Dust of The Zulu Ngoma Aesthetics After Apartheid - (Introduction The Politics of Participation in Ngoma Song and Dance)

/ / / INTRODUCTION
The Politics of Participation in Ngoma Song and Dance
A summer afternoon in Msinga, wind. The rasping against the ear. The wrap-
ping around the body. The covering of the voice. The lift and billowing of
dust.
For migrant Zulu men in rural KwaZulu-Natal and Johannesburg, ngoma
performance is a form of participatory politics with regard to community life,
while it offers a way of being in the world. Imagine the politics: Mboneni,
curtailed in a moment of improvised dare. Uzowotha dancing, and nothing
is spoken. Zabiwe slicing through Siyazi’s dance that day. Mdo strutting, call-
ing out praises, struggling this year against the virus. Spindly Sono replacing
his father, now gone. Notice ways of being: boys parroting the dancers, and
mothers exhorting their sons. Zabiwe singing with the eloquence of men.
Copyright © 2017. Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
Ntibane trumping the moves of his friend. The elders advising, admonishing,
blessing. The granny crisscrossing the dance floor, crisscrossing, crisscross-
ing, as the wind blows.
Ways of being and ngoma’s politics of participation are embedded in his-
tories of violent encounter and its mediation. Late apartheid fomented Zulu
ethnic nationalism and with this, notions of Zulu men as warriors. The per-
formative features of Zulu warriordom—singing and dancing—captivated
the global media covering South Africa’s struggle. But African men as sing-
ing, dancing, drumming figures also lie at the heart of a much longer history.
To colonials and Afrikaner nationalists for whom African aesthetics were im-
penetrable, African men’s performances stood as the very index of excess—
of body over mind, rhythm over melody, sound over logos. Derided as ex-
Meintjes, Louise. Dust of the Zulu : Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid, Duke University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rochester/detail.action?docID=4915831.
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pendable and irrational, Africans were exploited, their bodies appropriated
for imperial and nationalistic projects that were impossible without a labor
force. Colonials and white nationalists used their depictions of African per-
formances to justify their politics of dehumanization in the interests of their
imperial, entrepreneurial, and nation-building projects, whether in the 1890s
or 1980s. At the same time, Zulu men’s performances have circulated globally
as representations of frenzied, sometimes formidable warriordom to acclaim
on stage and screen, in print and sound, from the earliest travel accounts
through the struggle to overcome apartheid.1 Dust of the Zulu investigates
the legacy in ngoma of this brutal control of African men’s bodies with its
twinned and double-edged celebration of performed ferocity.
In contrast to the ahistorical representation of the warrior-dancer, and in
relation with it, postapartheid ngoma exposes the temporality of men’s bra-
vado. Vulnerability presses in at the edges. The dancer as warrior is at once a
worker, and what happens when wage labor fails a man? In times of conflict
and epidemic, when the warrior-worker falters, how does he redress his un-
becoming? (A wavering voice, a waning song, the bellow of a sacrificial ox.)
On another day, in another register, the warrior is sung into public as com-
modity culture. In the search for professional breaks, for sponsorship and
new relationships, in dreams of elsewhere, in the noise and spillage of me-
diated desires, warrior-workers articulate aspirations and the futures aspira-
tion shapes.
Ngoma dancers play in the space/time between vulnerability and aspi-
ration, in an enduring relation with the history of violent encounter. In this
space/time, ngoma’s warrior politics hover between the easy instrumental-
ization of the arts and their relegation to mere expression, between the enact-
ment of violence and the pleasures of artfully rendering form. Ngoma rides
the tension, finding its eloquence by pushing at the limits where the question
of violence as performance is excited.
In a world in which dancers encounter violence, live and manage it, fear
and suffer it, violence becomes a theme enunciated by the singing, danc-
ing body. That violence, rendered into an aesthetic, has entwined injurious
forms. Periodized through South Africa’s history and enacted in the present,
experiences of violence are carried in bodies and voices, and so also are posi-
tions reflecting upon it, and the will to speak back to it or with it. Less a genre
to be culturally contextualized than an embodied practice—crafted, sub-
sumed through a lived history, enacted, and naturalized as affective, ngoma
aesthetics are inextricably linked to violent politics.2 Ngoma performance
2 / / / INTRODUCTION
can be a means of witnessing, an assertion, and a sense of potential sung and
danced. It is the finesse of politics and the force of aesthetics coproduced
through violence. I will expand on this key point and explore it ethnographi-
cally once the dancers are singing and dancing and their home is on the page.
The Place of Conflict

