: An Introduction’, in L. Ouzgane and R. Morrell (eds),
African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (New York, Palgrave,
2005), pp. 5–9; H. Bradford, ‘Women, Gender, and Colonialism’, JAH, 37, 3 (November 1996), pp. 351– 70.
28 Marks, ‘Patriotism, Patriarchy and Purity’; Cope, ‘The Zulu Petit Bourgeoisie’.
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
39
Figure 4. Inkatha impi with ‘traditional weapons’ in Johannesburg-area township led by man performing ukugiya
before South African security forces, ca early 1990s. This photograph was taken by T.J. Lemon; it appears in
L. Meintjes, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham, NC, Duke University Press,
2003). The authors thank Louise Meintjes for permission to reproduce T.J. Lemon’s image.
This incisive top-down reading of invented tradition in Natal and Zululand obscured how
Zulu men moulded their identities from below, as recently demonstrated by the work of Paul
La Hausse de la Louvière.29 William Beinart, for his part, surveyed the conditions under which
African men resorted to violence and why their stereotypical martial societies reluctantly
turned to confrontation in defence of sovereignty.30 Beinart urged scholars to reassess the
dislocating processes of industrialisation that propelled black men to become more aggressive
as they were emasculated by racism, migrancy and urbanisation. Catherine Campbell
undertook a correlative study set in Zulu-speaking townships racked by apartheid repression
and civil strife. She chronicled the fraying relationships between rural-born fathers and their
sons who joined the United Democratic Front (UDF), an organisation associated with the
ANC. The older men embraced Inkatha, which repudiated ‘militant’ youths for advocating
constitutional equality and abandoning Buthelezi’s support of Zulu gerontocracy.31 Soon after
the 1994 democratic election, other studies of African masculinities concentrated on citybound black men: their life in compounds, gangs and politics.32 Gerhard Maré and Thembisa
29 P. La Hausse de la Louvière, Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity and History in the
Lives of Petros Lamula (c. 1881–1948) and Lymon Maling (1889–c. 1936) (Pietermaritzburg, University of
Natal Press, 2001), pp. 6– 7.
30 W. Beinart, ‘Political and Collective Violence in South African Historiography’, JSAS, 18, 3 (September 1992),
pp. 457 & 485.
31 C. Campbell, ‘Learning to Kill? Masculinity, the Family and Violence in Natal’, JSAS, 18, 3, (September 1992),
pp. 614 –28.
32 The body of literature is large. Some examples are: T. Dunbar Moodie and V. Ndatshe, Going For Gold: Men,
Mines and Migration (Berkley, University of California Press, 1994); C. Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of
Soweto, 1935–1976 (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2000); G. Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World: A History of
the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999 (Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2005).
40 Journal of Southern African Studies
Waetjen, for instance, examined Inkatha’s appeal to ‘blood brotherhood’ which enabled Zulu
men in townships to exert dignity in the face of labour exploitation.33 Taken together, this
diverse scholarship highlights gender relations in stages of urban transformation.34 Yet more
attention needs to focus on formative masculinities and their rural practices, especially sports
like stick fighting which taught Zulu boys to contain violence.35
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Stick Fighting: Languages of Sport, Questions of Analysis
Unlike their neighbouring Xhosa and Sotho counterparts, Zulu boys did not enter manhood
after a painful rite of teenage circumcision. Instead, they crossed another ‘ceremonial’
threshold over a longer period of time through cohort-based, rule-bound competitions like
stick fighting.36 The customary importance of stick fighting certainly appealed to Zulu kings
(ca 1810 –1879). They conscripted male youths who had honed in the pastures of childhood
the fencing skills, ukungcweka or ukubiya, needed for stick fighting and, later, national
service (see Figure 5). But it should be noted that many new recruits in amabutho entered the
army with little experience battling an opponent to death with a spear; this weapon was
forbidden in ukungcweka and ukubiya. Boys who fenced tended to use the umthsiza and
ibhoko, the striking stick and blocking stick, respectively. Moreover, their pre-military
sparring accentuated risk-averse simulations such as parrying blows, exercising ‘pure’
restraint and revering ‘fair’ play. To wit, enfolded in the verb ukungcweka was the noun
ngcwele, denoting something pious such as a truthful virtue commonly recognised by the
exclamation Ngqo! which rejoiced in pure or straightforward deeds. In more mundane terms
ukubiya meant to ‘ward off’.37 It is not surprising then that Zulu leaders swiftly intervened
after the ‘habit grew up’ among stick fighters ‘of sharpening one end of the Umtshiza’ and
flipping ‘round the sharpened end . . . [to] jab the opponent in the eye . . . King Cetywayo
passed a law prohibiting this practice, as a piece of cowardice and unfair fighting, under the
death penalty, or very heavy fine, according to the seriousness of the hurt inflicted, and
eventually the practice ceased’.38 Similar royal decrees had barred the assegai from stick
bouts. ‘This was a regulation observed in Tshaka’s as well as Dingana’s and Mpande’s
reigns’, according to Ndukwana in 1900, for ‘[i]t was thoroughly well-known . . . [if] one . . .
were to break his stick on his opponent, he would warn him that he had no stick but only
assegais left. He would ask him for one of his sticks with which to continue the fight; if no
33 T. Waetjen and G. Maré, “‘Men amongst Men”: Masculinity and Zulu Nationalism in the 1980s’, in R. Morrell
(ed.), Changing Men in Southern Africa (London, Zed Press, 2001), pp. 200–201 & 205; T. Waetjen, Workers
and Warriors: Masculinity and the Struggle for Nation in South Africa (Champaign, University of Illinois Press,
2004).
34 P. La Hausse de la Louvière, ‘The Message of the Warriors: The ICU, the Labouring Poor and the Making of a
Popular Political Culture in Durban, 1925– 1930’, in P. Bonner, I. Hofmeyr, D. James, and T. Lodge (eds),
Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in 19 th and 20 th Century South Africa (Johannesburg, Ravan
Press, 1989), 19 –58; T. Waetjen and G. Maré, ‘Warriors and Workers: Inkatha’s Politics of Masculinity in the
1980s’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 17, 2 (1999), pp. 197–216; T. Xaba, ‘Masculinity and its
Malcontents: The Confrontation between “Struggle Masculinity” and “Post-Struggle” Masculinity (1990–
1997)’, in Morrell (ed.), Changing Men, pp. 105 –24. Other studies exploring (rural–urban) African masculinities
outside KwaZulu-Natal: P. Delius, A Lion Amongst Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern
Transvaal (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 1997); A. Mager, ‘Youth Organisations and the Construction of
Masculine Identities in the Ciskei and Transkei, 1945– 1960’, JSAS, 24, 4 (December 1998), pp. 653–67.
35 Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men’, p. 620. Alegi’s Laduma! stands out as an exception.
