Benedict Carton

Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting: Reassessing Male Violence and Virtue in South Africa

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 self-mastery and ‘honour’, metaphors of manhood that bolstered kinship obligations during social turmoil. We also highlight the sports 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.

'Last Zulu warrior standing': cultural legacies of racial stereotyping and embodied enthno-branding in South Africa.

This paper explores the legacies of white South African cricketer Lance ‘Zulu’ Klusener. His childhood immersion in ‘Shakan culture’ on a Natal farm was said to imbue him with warrior prowess on the field. In Kluseners newly democratic country even township veterans of the Peoples War against apartheid, who associated cricket with racial tyranny, followed his World Cup exploits. So too did his rural Zulu fans in KwaZulu–Natal chiefdoms. Kluseners ‘Zulu’ persona not only represented deeper cultural histories, but also pervasive colonial markers. In the post-apartheid era, Kluseners fame revealed a different minority at play. His sporting identity impressed the ‘rainbow nation’, especially the promoters of reconciliation selling the evocatively familiar with a new twist: the warrior inspiring unity, not with tribal spear, but with colonial bat. With international sanctions against South Africa lifted in 1994, boosters of cricket wanted to change negative perceptions of their racially exclusive sport. Klusener appealed to the historically oppressed at home and opened sources of global revenue formerly closed by a four-decade-old sport boycott. Indeed, his ‘warrior’ reputation was ripe for exploitation in a ‘neoliberal’ tourism-oriented economy called ‘Ethnicity Inc.’, the title of a book by John and Jean Comaroff on the ‘marketing [of] vernacular lifeways’ of ‘ethno-nations’.

The Wages of Migrancy: Homestead Dynamics, Income Earning, and Colonial Law in Zululand, South Africa

This article examines a court case in colonial South Africa at the turn of the 20th century. The plaintiff, Ugudhla, was a newly-wed residing in his paternal homestead. He wrangled with the defendant, his polygamous father, chief Matshana kaMondisa, over lineage property and marital prospects. Ugudhla, a migrant labourer from Nkandla, Zululand, felt entitled to decide family matters because his wages from the Transvaal mines had helped the household of his mother to pay government taxes and buy needed provisions during great scarcity. Ugudhla had acquired his wealth in the burgeoning mineral revolution. His income symbolised a different route to traditional power for men who valued wage earning as both a necessity and a choice in the nascent industrial era. The family tensions arising from migrancy caused disruption, including legal contests initiated by migrants who petitioned their magistrate to ‘emancipate’ them from their fathers control. As upsetting as these court cases were they did not deter motivated members of a homestead from obtaining employment that buoyed domestic security and, crucially, enhanced personal options to fulfil their dream of ukwakha umuzi, building ones own homestead. Fuelled by discretionary spending, this ‘monetised’ dream had alienated Matshana from Ugudhla. Indeed, their rift would reveal how assertive migrants drew on opportunities of custom, capitalism and colonialism to pursue a life of accumulation and mobility that extended beyond mere survival.

Colonialism and African Childhood

African children shaped social, cultural, and productive dynamics during European colonial rule. Often marginal to those in power, children have been neglected by historians until recently, in part because few sources reveal experiences of childhood socialization, labor, education, and play. What constituted a child could be indicated by membership in an age set or by ritual initiation. In the nineteenth century, children become visible in court records of enslavement. By the twentieth century, colonial authorities had erased many of the complexities of African childhood. In white settler states, boys and girls were simply identified as workers crucial to capitalist accumulation. Learning to read in the classroom informed children’s expectations. School literature taught girls to perform domestic roles while adventure stories prepared boys for public life. Scholars still need to delve more deeply into the variations and continuities of African childhoods across a vast continent.