The singer-dancers call the area around the town of Keates Drift in the magis-
terial district of Msinga in the province of KwaZulu-Natal home, ekhaya.
Msinga has long served as a labor reservoir for industrializing South Africa.
One of the first areas declared an African reserve (in 1849) by the British ad-
ministrators of the Natal colony, it has, in short, always been a place of state
neglect.3 Mining and other industrial concerns depended on droves of mi-
grant laborers from rural southern Africa, including Msinga. Through the
twentieth century, these labor dynamics as well as encroaching agricultural
enterprise produced dry and rugged Msinga as overcrowded, overgrazed,
and underdeveloped. Homesteads depended on men’s mobility (and later,
also on women seeking urban employment) while competition for sparse
local resources rendered families economically impoverished, and some-
times it fueled tensions among them.
Also important to ngoma’s story—to the way its aesthetics are also its
politics—is Msinga’s history as a long-standing zone of conflict. Once a
buffer between Afrikaner settlers encroaching from the west, British colo-
nials from the south, and the Swazi kingdom pressing down from the north,
eruptions of violence at sites of encounter occurred through the nineteenth
into the early twentieth century when South Africa became a union (1910).
The Anglo-Zulu wars (1879–96) passed through the area, and in part were
waged on the land, engaging men of the local chiefdoms as well as chiefdoms
that subsequently migrated south into the area. The global media spectacu-
larized these wars, but they were by no means the only altercations with colo-
nials. (Later altercations included those between rival chiefdoms in Zulu-
land, fomented by the British.) Through the twentieth century’s national
struggles, first to establish the colony as an independent union, then an apart-
heid state, and later for liberation and democracy, Msinga remained a zone of
conflict. Continuing local competition for resources intersected with deadly
national political differences and with policies that increasingly curtailed ac-
cess to land and property. The history and politics of Msinga’s labor migra-
tion is also its history of conflict.4
After late apartheid’s ravaging violence (especially through the 1980s)
THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 3
in and around this Zulu-identified area, Msinga entered the postapartheid
era aligned with the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party. This would be
of little consequence to Zabiwe, Siyazi, Mboneni, Mqubi, and many other
ngoma participants, except that national politics impinges upon their lives.
First, in the transitional period (1990–94), national struggles continued to be
waged on the ground through the bodies of men and women in their com-
munities. Second, as the new state failed to come to grips with an epidemic
raging through the land, young bodies, especially those in underresourced
communities, bore the burden of the state’s inaction, as did their social net-
works. Third, rewards from the new African National Congress–led state that
would begin to rectify apartheid’s inequalities trickled down erratically to
rural KwaZulu-Natal. At the same time, faced with the challenge of shift-
ing from pariah nation to full participant in a global neoliberal economy,
state institutions and parastatal and commercial enterprises shed labor and
slashed wages, rendering young bodies redundant. While their forebears had
rushed in multitudes to seek prosperity in mines and factories, Bheki, Mbu-
siseni, Mphiliseni, Mbongiseni, Bafo, Bafana, Sicelo, Phumlani, Philani, and
their friends were sent scurrying into the informal economy or scuttling from
the city to stay at home.
Msinga, home, ekhaya, is 99 percent African, 99 percent rural and isiZulu
speaking (Cousins and Hornby 2009). It falls under a municipal districting
system and under traditional jurisdiction, which consists of six chiefdoms,
each divided into wards (sing. isigodi, pl. izigodi) and subwards (sing. isihosha
or umhlathi, pl. izihosha or imihlathi).5 The district of the Mchunu chiefdom
includes about sixteen wards, including Uthuli lweZulu, which is a large ward
containing five subwards.6 The ngoma team representing the subward of esi-
Pongweni is the focus of this study.

Msinga’s population is young, as is South Africa’s overall. The settlement’s
size is relatively stable now, with more women than men living in the area as
a consequence of migrant labor. At least double the number of people and
livestock live on the land than it can support (afra Newsletter 14, in “All
cap/Mdukatshani Newsletters” 2016). Households rely on multiple sources
of income: small-scale farming (including livestock) for consumption and
sale, earnings from agricultural labor nearby or from migrant labor in the
cities and industrial areas, and any other small-scale or temporary options
that present themselves, such as driving taxis. Illegal activities like marijuana
growing and gun running provide income for some. Commerce is sparse. For
many families, welfare and social support grants from the state are essential.7
MOZAMBIQUE
M pu m al ang a SWAZILAND
Fre e St ate
Kwa Zu l u - Nat a l
Msinga
Ladysmith
Bergville
Tugela Ferry
Weenen
Keates Drift
Greytown
LESOTHO
Indian Ocean
Pietermaritzburg
Durban
Johannesburg
KwaZulu-
SOUTH Natal
E as te r n Ca pe AFRICA
Indian Ocean
KwaZulu-Natal with the Msinga Local Municipality highlighted.

Msinga is the fourth poorest out of 227 local municipalities in South Africa,
with 86 percent of the population living below a lower bound poverty line
(Noble et al. 2014).8 Unemployment in Uthuli lweZulu lies at 69 percent.9
Households struggle against daunting odds. Vulnerability presses in from
the edges.
The Warrior Dance of the Migrant Laborer

“The Zulu nation is a nation of proud warriors,” proclaims the opening blurb
on the jacket of the first lp release of Umzansi Zulu Dancers, an internation-
ally circulated product of Gallo Record Company. Umzansi Zulu Dancers
(sometimes styled Mzansi Zulu Dancers, sometimes just Umzansi) is a pro-
Married women outside the supermarket, Keates Drift, 24 December 1992.
Photograph by TJ Lemon.
fessional group led by Siyazi Zulu that draws its membership from three
community teams. “Their tradition of song and dance goes back to the six-
teenth century. When the warriors returned home victorious from war, they
would be greeted by the War Lord, their families and the whole community
in wild celebrations of song, dance, cheering and screaming. This is where
the tradition of Zulu song and dance began” (Umzansi Zulu Dancers 1988).
In a description of the group at the National Arts Festival sixteen years later:
“In a high-energy performance of traditional Zulu dances they embody the
spirit of the victorious warrior, the respect of the tribe for its elders, and
the joy of the wedding couple with voice, melodies and dynamic moves”
(“Dance around Grahamstown” 2005). From Mandla Thembu, faxed from
London prior to his arrival in Johannesburg: “Dear Siyazi, I am not expect-
ing to see any unfit warriors with big stomachs when I come to South Africa.
Any one who is not prepared to train hard and rehearse will not come on
the tour.”10 From crossover/Afro-rock musician Johnny Clegg introducing
dancers for a featured spot in his show in Johannesburg: “[This is] umzansi
war d ancing!”11
Like the Idoma, Asante, Samburu, and Masaai, the Zulu are considered
ancient warriors in the global circulation of cultural commodities (Kasfir
2007).12 Reports of the fighting that beset the colony of Natal and its environs
over the course of the nineteenth century mythologized the Zulu warrior
figure and the grand Zulu army. However, the Zulu army never was a stand-
ing army. It was “a part-time militia” integral to “the labour system through
which the king exercised power and authority over all his subjects, both male
and female, in the interests of the state” (Laband 2009, 172). Furthermore,
the celebrated Zulu military system—expansive, highly organized, and for-
midable—that operated by means of age-grade regiments (amabutho, sing.
ibutho) operated in its highly developed form only from the reign of Shaka,
in the 1820s, until the battles of Isandlwana and Rorkes Drift (Laband 2009)
that ended the Anglo-Zulu War and left the Zulu defeated in 1879. When
Shaka was consolidating his power in the 1820s, he expanded his domin-
ion and cultivated the loyalty of those he conquered by raiding rivals who
refused him loyalty and tribute, then redistributing a portion of the booty
to loyal chiefs and to his amabutho. Loyal chiefs and warriors alike had an
incentive to go to war (Laband 2009).13 In this bloody 1820s milieu, Zulu
warriordom gained its long-standing reputation.14
Irrespective of the inaccuracies and ahistoricity circulating through Um-
zansi Zulu Dancers’ emblematic promotional texts, singer-dancers take plea-
sure and draw value from a past they feel they embody and through which
they play. When Siyazi applies for nonprofit organization status for Umzansi
Zulu Dancers, they compose a preamble to their constitution championing
Zulu tradition tied to Shaka. “zulu Tradition and Culture stood the test of
time through staunchness of such custodians like UMnumzane zulu [Mr.
Siyazi Zulu] who proudly follow the Nation building endeavours that king
shaka gained notoriety for across the Southern African subcontinent.