36 Such social principles of combative male sports are discussed in Connell, Gender and Power, p. 85.
37 A.T. Bryant, A Zulu–English Dictionary (Pietermaritzburg, P. Davis & Sons, 1905), pp. 40 & 86; C. Roberts, The
Zulu-Kafir Language (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1909, 3rd edn), p. 154. See also C. Roberts,
The Zulu-Kafir Language Simplified for Beginners (London, Wesleyan Missionary Society, 1880). Ukubiya also
means to defend (biyela) ‘fenced’ entities such as homesteads.
38 R.C.A. Samuelson, Long, Long Ago (Durban, Knox, 1929), p. 373.
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
41
Figure 5. Mchunu brothers sparring (ukungcweka), Makhabeleni, KZN, 2006. Photo courtesy of James Hersov.
stick were given the man might use his assegai to ward off blows’ but that was all because
handling a spear precluded offensive moves.39
Therefore, we do not presuppose that the recreation of herd boys who transitioned into
warriors sharpened homicidal instincts in Zulu society.40 In fact we question this line of
reasoning. Stick fighting tested and preserved the body by reinforcing norms of inkuliso.
Moreover, integral rules of the sport underscored the vitality of kinship, not the destruction of
it.41 When stick fighters competed, they were ‘playing with others’,42 ukudlalisa izinduku, on a
sanctioned pitch that elevated champions and shamed losers. For example during the Zulu
kingdom, if a young soldier was taunted into sparring with a rival of another regiment but
chose to ‘remain in silent discomfort (nyatela), i.e., refrain from taking up the bet’, the quiet
one could be labelled a ‘coward . . . [and have] his meat dipped in cold water’. As punishments
39 Testimony of Ndukwana, 14 October 1900, James Stuart Archive, Volume 4, p. 294.
40 Most analyses of cadet training in the Zulu army assume that recruits already honed homicidal impulses at a
young age: D. Morris, Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and Its Fall in
the Zulu War of 1879 (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1965), pp. 32 –3; A. McBride, The Zulu War (Oxford,
Osprey, 1976), pp. 1, 5 & 12.
41 Recent studies of ‘African leisure’ explore collective notions of sport: E. Akyeampong and C. Ambler, ‘Leisure
in African History: An Introduction’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35, 1 (2002), pp. 1– 16;
L. Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945
(Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2001); C. Badenhorst and C. Mather, ‘Tribal Recreation and Recreating
Tribalism: Culture, Leisure and Social Control on South Africa’s Gold Mines, 1940–1950’, JSAS, 23, 3
(September 1997), pp. 473 –89.
42 Definitions of sport as collective ‘play or frolic with others’: C. Doke, D. Malcolm, J. Sikakana, and B. Vilakazi,
English-Zulu Dictionary, (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1958), p. 264; P. La Hausse de la
Louvière, ‘“The Cows of Nongoloza”: Youth, Crime and Amalaita Gangs in Durban, 1900–1936’, JSAS, 16, 1
(March 1990), pp. 86– 87.
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42 Journal of Southern African Studies
went, this sanction was hardly a total disgrace.43 Lasting humiliation, however, could dog
those frequently beaten in organised stick bouts; they could be derided as effeminate boys
(amagwala, a synonym for cowards) and hounded into ‘exile’ as labour migrants who
preferred urban anonymity to local shame.44 Simply put, stick fighting enhanced homosocial
bonds which, in turn, reinforced peer ranking that inevitably set some boys apart.
The sport was potentially hazardous, as well, to participants and others, when hostilities
surged beyond the sporting ground to threaten observers or the passerby. This danger explains
why over the past two centuries stick fighting occurred well away from homesteads in a
designated open space. Depending on the mood and moment, a casually arranged bout could
mushroom into an attention-grabbing tournament. Nowhere was this more likely than during
weddings or young women’s coming out ceremonies (umemulo)45 (see Figure 6). Exalting in
fertility, these rituals attracted courting adolescent boys and young men who hankered for a
stick fight on the fringe of festivities. They hoped not only to win a match before a mixed
gender crowd, but also yearned to create a public stage on which they could distinguish
themselves as proper ‘favourites [plural amasoka; singular isoka ] among the girls’.46 As
Mark Hunter notes, the meanings of isoka have changed historically in ways that illustrate the
compelling significance of the terms ‘proper favourite’ in both sporting and courting arenas.
In the early to middle twentieth century the pejorative adjective dirty, or amanyala, was
appended to isoka. The isoka lamanyala came to represent a disreputable young man who
lustily promised love to an excessive number of girlfriends, spawning rancour and ruin in the
process. Thereafter a sharp distinction divided the dirty isoka from the proper isoka. The
former evinced no self-control or concern for others, while the latter embodied disciplined
virility and deference to communal well-being.47
The association between a proper isoka and proper sportsman illuminates the importance
that female admiration held for stick fighters hoping to impress, with prowess and restraint,
their watching sweethearts.48 Here, the role of older girls and young women in stick fighting
should not be underestimated. To a certain extent, they legitimised the sport by actively
attending bouts and bestowing attention on their favourite contestants.49 Yet female agency
had its limits in martial play that motioned more ominous intentions, as when a stick fighter’s
desire to lash out extended to the adolescent girl who declined his amorous overtures.
43 Testimony of Mpatshana, 25 May 1912, James Stuart Archive, Volume 3, pp. 306–7.
44 C. Doke and B. Vilakazi, Zulu-English Dictionary (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1953), p. 281;
testimony of Ndabazezwe, 23 June 1921, James Stuart Archive, Volume 4, 184, 194. See also izingwadi, an insult
linked to the (singular hlonipha) word umakoti, meaning bride: Testimony of Mkando, 20 August 1902, James
Stuart Archive, Volume 3, 184–85. When a suitor courted, he could confront a male rival with the phrase,
uyingwadi (‘you are the reject’): Author interviews: F. Nzama, 15 March 1993; M. Cele, 24 December 1997,
Makhabeleni, Natal (KZN).
45 Author interviews: R. Nxumalo, 19 November 1992, 23 December 2002, Makhabeleni; S. Ntuli, 20 February
1993, Nkandla; KwaZulu (KZN); personal communication with D. Mthethwa, 6 April 2006, Washington, DC,
USA; personal communication with J. Clegg, 7 April 2011, Hanover, NH, USA. Metaphorical praise for the stick
as a symbol of lineage obligation and personal bravery has long been a part of umemulo ritual. See, for example,
umemulo prayers for female initiates, in T. Magwaza, ‘“So that I will be a Marriageable Girl”: Umemulo in
Contemporary Zulu Society’, in Carton, Laband and Sithole (eds), Zulu Identities, pp. 490–91.
46 Bryant, A Zulu–English Dictionary, p. 595.
47 M. Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg,
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010), pp. 51 & 220. By the age of AIDS, isoka lamanyala had become
synonymous with lethal illnesses linked to HIV.