With this resilient foundation still visible and proudly preserved, UMnum-
zane zulu only serves as a catalyst towards the preservation, expression and
future growth of rich zulu Traditional routines.”15
Not only do ngoma dancers trace an epic military lineage in performance,
but they identify historic Zulu warriors as also being performers who sang
and danced in preparation for battle. But ngoma’s twentieth-century history
in fact is distinct from an epic history of Zulu war. It is a migrant men’s sing-
ing and dancing tradition, a recreational aesthetic form, and a style of com-
petitive display.
Teams compete while intrateam competition also fuels the drama. Each
team is organized hierarchically with leadership offices held by elected or ap-
pointed figures responsible for the management of the team, and elders over-
seeing the team. The organization is akin to that of a soccer team, a regiment,
a choir, or in local terms a span of oxen.16
These general features are shared across a complex of hierarchically or-
ganized competitive song and dance practices found through southern and
southeastern Africa from South Africa to Uganda and Tanzania (Argyle 1991;
Gunderson and Barz 2000; Janzen 2000; Perman 2010; Pier 2015; Ranger
1975; Tracey 1952). Solo call and choral response singing as well as danc-
ing that features frontal kicks and stamps, and choreographed line dancing
are musical characteristics likely to be found in most ngoma.17 While there
are historical and regional differences in style and shifts in value, one could
claim that there is an ngoma belt that spans the region, wherein teams exhibit
similar colonial influences in their organization and likely mutual influence
through contact via labor migration to South Africa’s mines.
The specifically Zulu ngoma tradition grew out of a system of migrant
labor developed by South African state and mining interests through the
twentieth century. This includes a history of staged tribal dancing associated
with sites of work.18 School holidays in the early 1970s: an outing to a mine
on the Witwatersrand. We protect ourselves under sun hats in this outdoor
arena. The earth is red. Teams of men file in, sing and dance, file out over the
red. With flouncy ostrich feathers, flapping animal skins, laced and sculpted
drums, the Swazi, Shangaan, Pedi, Sotho, and Zulu each offer variation.
Now Zulu ngoma is danced at homecoming times, especially at Christ-
mas, in rural KwaZulu-Natal and seasonally on Sunday afternoons at work-
ing and work-seeking men’s hostels in the cities of Johannesburg and Dur-
ban. These decrepit hostels—men’s dormitories—house a number of teams,
each of which usually consists of migrant homeboys from one rural ward in
KwaZulu-Natal.19 George Goch hostel traditionally houses the team I fol-
low, though some singer-dancers live in the inner city, in backyards or hos-
tels in the townships, or in Jeppe (officially named Wolhuter) hostel close
to George Goch.
There are three Zulu ngoma substyles: umzansi, isishameni, and isiBhaca.20
Each style combines choreographed group work and individual improvisa-
tion and is danced to call-and-response singing and clapping. The umzansi
style adds a marching bass drum. Each style features the kick, though its exe-
cution differs stylistically. The umzansi dancers kick highest and straightest
and land hardest, often following a phrase-final kick with a flamboyant back-
ward fall. The isishameni style is boring, Zanaso says, for “there’s no pain.”
Umzansi team from Bergville, George Goch hostel, Johannesburg, 1992.
IsiBhaca team, Vosloorus, 1992. Photograph by TJ Lemon.
From the outside, the umzansi style is seemingly the most warriorlike, the
most ferocious or aggressive, and so also appears as the most traditional of
the three styles. The team I follow dances in the umzansi style.21
The history specific to umzansi dancing, as recounted by Clegg, “is that
it originated around Ndwedwe and Mapumulo and the Umvoti area [of
KwaZulu-Natal], was taken up by the migrant workers around Durban and
became very popular at the organized dance competitions that were held
around the end of each year. The dance later became an integral part of the
migrant worker culture in Johannesburg and more especially at Wemmer
Hostel, which is a famous hostel at the bottom of Rissik Street” (1982, 64).
The team that spawned today’s umzansi groups was established at George
Goch hostel in 1941 by the famed team captain named Kwini (that is, Queen
Victoria). (It was one of the earliest teams in the city [Clegg 1982].) While
today a multitude of isishameni teams exist, as do numerous isiBhaca teams,
umzansi is practiced only in the wards of Uthuli lweZulu, Madulaneni, Gali-
basi, and Nxamalala within the Mchunu chiefdom of Msinga, and by dancers
in Bergville 150 kilometers to the west. In Johannesburg, these dancers prac-
tice at the George Goch and Jeppe hostels, at Thokoza hostel in the township
to the south, and sometimes at Diepkloof hostel in Soweto.
Ngoma’s Body
Zulu men’s body habitus, which is also a habitus of the voice, is cultivated
playfully, socially, continuously through and around ngoma. Six-year-old
Wunda Boy stands steady, watching for his turn with the bevy of boys playing
at ngoma. Little Jabu is spinning about, legs and arms flailing in all directions.
As he paces out his steps, he sounds out the core rhythm with palatal clicks.
Next Wunda Boy jumps in. He mimicks choreography he has scrutinized

at the dance arena. Rhythmic breathy rasps sound out his exertion and his
counting on the pickup to each danced kick and on each stamp that follows.
His mother eyes him as she passes over the kitchen threshold. “Wunda!” she
calls out in praise, with a peal of laughter. Three boys are playing at ngoma be-
hind the house. One taps out the drum pattern with two twisted metal shards
on a crumpled metal sheet. Another waits his turn, sitting on his haunches.
Mpi solos. “Hwa!” he exhales on each stamp. “Hwa! . . . Hwa!”
As well as being expected to learn masculine comportment, performance
styles, and perseverance, boys learn the social value of courage and bravado.
They are taught through boisterous play to toughen up, incrementally accu-
mulating the composure needed to deal well in a world of hard knocks. They
Mbusiseni Zulu preparing his ngoma costume, assisted by his son, esiPongweni,
25 December 2009. Photograph by the author.
begin to bear the signs of training on their bodies, whether through scars or
physique. Stick fighting, a martial skill gathered in boyhood especially while
herding, is one such preparation for manhood, as it is for ngoma dancing.22
Ngoma itself socializes participants, entrains bodies, and finely crafts ex-
pressivity in ways envisaged to cultivate admirable men, participants in a

community.23 In particular, the organizing tension between competition and
camaraderie calls oppositional personal qualities into action: aggression and
intimacy, courage and fear. It shares this organizing principle with other mar-
tial arts and competitive sports in which practitioners self-present as fighters
(Wacquant 2004); the give and take of punishment in stick fighting (Car-
ton and Morrell 2012); deception and solidarity mediated by ambiguity in
capoeira (Lewis 1992); hostility and trust in independent professional wres-
tling (Smith 2014); tough love and intimacy in a boxing ring (Trimbur 2013).
When exploited skillfully, these creative tensions produce fine performances
and cultivate intense sociality among participants whose working bodies all
bear the signs of their effort, carrying their experience of the past. This soci-
Boys play at stick fighting, esiPongweni, 22 December 2013.
Photograph by the author.
ality grows out of shared body aesthetics and practices. It hinges on col-
laborative evaluation of entrained bodies, and on building relations through
competitive training.
As men and women shape local senses of manhood through ngoma prac-
tice, and men and boys perform their gender experiences for themselves and
to others by means of ngoma, they directly encounter democratic South
Africa’s most pressing struggles.24 The threat of injury in a gun-ridden world
(a world that is postapartheid, but not postconflict), the danger of physical
weakness in the context of a raging epidemic, and the commodification of
singing, dancing, and drumming or of tribalized ferocity in a deindustrializ-
ing market all impinge upon athletic and sung performance.
These oppressive dynamics are produced by a particular historical com-
plex. Apartheid (in conjunction with the neoliberal trajectory of democratic
South Africa) has of course left its deep imprint on emerging registers of
manhood across race, class, and ethnicity. For one, South African manhood
is entangled with the ethics and experiences of violence (Morrell 2001),
whether in the form of a “struggle masculinity” (Xaba 2001), in an attach-
ment to a culture of guns (Cock 2001), in forceful processes of labor dispute
resolution (Donham 2011; Moodie 1992), or in widespread domestic abuse
and a high national incidence of rape (Nuttall 2009). For rural and migrant
men, the bravado of hard labor and mining (Coplan 1994; Moodie 1994;
Morris 2008), the dehumanizing living conditions that accompany apart-
heid’s labor system, and the practices of social allegiance that grow out of
it (Epprecht 2002; Magubane 2002; Ramphele 2000) have been formative
masculine experiences. In conjunction with the bravado that labor migration
cultivates, so too is manliness enhanced by breadwinning (Donham 2011;
Hunter 2010; Maré 1993; Waetjen 2004). When wage-earning capacities di-
minish and the kinship ties upon which domestic reproduction depend are
unsettled (White 2010), ways of being a responsible man are placed under
duress. Additionally, the pressures brought to bear on sexual and gendered
social practices by hiv/aids (exacerbated by a neglectful state) trouble tra-
ditional African masculine forms and ideas about the body (Campbell 1992,
2001; Decoteau 2013; Gibson and Hardon 2005; Macheke and Campbell
1998; Maharaj 2001).25 New versions of the same long-standing brutalities
render African bodies excessive and expendable, marginalized as they are in
a zone of increasing global neglect (Ferguson 2006; Piot 2010).
Ngoma’s Voice
In these circumstances, what does it mean to speak with a dancing body?
What does it mean to have a voice? Listen to my dance, Zabiwe says by cup-
ping his ear as he begins his solo sequence. Can you hear what I’m saying? A
dancer is not speechless if he holds some control over his own representa-
tion (Feld 1996a), and if he is heard (Koestenbaum 1993).26 A “speechless