48 Though rarely, Zulu girls could (stick) spar, particularly when they herded for a patriarch with no sons to tend his
livestock. During the Zulu kingdom, young women also learned martial skills in the few female amabutho with
combat roles. See Ndlovu, ‘A Reassessment’, pp. 112–13.
49 Our conceptual understanding of female legitimisation of ‘hegemonic’ masculinities, including martial
masculinities, is informed by recent empirically-grounded, theoretical gender research: K. Talbot and M. Quayle,
‘The Perils of Being a Nice Guy: Contextual Variation in Five Young Women’s Constructions of Acceptable
Hegemonic and Alternative Masculinities’, Men and Masculinities, 13, 1 (2010), pp. 1–24.
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
43
Figure 6. Stick fighters at umemulo, Makhabeleni, 1993. Source: Edgar-Carton Collection, Washington, DC. Photo
courtesy of Zev Greenfield.
Whatever the motivation and wherever the contest, stick fighters consistently learned to
give and take punishment in matches umpired either by a stick-fighting champion (ingqwele;
plural izingqwele), a headman of young men (induna yezinsizwa), or ‘war captain’ (igoso or
umphathi wezinsizwa). Most referees ensured that each competitor protected himself with
some kind of long blocking stick, ubhoko, and the umsila, a short stick slid through the back of
a cowhide shield (serving as a handle). While this repertoire signalled intent to do battle, the
purpose was not to slay an opponent. Once two fighters faced each other, they tapped sticks or
one another’s shield; sometimes they launched in with the umshiza, landing chopping blows
that could blind an eye, break fingers, or crack the skull. Permanent marks on elbows, ankles,
and the scalp were seen as badges of honour, especially the scar (ingozi) on the head, which was
named idiomatically, inkamb’ beyibuza, ‘wherever you go people ask, what’s that from?’50
The diverse evidence we consulted suggests that clashes were brief, lasting just minutes.
In the heat of the moment referees invariably commanded a combatant to pull back after
wielding a decisive blow, or if his opponent crumpled to the ground. Stick fighters knew the
50 Author interviews: R. Nxumalo, 19 November 1992; S. Ntuli, 20 February 1993; personal communication with
D. Mthethwa, 6 April 2006; Testimony of Mpatshana and Nsuze, 31 May 1912, James Stuart Archive, Volume 3,
pp. 325 –26.
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44 Journal of Southern African Studies
dangers, which made solid defence as essential as potent offence. Risking disapproval, some
competitors could pummel a fallen foe, despite the referee’s cries of ‘Maluju-wethu!’ and
shouts from the crowd of ‘Khumu!’, ‘Enough! ‘That’s it!’ But the former stick fighters we
interviewed were quick to insist their ‘fiercest anger’ (unolaka) was often delivered verbally,
according to linguistic conventions that alternated between the scripted and idiosyncratic,
subtle and profane. Right before a contest, opponents could convey their zeal by issuing
‘polite’ challenges (inselelo) that cloaked belligerence, such as ‘I won’t let so-and-so [calling
the so-and-so by his ancestral praise name] kick dust in my eyes’; or they could sing amahubo,
regimental ballads naming lineage patriarchs known for their valour. As further barbs were
traded, one stick fighter might leap into an ukugiya performance, combining energetic dancing
and loud praises that extolled the heroic (iqhawe) honour of a patriarch. Ukugiya (or ukugida)
routines could also climax in a stomp that evoked a bull’s fury, displaying just how rapidly the
pendulum could swing from gravitas to aggression.51
This pendulum was propelled by a range of gender forces that need to be questioned
further by scholars. Did stick fighters purposively develop skills that enabled them to
impose their will on others? Did stick fighting encourage (or drive) participants to express
their frustrations beyond the sporting ground, where they punished non-combatants? The
historian Anne Mager has engaged these issues in her investigation of youth socialisation in
twentieth-century Xhosa-speaking communities.52 Mager’s evidence documenting rape in
the 1940s illustrates how competitors’ ability or inability to dominate a rival led to an
increase in sexual assaults, particularly in the absence of sanctioning male elders who were
mobilised to support British military efforts in the Second World War. Yet in other African
societies where martial traditions survived colonial encroachment, as Suzette Heald argues
in her study of the Gisu in Uganda, manhood and morality played out differently. Becoming
a Gisu man required circumcision, a ritual operation that reminded adolescent initiates of
the painful trials they would face as adult men. Significantly, this rite of passage is
celebrated with stick-fighting bouts that reaffirmed what was appropriate or inappropriate
aggression. During these spectacles, young Gisu men were said to tame their ‘violent
power’ by proclaiming after combat, ‘[t]he good man is one who is his own master, and can
master himself well’.53 These contrasting scholarly perspectives have shaped our
understanding of how Zulu masculinities embodied social dimensions of stick fighting over
the last two centuries, beginning with the emergence of the Zulu kingdom and extending
beyond its destruction by imperial troops in 1879. By the late nineteenth century many
coming-of-age Zulu rituals had eroded but some persisted such as stick fighting. From the
post-1879 period into the early twentieth century, white rulers, bent on restricting martial
51 Author interviews: R. Nxumalo, 19 November 1992; S. Ntuli, 20 February 1993; personal communication with
D. Mthethwa, 6 April 2006. A stick fighter’s ukugiya sometimes evoked the force a young man displayed with his
bare hands when he chopped the hardest bone of a slaughtered cow, the jaw (elifuphi). J. Clegg, ‘The Social
Construction of Zulu Masculinity—Stick-fighting, the Giya and the Dance’ (Department of Social Anthropology,
University of the Witwatersrand, 2004); J. Clegg, ‘“Ukubuyisa Isidumbu—Bringing Back the Body”: An
Examination into the Ideology of Vengeance in the Msinga and Mpofana Rural Locations, 1882–1944’, in
P. Bonner (ed.), Working Papers in Southern African Studies, Volume 2 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1981),
pp. 165 –81; J. Clegg, ‘Towards an Understanding of African Dance: The Zulu Isishameni Style’, in A. Tracey
(ed.), Papers Presented at the Second Symposium on Ethnomusicology (Rhodes University, 1982), p. 8; Regina
versus Mamfona and Others, 27 October 1897, 1177/97, Stanger Minute Papers, 1/5/1/4, 1/SGR, Durban
Archives Repository (DAR). The scholarship on praising is now quite well developed. A milestone work of
analysis is E. Gunner and M. Gwala, Musho! Zulu Popular Praises (Lansing, Michigan State University Press,
1991).
52 Mager, ‘Youth Organisations’; Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men’. See also M. Messner and D. Sabo (eds), Sport, Men
and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 1990).