emissary,” on the other hand, such as a depiction of a Zulu warrior, or the
figure of the refugee upon which humanitarian interventions hinge, is repre-
sented without name or narrative, and without dialogic participation in the
form in which she is presented (Malkki 1997, 223). (In the case Malkki ana-
lyzes, the refugee figure is a photographed woman, though representation in
image does not in itself make one speechless.) Having a voice, whatever the
medium, is having “the ability to establish narrative authority over one’s own
circumstances and future, and also, the ability to claim an audience” (Malkki
1997, 242).
Being heard requires that a voice be materially instantiated. A material
voice carries the past, including the contours of biography (Feld 1996b):
Mlambo’s aged vocal fry; Kusakusa’s drumming replacing his dance when
metal replaces part of his thigh bone. (It was a homecoming taxi crash.)
Voice is also a site of pleasure and intimacy (Goldin-Perschbacher 2007; Gray
2013) that is gendered (Koestenbaum 1993) and raced (Eidsheim 2009; Fisher
2016; Ochoa Gautier 2014): a girl eyes Mqubi’s style; dancers sing Zulu close
harmony, their bodies pressed together in a tightly seated cluster in the heat.
The voice is mindful and affective, constituted through and instantiated in
historically specific, culturally inflected social relationships. Genre’s organiz-
ing principles set interpretive frames through which the voice is heard, evalu-
ated, and answered (Bauman 1984; Goffman 1959).
In the case of ngoma, a team consists of ten or more singer-dancers and
usually at least double that. An elected igoso or ukaputeni (captain) and iphini
(vice captain) are responsible for the training, discipline, song selection,
choreography, and leadership of the team. A disciplinary adviser, iphoyisa
(police), mediates between dancers and the leadership when necessary and
assists with management of the team. Elders advise the igoso and iphini and
give their blessings to the team at performance events. These elders are com-
munity leaders, including former team leaders and members.
An umzansi dance event begins with an entry dance in file formation
called ifolo (follow, as oxen in a yoke). Thereafter the performance is usually
broken up into two sets. The opening and closing sections of a set always in-
volve the whole team: the beginning is sung and danced with line choreog-
raphy for the whole group (isipani). The line dance consists of a slower part
followed by a faster section. In the line dance the team members carry their
fighting sticks, wooden rods about the size of broomsticks that are also used
in the martial art of stick fighting and that are carried by men ceremonially,
at times for protection, and on occasion as masculine accoutrement. The set

closes similarly, followed by collective song.
The flow and sequence of the subsections within the middle of a set are
determined by the igoso, who directs the performance with a shrill whistle, a
whip (also used to herd cattle), sung signals for call-and-response singing, and
sung-spoken directives for group chanting. These middle subsections consist
of self-choreographed subgroups of two (isidabulo) to ten peers competing
against one another (sometimes called jabane) and individual competition
(one-one). The only instrument played is a marching bass drum, usually played
by two drummers at once. When teams combine for an event, so too do their
drummers. The rest of ngoma’s sound is produced by dancing and singing
bodies, using ngoma’s principles and its living, changing structure to speak.27
Just as ngoma participants consider the moving body and the singing
voice to be able to speak, so too do they consider the role of the dancer to
include singing.28 BaSotho migrant performers who talk of a “song sung with
the feet” (Coplan 1994, 323) seem to do likewise. Metaphorizing body and
voice in terms of each other is a practice tied to specific singer-dancer tradi-
tions, as well as a widespread one variously deployed with poetic or analytic
goals in mind. For example, in the heat of tumbuka ritual, sound and image
are mutually convertible, participants in effect “seeing the beat and hearing
the dance” to effect healing (Matonga 2010, 283). Song articulated as “danced
speech” similarly metaphorizes the relationship (Lomax 1968, 222).29
While the singing and dancing practice of ngoma posits that the body
and voice bear equivalent value, are metaphorically interchangeable, and are
joined in an ineffaceable relationship, it also reveals discrepancies and dis-
junctures between them. The dancing body is more than (or not only, or not
always) a resonator for the sung or spoken voice. In turn, the voice is not
always or only the body made audible or articulate. What the sung or spoken
voice has to say in its text and texture is often but not necessarily the same as
that which the body performs.30
Three points follow. First, as vocalizing implicates breath, the internal
vocal mechanisms, and supporting musculature, material instantiations of a
sung or spoken voice are embodied in the course of vocalizing (Feld 1996b;
Tatro 2014). Dancing as a mode of expression contributes another dimen-
sion to the embodied acoustic voice. Second, factoring the moving body into
the concept of the voice is less an amplification than a complication of the
idea. The body-voice is an expanded creative and material resource.31 Third,
the techniques of producing a voice involve the manipulation of sound and
kinetics as material, and the organizing of sociality as a set of musical re-

lationships shaped by their history. It concerns the crafting of forms of rep-
resentation in material. In this way, the material voice conjoins political and
poetic projects at once.32
The Force of Aesthetics

Whether dedicated performers, gripped fans, curious newcomers, or recoil-
ing colonials, aesthetic force is presumably the reason why men’s song and
dance has captured their attention. Striking performances that display tech-
nical virtuosity and unique imaginative instantiations of ngoma’s principles
inspire engagement. By means of the character of individualized artistic ex-
pression in relation to the expression of others, ngoma has the capacity to
assert, question, dare, provoke, comment, joke, or narrate, and so to capti-
vate, impress, move, or persuade its audiences. To notice the artistry in its
specifics—to heed the detail of form—is to participate in the dancers’ feel-
ingful play and to understand its intricate politics.
When Zabiwe cups his ear in a danced request that his audience listen,
what is he specifically going to say? The ideas of danced speech and songs
sung with the feet point to the tensions between what song and dance can
reference, and what is necessarily left opaque in heightened poetic forms and
in sound and kinetics that pass by in time (and that are in part improvised).
Whether in the register shifts upon which poetics rely to deepen a state-
ment’s meanings, or in the shift from vocalizing to body movement, or in the
pragmatics of a poetic statement, the meaning of danced speech and songs
sung with the feet points in multiple directions at once, making their signifi-
cance more than (or different from) their appearance. Herein lies ngoma’s
expressive potential (Samuels 2004).33 Indeed, the bonds of ngoma brother-
hood are strengthened by sharing that which requires no articulation. Not
only this—sometimes leaving things unsaid is essential to the maintenance
of that camaraderie, while details danced out but unspoken, noticed and un-
remarked, can suggest alternative stories. Certainty felt in the deeply held
gist of a poetic trope is fleeting and unarticulated (Friedrich 1991, 41–43).
Rendering this feeling of grace (Bateson 1972) in a voice—a gist too deep to
translate, but too diffuse to articulate—is the captivating craft of the trope.
With the poetic leeway aesthetic ambiguity offers, performers and their
fans generate a robust feelingful sociality among themselves through play-
ful improvisation (Fox 2004), whether in talk, song, gesture, or dance.34 In
the perfectly performed moment, socially shareable understanding is made
available, and yet the experience of performing and listening also exceeds
its collective dimension (Feld 2012).35 Such ambiguities enable intimate en-
counters with difference, just as they enable pleasure. They enable life to go
on without closure or fixity or certainty, and they ensure that the capacity
to instrumentalize the arts toward political ends can never be contained or
complete.
The fixity of aesthetic forms and of their significance is also disabled by
technologies of mediation. The global culture industry depends on the ca-
pacity to unhook popular representations—the Zulu warrior—from the
periodized violent histories from which they emerge and to circulate them
in processes of schizophonic mimesis (Feld 1996a). As the gluttonous his-
torical Zulu warrior figure devours alternative representations in cycles of
accumulating cultural feedback, ngoma dances between the heaping up of
representations and the paring down of ideas represented, between possibili-
ties for creative augmentation and for troubling diminution (Keil and Feld
1994). Whether the immediate reportage of struggle politics and the apart-
heid state’s repressive actions, or the epic narrative of Zulu war stemming
from nineteenth-century colonization, the history of the representation of
Zulu violence is inseparable from ngoma’s circulation.36
Likewise, the affective silence of ngoma brotherhood—a form of aes-
thetic ambiguity—is intimately coupled with the positive valence of mas-
culine toughness that ngoma renders into art. In other words, the silence of
brotherhood is as much a quality that emerges out of mediations of violence
as it is a quality that relies on grace (Bateson 1972).37 Corporeality is “limned
by violence” (Cohen and Weiss 2003, 4).
The body and voice are constituted in immediate dialogic improvisations
that themselves draw from a repertoire of relationships near and far, contem-
poraneous and historical, imagined and remembered, material and elusive.
This intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty, via Fischer 2008; Weiss 1999) and its
inflection into the voice as intervocality (Feld 2012) blend the experience
of the body-voice in motion with the organization of the ngoma collective
as a competitive practice and brotherhood. It blends the significance of the
sound with its reshaping in the moment of sounding, gesture with its re-
shaping in the moment of moving. Singular voices carry within them mul-
tiple others, present and elsewhere. They emerge in dialogue with others and
in relation to ways of being heard (Feld 2012).38 In a competitive practice,
distinctions among these voices are kept alive, disrupting the shared recogni-
tion of feeling by recognition of differences, defying closure to the commu-
nicative system and so always rendering new possibilities, new inflections to

ways of relating in an intertwined world (Fischer 2008). Materiality, history,
and textuality are inseparable, as are the prereflective and reflective (Cohen
and Weiss 2003; Weiss 2003). Ngoma’s artful vocalizing and moving tell of
performers’ relationships to one another, to the communities they articu-
late as their own, and to the worlds with which those communities inter-
sect. Their vocalizing and moving likewise tell of the histories from which
dancers emerge, and the futures toward which they reach. Expressed in ways
too deep to translate, too diffuse to articulate, dancing, Zabiwe cups his ear.
Aesthetics, then, gathers its persuasive power from the histories of conflict
and the hard experience of migrant labor ngoma encompasses. In a narrative
sense, it is an aesthetics about the forcefulness of violent encounter, compe-
Mboneni Zulu, esiPongweni, December 1991. Photograph by TJ Lemon.
tition, and struggle. It utilizes components of various military styles as a play-

ful expressive resource. Military aesthetics incorporated into ngoma ambi-
guate ngoma’s relationship to acts of violence, intensifying the performance.
In a dramatic sense, military aesthetics heighten the forcefulness of ngoma’s

effect for an audience. The way that ngoma’s body-voice carries histories like-
wise enhances ngoma’s persuasion, while the links between experience in
and out of the dance arena open the possibilities for one domain producing
effects in the other. In this social sense, ngoma aesthetics has force in and
upon the world. It has the potential to redirect action. Likewise, violence as
itself a performance in the world that acts upon that world can enter ngoma
by force, and it can dramatically reduce or inspire ngoma aesthetics. The me-
diation of conflict histories, as of ngoma, amplifies and extends the reach of
both. Mediation and the potential to redirect action tie ngoma to politics. As
an aesthetic that represents forcefulness and embodies forceful experiences,
yet combines this with artful ambiguity and improvisational play, ngoma aes-
thetics offers a means to finesse the disruptions of violent politics. The force
of aesthetics and the finesse of politics are coproduced through violence.
Registers of Representation
Many ngoma friends have multiple names in an elaborate and playful naming
practice that marks multiple registers of their personality, relationships, place
in life, and dance style. I add to this by substituting pseudonyms on occasion.
Mostly, in the spirit of celebrating the singular artistry of individuals and cir-
culating their reputations, I use names that belong to those I reference.
Just as names shift in feeling, form, and function, my text shifts in regis-
ter from the evocative to the explanatory, the terse to the detailed, and the
mimetic to the analytic. Usikhwishi raises the dust and draws the gaze of on-
lookers when he takes to the floor. Usikhwishi, they call him, for he attracts
the attention of women. “Usikhwishi!” chant his teammates, using his praise
name to set up a groove for his solo. “Usikhwishi! Usikhwishi! Usikhwishi!”
“Yeyi, Test-and-Pass!” friends salute him in the street, in fond remembrance
of his reputation for scoring high with women in his youth.
In mimetic mode, extended passages in this text depict the flow and tech-
nique of improvisations. They contrast with imagistic bursts using short sen-
tences and spare description. I think of this concision as equivalent to the
flash of a screen shot, a fast cut, a snapshot; and as rhythm deployed in writ-
ing about dancers springing surprises, cutting, turning, holding a pose. Ana-
lytics interrupt the mimetic with reportage, interlocutors’ commentary, and
historical and cultural frameworks. I also move among media, from words
to photographs to series of screen shots. These moves represent a search
for ways to convey the multimediated sensualness of ngoma, and to depict
the details upon which analyses of singular performances hang. The creative
challenge lies in how to reproduce a sense of flow and the energy of action
on one hand, and the detail of body movement and sound in which dancers’
finesse is displayed on the other. My shifts within the text and among media
aim to amplify ngoma’s kinetic poetics and support an ngoma analysis, given
the challenges of precise description the performance practice presents. The
screen shots and photographs therefore also shift between the mimetic and
analytic, sometimes assisting as example, but mostly standing as commen-
tary that keeps my analysis as a point of view.39 I think of them, especially
TJ Lemon’s, as ululations to ngoma dance. Lemon’s eye distinctively arrests
dancers’ action while at once unleashing it.40 His subjects are immersed
in the moment and relating to the action of others, often off camera. Even
Nkululeko Dladla, esiPongweni, 26 December 2006.