53 S. Heald, Manhood and Morality: Sex, Violence and Ritual in Gisu Society (New York, Routledge, 1999), p. 4.
See also A. Jackson, ‘War, Violence and Peace in Africa’, JSAS, 34, 4 (December 2008), p. 974.
Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
45
socialisation, expanded opportunities for rural-born wage-earners to continue their stick
fighting culture far from home in urban worlds of labour migrancy that melded modernity
and tradition.
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‘A Small Boy Carries His Stick’ and the ‘National Practice of Eating Up’:
Change and Continuity in Stick Fighting
Historical examinations of pre-colonial and early colonial African practices face the
challenge of finding evidence. To expand the pool of available primary sources, we
interviewed ‘retired’ stick fighters and consulted archived oral testimonies that discuss this
martial art. Such a mix of sources generated problems of verification, with exaggerated
recollections of bygone competitions only one of many shortcomings. The brief references to
stick fighting in nineteenth-century European accounts of the Zulu kingdom introduce other
methodological concerns, particularly the tone and omissions of these ethnocentric observers.
Of all relevant and reliable data, archaeological findings offered the most useful details with
which to construct a sketch over the longue durée, illuminating the life of stick fighters in
homesteads.54 Since at least the sixteenth century, these homesteads (imizi) were the focal
point of production, with one patriarch regulating a domestic hierarchy that subordinated
women to men, and juniors to seniors. Raising livestock (mainly goats and cows) was largely
the domain of males, while crop cultivation was mostly the responsibility of females. Boys
watched over herds, passing the time by sparring with sticks. Thus, rearing cattle afforded the
space for male youths to master the customary norms of inkuliso and inhlonipho that
underpinned ukukhonza, loyalty to political authority.55
In the Zulu kingdom and surrounding regions stick fighting was an everyday occurrence
that did not carry the prestige of initiation. At the turn of the nineteenth century, martial
activities amongst older boys took on greater significance, as male circumcision was phased
out by chiefs like Shaka who enrolled cadets and their local commanders, izingqwele
(respected young men with stick-fighting expertise), in the amabutho system.56 Regiments
trained in the deployment of lethal weapons raided cattle of Zulu rivals and scattered the
inhabitants of chiefdoms that refused to give loyalty, ukukhonza, and tribute to Shaka.57 By
the mid-nineteenth century, when Mpande kaSenzangakhona and Cetshwayo kaMpande
reigned, the amabutho had to curtail campaigns because Zulu territory was hemmed in by
British colonial Natal to the south, the Boer Republic to the west, and the Swazi kingdom to
the north. This was a time of relative peace, with bodies of soldiers summoned to labour for the
king a few times a year. Oral history testimony indicates that while they brought sundry
weapons from their homestead, when they arrived at royal barracks they adopted a defensive
posture by holding onto their sticks and laying down their spears (in conveniently located piles
54 G. Whitelaw, ‘A Brief Archaeology of Precolonial Farming in KwaZulu-Natal’, in Carton, Laband and Sithole
(eds), Zulu Identities, pp. 47 –61; J. Guy, ‘Analysing Pre-capitalist Societies in Southern Africa’, JSAS, 14, 1
(October 1987), pp. 18 –37.
55 Such codes of discipline extended beyond Zululand to Lesotho and the eastern Cape: J. Guy and M. Thabane,
‘The Ma-Rashea: A Participant’s Perspective’, in B. Bozzoli (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict: South African
Perspectives (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987), p. 455; P. Mayer and I. Mayer, ‘Self-Organization of the Red
Xhosa’, in P. Mayer (ed.), Socialization: The Approach from Social Anthropology (London, Tavistock, 1970),
pp. 159 –74; Moodie and Ndatshe, Going For Gold, pp. 180–210.
56 Wright and Hamilton, ‘Traditions and Transformations’; D. Hedges, ‘Trade and Politics in Southern
Mozambique and Zululand, c. 1750–1830’ (PhD Thesis, University of London, 1978), pp. 208–14.
57 After a decade or more of periodic service, veteran members of amabutho were demobilised on the king’s order
and allowed to wed with bridewealth cattle supplied from royal herds. This ilobolo gift established a powerful
link between stick fighting, military service, and patriarchal standing: Alegi, Laduma!, pp. 9 – 10;
P. Colenbrander, ‘The Zulu Kingdom, 1828–79’, in Duminy and Guest (eds), Natal and Zululand, pp. 96 –109.
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46 Journal of Southern African Studies
that afforded fast retrieval if called to battle).58 Young Zulu men also maintained their military
preparedness in national ceremonies that exemplified metaphorical elements of stick fighting.
For example, during the annual umkhosi, ‘first fruits’ festival recognising the sanctity of the
Zulu lineage, cadets participated in the umzimba wenkunzi (bull’s body) celebration. An oral
historian named Mshanyankomo, whose father was Mpande’s court poet, recalled ‘umkosi
ceremonies in the Zulu country’ that involved the king dispatching older boys to capture a
‘fighting bull, pitch black in colour [inkunzemnyama ]’. Unarmed, they dragged the beast to a
royal enclosure where they dismembered and roasted it. Hours later they ate their nemesis,
feasting on more than its meat.59 With the king looking on, they consumed the bull’s chest, the
body cavity in which the stick fighter’s essence was thought to be lodged.60
Perhaps to release the energies ingested during the inkunzemnyama, cadets were also
encouraged to spring into raucous ‘war dancing’, ukugiya. Ukugiya could accompany another
form of dance competition, ngoma, in which regimental teams timed their gestures to mimic
stick fighting. While these routines were dramatic, they were also ephemeral. Songs like
(amabutho) ballads known as amahubo were also performed to dramatise morality tales of
peer rivalries gone awry.61 One ballad lamented how two princes (and stick fighters),
Cetshwayo and Mbuyazi, collided over their father Mpande’s mantle and incited civil war in
1856.62 In the early twentieth century a ‘Country Zulu’ band named Inkumba Emfece,
popular with stick-fighting migrants in Durban, incorporated the amahubo genre. The band’s
songs such as ‘Sokushaya Isangquma’ augured heaven-sent destruction if stick fighters, eager
to win at any cost, ignited deadly factional strife. One set of lyrics warned: ‘Imikhombe
iyenana. Sokushaka isangquma. Lezonduku zonanana.’ (A bad turn deserves another. You
will be struck by hailstones. These sticks of yours will meet ours stroke for stroke).63
The ability of the Zulu state to foster unity through martial ballads and ritual theatre like
inkunzemnyama was continually misconstrued by imperial authorities in South Africa and
London. By the 1870s British officials were increasingly demonising the performance cultures
of amabutho as the restive machinations of a feral ‘man-slaying war machine’. Some of these
distant bureaucrats conspired to destroy Cetshwayo’s sovereignty over a subsistence-oriented
kingdom and weaken his regiments in order to swell the movement of able-bodied workers to
the Kimberley diamond fields. White settlers in Natal, for their part, vented fears that the Zulu
58 Several ‘traumatic’ incidents involving deadly clashes between amabutho reinforced the need to maintain this
defensive posture, with weapon-handling prohibitions that incorporated stick-fighting regulations. One of these
traumatic incidents is detailed in: Testimony of Baleni, 14 May 1912, James Stuart Archive, Volume 1,
pp. 31 –32. See also Testimony of Mtshayankomo, 20 January 1922, James Stuart Archive, Volume 4, p. 133.