From video taken by the author.
when he captures a full body, the action exceeds the photograph’s frame: the
dancer is on the move, his or her action incomplete. Color vibrancy (of the
original images) intensifies the bursting action.41
Dance ethnographies that have variously turned to poetics, transcriptions,
and single photographic images in reaching for the sensuality and aesthetic
finesse of dancing inspire my experimentation. Hahn (2007) evokes through
mimetic reference to the fan, central to the nihon buyo Japanese dance she
addresses, enfolding poetically evoked scenes into the analytic text, pointing
to feeling and atmosphere rather than illustrating danced form. Lewis (1992)
replaces photographs with sketches of capoeiristas in performance. He brings
attention to body stances through sparse line drawing. His lines are a form of
editing, allowing an untrained viewer to look into body form that would be
harder to see if only presented photographically. His sketches represent fea-
tures of isolated frozen moments.42 Julie Taylor (1998) inserts motion onto
the page by playing with a flip-book technique that animates a tango dance
sequence in silhouette figures on the edge of each book leaf. Rahaim (2012),
writing about body gestures that accompany and interpret Hindustani sing-
ing, combines a series of visual techniques to illustrate gestures of head, face,
arm, hand, and fingers. Sequential line diagrams isolate key details; photo-
graphs overlaid with graphic arrows index motions; and screen shots coupled
with musical notation tie particular movements to the sounds they interpret.
My screen shots are intended minimally as clarifying illustrations that
redress the inadequacies of my language to convey an accurate image of a
dancer in motion, let alone of dancers moving in response to one another.
The sequences point to the action I seek to evoke and analyze. Maximally the
screen shots, themselves terse evocations of the flow of movement, stand as a
counterpoint to my written representation. Sequences beginning and ending

the book are excerpted from a performance of 26 December 2006.43
Before the thunderstorm a gusty wind, isikhwishi, gathers all in its path.
The Finesse of Politics

The figure of the warrior-dancer mediates the relationship between aesthet-
ics (a way of imagining the world) and contemporaneous politics (a way
of acting upon it).44 The relationships among the temporality of violence,
its mediated circulation and feedback, the nonfixity that ambiguous aes-
thetics allows, and the timing of ngoma sound and motion produce an in-
tense sociality around and through ngoma’s artfully moving body-voice.
Against African colonial history and apartheid and with a view toward the
apparent futures neoliberalism presupposes, this sociality is a noisy presence
(the reclamation and redirection of the warriors’ danced “frenzy” and sung
“babble”), a refusal of the charge of victimhood and of relegation to the past.
It is a presence mediated by an experience of fighting as culture rendered
through hard work as art.
The trajectories that render young African bodies vulnerable postapart-
heid stretch back through apartheid, through South African state building
over the course of the twentieth century, through colonialism in southern
Africa. Forms of violence are present throughout. Inattention to African dis-
ease and radically unequal health facilities are components of colonialism
and apartheid as they are in the new era. Radical unemployment began in the
1970s. Struggles to earn and to secure wages were present alongside indus-
trialization through the twentieth century, and the struggle to subsist prior
to this forced men and women to enter the cash economy of wage labor. But
what might be particular to the new moment of promise when all citizens are
at last given a voice?
In preparing for a collaborative presentation with Siyazi Zulu at Stanford
University in 2001, I selected a series of photographs that I thought would
give the audience a South African political context for the dancing of which
they were to see an excerpt. “No politics,” said Siyazi. He worried Americans
would take the dancers for ideologues, frenzied into violent action through
political rallies at home. He wanted to represent his art and their ngoma tra-
dition as Zulu culture at its best. “Why make it more complicated?” he asked.
A few years later, we were translating Inkatha Freedom Party songs I had
recorded in 1992 at the height of the urban violence during the negotiation
period leading up to South Africa’s transitional democratic government. We
listened. “The police sergeant was present when we sliced off the balls of the
leader [of our opponent the anc, Mandela],” sang the protestors. Siyazi hesi-
tated: why did I want these songs documented in English? I wanted readers
to understand the broader context in which ngoma dancers were living at
that distressful time, that dangerous time if you were a hostel-dwelling Zulu-
identified person, that time of intense struggle against the violences of every-
day life. He worried that readers would imagine that ngoma dancers sang
such songs, songs that were both dirty and radical, though he acknowledged
that he understood that the overseas market wanted to hear about politics
(so we should include some information). “All right,” he said, skeptically,
about the rally songs, “but write carefully so people can understand nicely.”45
Siyazi and I mean something different when we speak of politics. He does
not want his art instrumentalized in the service of the agenda of a politi-
cal party or an activist group. He does not want his art to be reduced to a
political act. He favors standing in the service of the ideas of heritage, tra-
dition, and Zulu culture, ideals and values he wants to promote for what
they promise professionally and commercially in the neoliberal order and
because he believes in them as the affective and moral core that can sustain
his community. In this, he mirrors the current perspectives of many mar-
ginalized people in the global South, perspectives developed in synchrony
with unesco’s preservationist policies and discourse on cultural rights. Si-
yazi’s politics recognizes his and others’ intentionality as people knowingly
grasping for control over their own histories and representation. Politics, for
Siyazi, is not the equivalent of resistance. It requires that one enter into con-
tested, usually unequal, and sometimes compromising spaces in search of
ways to dialogue and collaborate. Such mediation is a means toward collec-
tive self-actualization. I, on the other hand, take politics as the asymmetrical
order of the everyday that necessarily produces forms of struggle.
To get at the historical contingencies of politics and so also at the tem-
porality of violence, the chapters that follow loosely periodize South Africa’s
postapartheid narrative. After the first two chapters introduce ngoma’s key
stylistic and social principles, chapters 3 and 4 cover the transitional period
(1990–94); chapter 5 spans the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s; chapters 6
and 7 focus on the mid-1990s through the early millennium; and chapter 8
focuses on the remaining years.
Starting close in by detailing ngoma’s form (that is, by attending to singu-
lar moments of artistry), I profile ngoma masculinity as it is represented in a
key aesthetic value, isigqi (power) in chapter 1, and, in a related affect, ulaka
(anger) in chapter 2. These chapters focus on how the ngoma body-voice

summarizes a history of work. Next I fill in and flesh out these themes as they
are brought to bear in motion, in time: that is, in moments of performance
that have efficacy in the world of social relationships from which they arise.
Incrementally zooming out from ngoma’s form into the world around it,
chapters 3 and 4 consider the safety of the body, along with the issue’s under-
belly, namely the necessary management of danger for migrant workers in
violent times. While chapter 3 focuses on intracommunal struggles and their
tense resolution, chapter 4 connects local danger and bravado to the net-
work of national violence that dramatically charged the notions of masculine
Zuluness during South Africa’s transitional period. Chapter 5 considers the
effects at home of the celebration of the warrior body on the entertainment
Zama Zulu, Vusimuzi Zulu, Mdo Mdlalose, Mboneni Zulu, esiPongweni,
25 December 1992. Photograph by TJ Lemon.
circuit by narrating the relationship of renowned musician Johnny Clegg to

ngoma at Keates Drift. Histories of local violence and national struggle are
imbricated in ngoma’s international successes, as are the will for better living
and dancers’ cosmopolitan forms of aspiration, while the racialized global
discourse of South African aesthetics enters ngoma play at home.
If prior chapters highlight the strengths and agility of the ngoma body,
chapter 6 addresses the struggles weakening bodies provoke by considering

how individuals and the team manage well-being and stigma in the context
of the aids epidemic. Chapters 7 and 8 likewise consider the daunting cir-
cumstances of precarious neglect, searching for the pressure points where
management might also be read as a form of resistance and hope, a mascu-
line resolve to sustain becoming. Chapter 7 follows Umzansi Zulu Dancers
into a recording studio where competitive masculine sociality sustains a
contemporary presence even while aesthetic and acoustic accommodations
compromise their self-representation of ngoma. In chapter 8, dancers engage
and redirect cultural brokers’ nostalgic Zulu warrior figures in their efforts to
hold open the possibility of an expansive future. I conclude with thoughts on
the pleasures of ngoma performance as they are entwined with Zulu mascu-
line virtuosity, anger as affect, and the violent politics of South African his-
tory. Participants struggle for respectable manhood in a postapartheid South
Africa that is still unfolding, while improvising in an art form that thrives on
the tension.
Dancers work to keep ngoma valued in public culture as a living aesthetic
with a deep past. Sometimes they are expedient. But most of the time, sing-
ing and dancing is more than a political act or a representation of cultural
identity, even in the moments in which it plays out in the world in these
terms. To ngoma dancers, ngoma does not always say something. Sometimes
it is a way of being in the world that exceeds explanation. Sometimes it is just
playing.
Dancers are preparing indoors and in the yard, dressing in their uniforms,
securing cowbells to their belts, sipping Coke or beer or hot stuff, smoking,
stoking up, warming up, hanging together. Age-mates practice their collec-
tively choreographed sequences behind the house. Cowbells jangle as they
stretch and raise their legs half-high to stamp. “Shhhha!” under the jangle
and clang. “Shhha!” they say together softly, sibilance rushing into the vowel
as they raise their legs slightly to stamp lightly. “Shha!” representing the
energy they will use in performance, the power that will rain down through
the kicking, stamping leg.
Siqhandolo Mzila, esiPongweni, 27 December 2015. Photograph by TJ Lemon.
Flirting and courting (ukushela), Keates Drift, 24 December 2003.


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/ / / INTRODUCTION

The Politics of Participation in Ngoma Song and Dance

The Place of Conflict

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 3

Pongweni is the focus of this study.

KwaZulu-­Natal with the Msinga Local Municipality highlighted.

The Warrior Dance of the Migrant Laborer

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 5

shaka gained notoriety for across the Southern African subcontinent.

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 7

IsiBhaca team, Vosloorus, 1992. Photograph by TJ Lemon.

Next Wunda Boy jumps in. He mimicks choreography he has scrutinized

pressivity in ways envisaged to cultivate admirable men, participants in a

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 11

tion (Feld 1996a), and if he is heard (Koestenbaum 1993).26 A “speechless

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 13

at times for protection, and on occasion as masculine accoutrement. The set

kinetics as material, and the organizing of sociality as a set of musical re-

The Force of Aesthetics

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 15

nicative system and so always rendering new possibilities, new inflections to

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 17

tition, and struggle. It utilizes components of various military styles as a play-

In a dramatic sense, military aesthetics heighten the forcefulness of ngoma’s

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 19

Nkululeko Dladla, esiPongweni, 26 December 2006.

counterpoint to my written representation. Sequences beginning and ending

The Finesse of Politics

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 21

(anger) in chapter 2. These chapters focus on how the ngoma body-­voice

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 23

circuit by narrating the relationship of renowned musician Johnny Clegg to

chapter 6 addresses the struggles weakening bodies provoke by considering

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION / / / 25

Siqhandolo Mzila, esiPongweni, 27 December 2015. Photograph by TJ Lemon.

Flirting and courting (ukushela), Keates Drift, 24 December 2003.

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KwaZulu-Natal with the Msinga Local Municipality highlighted.

(anger) in chapter 2. These chapters focus on how the ngoma body-voice