59 Testimony of Mtshanyankomo, 11 January 1922, James Stuart Archive, Volume 4, p. 115; J. Stuart, uHlangakula
(London, Longmans, Green, 1924), pp. 105–19.
60 In rural Zulu life this criterion of bull-like strength is as well-recognised today as it was a century ago. The lithe
contender could also inflict swift blows, a skill useful during the seizure of inkunzemnyama. Author interviews
with R. Nxumalo, 19 November 1992; 23 December 2002; M. Cele, 24 December 1997; S. Ntuli, 20 February
1993; personal communication, author with J. Clegg, 6 January 2006, Makhabeleni; D. Mck. Malcolm,
Broadcasts/ Talks on the Bantu, 292 (8), c. 1940s, Daniel Mck. Malcolm Papers, Killie Campbell Library,
Durban. In the 1930s and 1940s, Malcolm visited rural Zulu communities as Natal Chief Inspector of Native
Education. For a study of the symbolism of the male sporting body in South Africa with reference to Zulu
warriors see: D. Booth and J. Nauright, ‘Sport, Embodiment and Race in South Africa’, in J. Nauright, A. Cobley
and D. Wiggins (eds), Beyond Boundaries: Race and Ethnicity in Sport (Little Rock, AK, University of Arkansas
Press, forthcoming).
61 Testimony of Mtshanyankomo, 11 January 1922, James Stuart Archive, Volume 4, p. 115; Stuart, uHlangakula.
For scholarship on ngoma, see V. Erlmann, ‘“Horses in the Race Course”: The Domestication of Ingoma Dancing
in South Africa, 1929–39’, Popular Music, 8, 3 (October 1989), pp. 259 –73.
62 Testimony of Maxibana, 31 December 1913, James Stuart Archive, Volume 2, pp. 241–42; Colenbrander, ‘The
Zulu Kingdom’, p. 104; author interview with M. Dube, 17 September. 1992, Thukela River Mouth, Natal
(KZN).
63 H. Tracey, Lalela Zulu: 100 Zulu Lyrics (Johannesburg, African Music Society, 1948), pp. 19, 94 & 114–15;
Testimony of Mangati, 15 December 1920, James Stuart Archive, Volume 2, pp. 215–21.
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
47
army was destined to eradicate them.64 In 1878 the British High Commissioner for South Africa
Bartle Frere promised to deal with the ‘savage threat’. He coined the phrase ‘man-slaying warmachine’ to characterise his enemy, believing he described the desire of Zulu manhood,
nurtured since its stick-toting childhood to value the ‘national practice of “eating up” . . . i.e.,
slaughtering’, to kill or be killed.65 In January 1879 British forces invaded Zululand, but early in
the campaign suffered a stunning setback at Isandlwana. By mid-year, however, they had
overrun the kingdom, deposing Cetshwayo and disbanding the amabutho system.66
During the next two decades, as British officials extended wider control over their newly
conquered territory, the Natal colony to the south appropriated more African land for
European commercial farmers.67 Yet, despite these incursions, crop production and livestock
husbandry remained central to the lives of most Africans.68 Believing such agricultural
activities offered too much autonomy, white authorities tried to limit traditional sporting
behaviour by compelling homestead patriarchs to send adolescent sons to work on public
projects such as building roads. New laws, meanwhile, placed restrictions on young men’s
martial recreation.69 By 1900, the carrying of sticks was more closely monitored, with only
one permitted to be held in public. Furthermore, policemen were conducting more
surveillance of older boys who attended festivities attired as both reveller and stick fighter.
(See, Figure 3, for example)70 Magistrates also halted wedding dances like imijadu, around
which groups of boys gathered to giya on ground set aside for stick fighting.71 Yet given the
growing colonial anxiety, Natal government officials never banned stick fighting as such –
perhaps recognising, despite all reservations, that the martial art remained an important
medium through which boys developed the grammar of honourable restraint.
Indeed, the rhetoric of honourable restraint animated the founders of the ANC in 1912.
The political organisation initially accommodated non-violent objectives expressed by an
emerging African middle class and traditional leaderships, mainly chiefs. Particularly
amongst traditionalists, stick fighting held considerable appeal. For example, Pixley Seme
(1881 – 1951) tapped into idioms of stick fighting to inspire, as the one-time ANC president,
an anti-colonial vanguard during an era of few mass confrontational campaigns against white
rule.72 Seme alluded to the fortitude of Zulu herd boys as compared to children enfeebled by
64 J. Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom (London, Longmans, 1979), pp. 41–50; R. Cope, Ploughshares of
War: The Origins of the Anglo–Zulu War of 1879 (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1999), pp. 236–41.
65 H. Bartle Frere, ‘On the Laws Affecting the Relations Between Civilized and Savage Life, as Bearing on the
Dealings of Colonists with Aborigines’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 11
(1882), p. 329 & 332–37; Cope, Ploughshares of War, pp. 236–41.
66 J. Laband, Kingdom in Crisis: The Zulu Response to the British Invasion of 1879 (Pietermaritzburg, University of
Natal Press, 1992), pp. 81 –6; Guy, Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, pp. 54–61.
67 J. Lambert, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press,
1995), pp. 71–85, 90–97 & 123.
68 E. Brookes and N. Hurwitz, Natal Regional Survey: The Native Reserves of Natal, Volume 7 (Cape Town,
Oxford University Press, 1957); A. MacKinnon, ‘The Persistence of the Cattle Economy in Zululand, South
Africa, c. 1900–50’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 33, 1 (1999), pp. 98 –136; C. Simkins, ‘Agricultural
Production in the African Reserves of South Africa, 1918–1969’, JSAS, 7, 2 (April 1981), pp. 256 –83.
69 Testimony of Sisekelo, 13 April 1902, James Stuart Archive, Volume 5, p. 364; H. Bradford, A Taste of Freedom:
The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924–1930 (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 46–48.
70 Circular, Under Secretary for Native Affairs, 1907, SNA 738/1907, I183/1907, Impendhle (Polela) Min. Papers,
3/1/3, 1/IPD, PAR; Telegram, Civil Commissioner, Eshowe, to Colonial Secretary, 1 April 1898, 705/1898,
1/1/280, 1/SNA, PAR; Minute Magistrate Umsinga, to Under Secretary for Native Affairs, 29 Dec. 1896,
117/1897, Weenen Minute Papers, 3/2/2, 1/WEN, PAR; Testimony of Maziyana, 25 April 1905, James Stuart
Archive, Volume 2, p. 292.
71 Annual Report Magistrate Kranskop, 31 December 1898, KK1A/1899, Minute Papers Kranskop, 3/1/2, 1/KRK,
PAR; Mvinjwa and 17 others versus Rex, 15 July 1903, 1/1/302; Court Statements, Official Witness Nyandeni
Mvalase and Headman Lundayi, Umsinga, 28 November 1905, 3213/1905, 1/1/330; 1/SNA, PAR; Testimony of
Mkando, 14 July 1905, James Stuart Archive, Volume 3, pp. 153 & 159 –60.
72 Testimony of Seme, 14 May 1925, James Stuart Archive, Volume 5, p. 273; R. Rive and T. Couzens, Seme: The
Founder of the ANC (Johannesburg, Skotaville, 1991), pp. 75–81
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48 Journal of Southern African Studies
Figure 7 ‘North Zululand’ ngoma dancers, Johannesburg area, ca 1930s. Source: Edgar-Carton Collection, Derwin
World Tour Album. American ‘world-tour’ travellers, Mr. and Mrs. Derwin, visited the Transvaal and Natal; they
were the parents of California big-band leader, Hal Derwin.
bourgeois settlers: ‘He [the Zulu boy] does not need to be taken visiting all the time, like the
child of a white person, which is always having balls and carts bought for it’.73 Europeans
coddled their offspring, Seme all but scoffed, while the sons of Zululand traversed pastures
forging an esprit de corps with ‘their own izinduna, the izingqwele, who gave them orders,
like soldiers, and who were obeyed by all the other boys’. Herd boys learned to become men
without the toy soldiers and fake guns; they relied on one another to release their aggression
in sanctioned spaces, where they would be less likely to incite greater violence. ‘If boys
fought with one another, if they disputed over the grazing-grounds of the cattle’, Seme
recalled, ‘these matters were not interfered with by older people. For boys did not fight at
their homes; they fought out in the countryside (endhle), where they were in charge’.74 Here
stick fighting provided Seme with a coolly reserved yet fiercely independent approach to
confronting the emasculating forces of segregation. To this end, his political strategy drew on
the training boys underwent as stick fighters, who when provoked learned to control their
reactions in order to live, compete, and contribute another day.
Seme’s romantic ode to stick fighting barely addressed the anxiety experienced by Africans
moving between soil and pavement. By the early and middle twentieth century, fewer and fewer
Zulu-speaking males were living year-round in their designated reserves.75 Worsening
landlessness and poverty pushed them into occupations as servant and stevedore in Durban, and
menial positions in Johannesburg’s factories and mines. In wage labour they were infantilised
73 Testimony of Seme, 18 May 1925, James Stuart Archive, Volume 5, pp. 275 –76.
74 Ibid., pp. 271–72.
75 P. Maylam, ‘The Changing Political Economy of the Region’, in R. Morrell (ed.), Political Economy and
Identities in KwaZulu-Natal (Durban, Indicator Press, 1996), pp. 98–101. The typical ‘provider’ was a phantom
in the reserves because he was in town job-seeking or working: M. Hunter, ‘Fathers without Amandla: Zuluspeaking Men and Fatherhood’, in L. Richter and R. Morrell (eds), Baba: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa
(Pretoria, HSRC Press, 2006), pp. 99 –107.
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
49
by paternalistic employers who spoke of ‘my boys’, conveying the emasculating form of
proprietary fondness.76 Alarmed by the influx of migrant workers, segregationist authorities, in
turn, enforced draconian measures such as stricter pass laws to ‘protect’ whites-only residential
areas from ‘detribalised natives’.77 Yet in leaving the homestead, young Zulu men were not
abandoning their ideals of manhood. They brought stick fighting to cities, adapting its
manoeuvres to pursuits like ngoma team dancing in and around their labour compounds.78
Ngoma attracted a range of youth groups such as amalaita ‘gangs’ which revelled in stickfighting culture, drilled with their izingqwele and took names like Nkunzemnyama, the black
bull.79 On weekends, amalaita members and ngoma enthusiasts gathered at municipal ‘Native
Grounds’ dressed in a mix of combat regalia and town haberdashery, brandishing sticks on cue
from their ‘war captain’ (igoso). In performances the ngoma teams occasionally choreographed
movements to the rhythms of amahubo and syncopated lyrics of herd boys’ songs.80 More
dramatic foot work could also imitate the ukugiya prelude to a stick fight81 (see Figure 7).
By the 1920s and 1930s, ngoma dancing had become popular entertainment for Zulu-speaking
Africans in Durban (and Johannesburg). Rather than bar ngoma from the city, Durban politicians,
employers, and compound managers tried to ‘domesticate’ the recreational form, much as rural
Natal magistrates had regulated stick use in the late nineteenth century.82 In the 1930s and 1940s
high-profile championships were arranged for settler crowds in colonial venues such as Durban’s
Kingsmead cricket ground. At these spectacles, commercial sponsors distributed programmes
advertising wholesome ‘national’ entertainment and the ‘full gala kit’ of ‘Zulu troops’. And while
a table of judges could feature prominent provincial and municipal officials, Zulu élites such as
Charles Mpanza (Secretary of the Zulu Society, an organisation of intellectual cultural
nationalists) were also included in the panel. They met with ngoma ‘captains’ to establish how the
jury would evaluate the ‘intricate’ criteria reflecting ‘coordination of movements’ familiar to stick
fighters’ ideals of contained masculinity, from ‘Deportment . . . [and] Poise . . . [to] Leadership’.83
A remarkable, if not unexpected, parallel development occurred in rural areas profoundly
affected by labour migrancy. As in the city, stick fighters in the countryside faced growing
colonial encroachment, which compelled them to modify their proving ground of manhood
and involve senior men in a young peer-based sport. These traditional elders helped to
reframe rules of engagement that aimed ultimately to safeguard communal values. Around
76 Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men’, p. 616.
77 G. Vahed, ‘Control of African Leisure Time in Durban in the 1930s’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 18
(1998), pp. 67 –123.
78 V. Erlmann, ‘Horses in the Race Course’; La Hausse de la Louvière, ‘“The Cows of Nongoloza”’, pp. 79– 111;
T. Couzens, ‘Moralizing Leisure Time: The Transatlantic Connection and Black Johannesburg, 1918–1936’, in
S. Marks and R. Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (London, Longmans, 1982),
pp. 314 –37.
79 La Hausse de la Louvière, ‘“The Cows of Nongoloza”’, pp. 88, 89–91 & 98. Needless to say, ngoma alarmed
segregationists because it was seen as a practice of (amalaita) gangs that robbed whites: Erlmann, ‘Horses in the
Race Course’, pp. 265 & 267.
80 See the song ‘Esakithi isikhonkwane/ Sigudle umfula/ batshele, muntu omkhulu/Sigudle umfula’: Tracey, Lalela
Zulu, pp. 12 & 92. See also L. Meintjes, ‘Shoot the Sergeant, Shatter the Mountain: The Production of Zulu
Masculinity in Zulu Ngoma Song and Dance in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 13, 2
(November 2004), p. 187.
81 Ngoma spinoffs with stick-fighting dimensions (such as the isishameni dance, for example) had links to martial
competition: Clegg, ‘Towards an Understanding of African Dance’, pp. 8–14; personal communication with
J. Clegg, 7 April 2011. Ngoma contests troubled Native Affairs officials and ‘enlightened Bantu’ (that is to say
African Christians) critical of displaying too much ‘raw tribalism’: Erlmann, ‘Horses in the Race Course’, p. 268;
Third Annual Natal Native Dancing Championships (Durban, A. Fishwick & Co., 1941). Ngoma could stir
challenges to segregationist order. For example, at the end of one dance in the 1930s some competitors and black
onlookers marched into a whites-only commercial zone of Durban and clashed with police: Correspondence,
Chief Constable to Town Clerk, Durban, 11 October 1934, Durban Town Clerk, File 6, 467, DAR.
82 Umteteli wa Bantu, 2 March 1935; Erlmann, ‘Horses in the Race Course’, pp. 267–68.
83 Third Annual Natal Native Dancing Championships.
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50 Journal of Southern African Studies
the turn of the twentieth century, more and more young men in crowded reserves clashed over
scarce pasture. The barren territory of Msinga district was one epicentre of conflict. There,
herd boys saw the prospect of supporting (bridewealth) cattle – and their hope of gaining in
patriarchal standing as married men – decline as ineluctably as the pasture around them. This
eroding existence, Jonathan Clegg writes, amplified the stakes between stick fighters who
envisaged victory in sport as one of the last ways to achieve recognition before facing the
grim uncertainties of manhood. The consequences of taking a beating heightened too;
defeated young men could feel acutely humiliated and, instead of waiting to compete again in
a refereed contest, they might muster cohorts and assault the winner’s homestead. Such
incidents ignited revenge attacks (ukuphindisela), which magistrates glibly called ‘faction
fights’. The arsenals deployed in these reprisals ranged from sticks and shields to bevelled
clubs (the iwisa or knobkerrie) and spears. Msinga’s prominent homestead heads responded
to this violence by arranging inter-district stick fights (umgangela) at a designated spot and
time, thus affording a venue for young male rivals to release their volatile frustrations in
competition.84
Today, similar contests are holiday affairs for rural-born Zulu men who work in the city.
Around Easter and Christmas they leave Durban and Johannesburg for family homesteads in
the chiefdoms of KwaZulu-Natal. In the midst of week-long beer drinks, stick fighting is a
main event, as it has been for decades in Makhabeleni, a remote district in the Thukela River
valley. There, returning migrants mix with Makhabeleni’s school boarders residing in
townships, where stick fighting is not standard recreation. Having grown up enjoying
ukungcweka, these students ache to compete again and coach some of their city-born
classmates, the ‘inexperienced location boys’ as they are dubbed in Makhabeleni, who visit
the former homelands during school vacations on a ‘quest to rediscover tradition’ through
stick fighting. Although these urban visitors might know just a bare sketch of the ethos of
stick fighting, they are nonetheless quite familiar with the sport’s codes of heroic and
householder honour, as Crispin Hemson’s research makes clear. In his study of young Zulu
men employed by the Durban municipality to save swimmers on city beaches in the 1990s,
Hemson observed how these lifeguards learned to endure the pummelling sea by drawing
inspiration from ‘protective’ discourses of vigilant restraint and self-mastery (ukubekezela, to
be patient and forbearing, and ukuzithemba, to trust oneself).85 In stark contrast to the
‘inexperienced location boys’, a few ruthless amashinga might also arrive in Makhabeleni
with the homecoming crowd. Amashinga are itinerant stick fighters notorious for deviating
from virtues of honourable masculinity by pulverising every foe, even if he is lying face down
and unconscious in the dirt. It is no exaggeration to say they are widely known for the pain
and havoc they spawn, and for their mercenary adventures in the world of martial arts. Indeed,
their one saving grace in Makhabeleni appears to be the speed with which they depart rural
districts for urban destinations such as the amashinga-only tournaments in hostels of
Johannesburg, where gamblers bet on the outcome, standing champions win cash prizes, and
some losers might die in the round.86
84 Clegg, ‘Ukubuyisa Isidumbu’, pp. 168–69 & 189; B. Carton, ‘Locusts Fall from the Sky: Manhood and Migrancy
in KwaZulu’, in Morrell (ed.), Changing Men, pp. 136–38; A. Vilakazi, Zulu Transformations (Pietermaritzburg,
University of Natal Press, 1965), pp. 80–85. ‘Factional’ conflicts over resources: Minute Secretary for Native
Affairs to Magistrate Kranskop, 29 January 1902; Statement Zikizwayo, Umvoti, 24 July 1902, 299/2902,
1/1/295, 1/SNA, PAR.
85 The lifeguards’ ability to use their bodies in protective and affirming ways enabled them to earn the respect and wages
of a male provider; this accomplishment connected them, as well, to an earlier history of masculine (recreational)
socialisation in which mastering the rigours of stick fighting was a necessary part of becoming a patriarch: C. Hemson,
‘Ukubekezela or Ukuzithemba: African Life Savers In Durban’, in Morrell (ed.), Changing Men, pp. 57–73.
86 Author interviews with F. Nzama, 15 March 1993, M. Cele, 24 December 1997, and S. Ntuli, 20 February 1993;
Carton, ‘Locusts Fall from the Sky’. A corroborating perspective of amashinga: M-H. Coetzee, ‘Zulu Stick Fighting:
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Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
51
The ukuphindisela and amashinga dimensions of stick fighting reveal the sport’s potential
for explosive violence, a subject requiring further research. In African communities
neighbouring Natal such as Transkei chiefdoms, Anne Mager has found that both winners and
losers of stick fights sometimes went on to assault more vulnerable people. She documents
mounting cases of rape in criminal courts that ‘curb[ed] the excesses of masculine
aggression’ at a time when apartheid oppression increasingly made Xhosa young men ‘well
aware of the difficulties they faced in attaining formal manhood through a homestead, land
and cattle’. In tracing how male youths displayed ‘excessively aggressive behaviour towards
girls’, Mager suggests that their preferred martial art led to the ‘extract[ion of] feminine
obedience literally through the wielding of sticks’.87 The most relevant colonial documents
and court dockets (from Thukela Valley magisterial divisions) do not reveal a similar pattern
between the 1880s and 1920s, but we establish no firm conclusion from this paucity of
records. We know from interviewing former stick fighters that ‘bad behaviour’ was not
uncommon; but we did not glean more about such transgressions, even after pressing for
elaboration.88 It is tempting to assume that boys and young men, impassioned by contact,
would likely expand their array of targets to the opposite sex. But, as Sarah Hautzinger
argues, that would be to take an instrumentalist view of male violence. Men are not
genetically programmed to violate women; nor, for that matter, do Zulu boys emerge from the
womb as ‘man-slaying war-machines’. A more apt understanding could posit that men
behave violently because, as Hautzinger contends, certain contingencies and dynamics cut
them off from models of ‘respectable’ (contained) masculinity.89
Conclusion
In KwaZulu-Natal, stick fighting is popular because it represents a life-affirming practice for
generations of rural-born boys. They have long recognised the communal value of testing
their mettle in a refereed arena that remained a refuge of recreation in an unremitting storm of
change. Indeed, stick fighting enabled competitors at a nascent stage of their masculine
formation to pursue the heroic feats of a martial art without abandoning, in the words of Iliffe,
the priorities of householder ‘honour’ that sustained kinship. These priorities were regulated
by senior authority; they upheld domestic hierarchies by emphasising that displays of
idiosyncratic rhetoric and manly vigour were ancillary to idioms of communal respect and
patriarchal gravitas. From at least the battle of Isandlwana onwards, however, colonialists
presented a different perspective of stick fighting. They essentialised the sport as ‘warrior’
savagery, too ubiquitous to stamp out but not invulnerable to legal restrictions. Arguably,
proponents of white supremacy who, among other things, channelled the theatrical elements
of stick fighting into public entertainment like ngoma dance, did more than most to project,
deep into the twentieth century, an image of weapon-wielding Zulu men as relentless
purveyors of aggression and chaos.
Footnote 86 continued
A Socio-Historical Overview’, InYo: Journal of Alternative Perspectives on the Martial Arts and Sciences
(September 2002), available at http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_Coetzee_0902.htm, retrieved on 2 September 2011.
87 Mager, ‘Youth Organisations’, pp. 663 & 666.
88 In encouraging future enquiries we point to sources that offer leads, for example, ‘indecent assault’ and
‘seduction’ cases which magistrates attributed to weakening homestead patriarchy and ‘savage’ young men
whose libidinous bloodlust had to be monitored at all times: Administrator of Native Law Criminal Record Book,
1898– 1903, Mahlabathini Magistrate, 1/2/1/1, PAR; Report Secretary for Native Affairs, August 1900, 22,
1430/1900, 1/1/290; Statement of Ziboni, 25 October 1905, p. 5, 985/1905, 1/1/328; 1/SNA, PAR.
89 S. Hautzinger, ‘Researching Men’s Violence: Personal Reflections on Ethnographic Data’, Men and
Masculinities, 6, 1 (July 2003), pp. 93–106.
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52 Journal of Southern African Studies
Yet stick fighting was and is predicated on degrees of belligerence. Even more so, the
sport embodied past military exploits, particularly those of the amabutho. It also could be
unpredictable, when rules of engagement failed to thwart eruptive energies that placed
vulnerable people at risk before and after a bout. Yet these factors should not lead to the
conclusion that the formative experiences of stick fighting drove Zulu men into
bloodletting, for example, during the civil conflict that nearly derailed South Africa’s first
democratic election. On the contrary, this martial art expressed the grammar of honourable
restraint, the very language that the ANC adopted in strategies of non-violent protest to
white rule. Stick fighting also cemented bonds between men because it valourised robust
masculinity. In this regard the martial art contributed to homosocial relationships that not
only shaped male hierarchies, but also attracted different audiences, including adolescent
girls and unmarried women, who sought to participate in something more lasting than
ephemeral sport, namely the creation of family itself. In fact the spectacle of stick fighting
provided an exciting arena in which heterosexual lovers might meet and ‘proper (male)
favourites’ might construct an isoka manhood that offered prowess, restraint and, above all,
the promise of providing. Whether stick fighting is understood in political terms, gender
relationships or a combination of these and other power dimensions, we should challenge
the assumption that it invariably stoked aggressive masculinity and violent criminality in
South Africa.
Finally, the future of stick fighting does not seem to be in doubt, but its purposes may
very well be. To wit, the sport remains an expression of defending the body and connecting
personally and collectively with forces of kinship. But remarkable changes appear to be
afoot. While national trends in democratic South Africa still determine the geography of
stick fighting, hemispheric currents may be directing where and how it will be practiced in
years to come. If new developments in stick fighting offer any indication, this martial
art is beginning to move from community to commodity. With high unemployment (near
40 per cent countrywide and endemic now for a decade), stick fighting may no longer be
preparing rural young men for the rigours of wage-supported patriarchy. One might ask,
then, with jobs vanishing from industrial and manufacturing sectors what economic
processes are likely to transform stick fighting? Such a question might focus on the
opportunities embraced by post-apartheid élites as they hustle to lure overseas investors.
The fastest growing segment of South Africa’s neo-liberal economy is the hospitality
industry; it receives significant injections of foreign capital and packages the country’s
top ‘brands’, among them wildlife safaris and heritage tourism. Besides game parks, one of
the prominent destinations is the ‘tribal’ resort, offering visitors from across the world a
chance to participate in ethnographic dramas of the ‘real Africa’. For example, a few years
back at Simunye Zulu Lodge near Melmoth in KwaZulu-Natal daily entertainment included
stick fights. After watching a simulated bout, guests are invited to try combat with spongepadded umshiza and ubhoko under the command of a Zulu-speaking lodge employee
playing igoso, the ‘war captain’. In Simunye (once an appendage of Protea Hotel’s great
attraction, Shakaland) a sport enjoyed by Zulu male youths takes place in an arena of
intense commercial activity. Indeed, a boy growing up in the shadow of a ‘cultural village’
who tests himself against peers might, if he is lucky, secure employment as a mock
‘warrior’.90
90 B. Carton, ‘Remaking Zulu Identity in the Era of Globalization’, Global Studies Review, 1, 1 (2005), pp. 7–8. See
also B. Carton and M. Draper, ‘Bulls in the Boardroom: The Zulu Warrior Ethic and the Spirit of South African
Capitalism’ as well as T. Waetjen and G. Maré, ‘Shaka’s Aeroplane: The Take-off and Landing of Inkatha,
Modern Nationalism and Royal Politics’, and B. Freund, ‘Zulu Identity in International Context’ all in Carton,
Laband and Sithole (eds), Zulu Identities.
Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
53
BENEDICT CARTON
Department of History and Art History & African and African American Studies, 4400
University Drive, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. E-mail:
[email protected]
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ROBERT MORRELL
School of Education/Research Office, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7700, South
Africa. E-mail: [email protected]