ANTH1007A 2023 Reader

ANTH1005A (2023)
Practices of Identification
Part B (Block 4)
NEW MEN:
GENERATION AND GENDER
Dr. Hylton White

Engaging Postcolonial Cultures: African
Youth and Public Space
Mamadou Diouf
Abstract: The violent irruption of African youth into the public and domestic
spheres seems to have resulted in the construction of their behavior as a threat, and
to have provoked, within society as a whole, a panic that is simultaneously moral
and civic. At issue are the bodies of young people and their behavior, which escape
the constraints of social construction, their sexuality and pleasure, as well as the for-
mulas of their action and presence as junior social actors. The new situation has
consequences for several issues, the most important of which are the redefinition
of the relationships between identity and citizenship in the whirlwind of globaliza-
tion, the metamorphoses of the processes of socialization, the production of new
forms of inequality accompanied by their own representations and imaginations,
and the extraordinary mutation of the chronological and psychological construc-
tions of the passage from youth to adulthood.
R6sum6: La violente irruption de la jeunesse africaine dans les spheres publiques

et domestiques semble avoir eu pour consequence la construction de leur com-
portement comme menace, et semble avoir provoqu6 dans l'ensemble de la soci6t6
une panique a la fois morale et civique. Les arguments invoqu6s sont les corps des
jeunes gens et leur comportement, qui 6chappent aux contraintes de la construc-
tion sociale; leur sexualit6 et leur plaisir; ainsi que les codes r6gissant leurs actions
et leur presence en tant que jeunes acteurs sociaux. Cette nouvelle situation a des
consequences dans plusieurs domaines, les plus importants d'entre eux 6tant la
redefinition des relations entre identit6 et citoyennet6, prises dans le tourbillon de
la globalisation; les m6tamorphoses des processus de socialisation; la production de
nouvelles formes d'in6galit6, accompagndes de leurs repr6sentations et de leur
imaginaire sp6cifiques; et l'extraordinaire mutation des constructions chron-
ologiques et psychologiques du passage de lajeunesse t l'age adulte.
African Studies Review, Volume 46, Number 1 (September 2003), pp. 1-12
Mamadou Diouf is a professor of history and African American and African

Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also Associate
Director of African Studies at the Center of AfroAmerican and African
Studies. His most recent book is Histoire du Sin`gal (2001).

1
This content downloaded from

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
2 African Studies Review
Introduction
Today, young people are emerging as one of the central concerns of

African studies. Located at the heart of both analytical apparatuses and
political action, they also have become a preoccupation of politicians,
social workers, and communities in Africa. Undoubtedly, the centrality of
this subject is connected to the extraordinary turnaround over the last
three decades in the way African societies see themselves.
Since the end of World War II, the basic objects of research on and
explanations of African societies and the condition of Africans have been
the state, rural populations, and the processes of the authoritarian and/or
democratic construction of political systems. This interest has been focused
over the past decade on the deepening economic and financial crisis, the
jolts occurring in efforts at democratization, and the political ruptures that
began on the continent at the end of the 1980s. In general, Africa has been
understood in terms of a triple crisis involving the family, the nation, and
the state. At the level of the family, dramatic changes have come about in
terms of gender roles and the distribution of responsibility. Just as men are
no longer expected to be the sole economic providers for the family, they
are no longer the sole authority. This transformation, in turn, has made
women more visible in the public sphere, a development that has been
influenced by the globalization of desires and expectations. At the level of
the nation, international institutions and money lenders have challenged
the development paradigm that encouraged privatization of African
economies, including national appropriation of resources and the means
of production. At the level of the state, the focus has been on the difficult
processes of institutional and political stabilization which virtually all coun-
tries face.
Several factors seem to have been involved in the increased focus on
youth in particular. First of all, in contrast to the demographic situation in
developed countries, where declining birth rates have led to a decreasing
proportion of young people, the youthful population of Africa has been
growing. Young people now constitute the majority of the African popula-
tion, and their integration into society, in terms of both civic responsibility
and membership, has had enormous economic, cultural, political, and
social consequences.1 At the same time, the condition of young people in
Africa, as well as their future, is heavily influenced by the interaction
between local and global pressures: the fragmentation or dissolution of
local culture and memory, on the one hand, and the influences of global
culture, on the other. Like the demographic changes, this conflict has reli-
gious, esthetic, cultural, political, and economic consequences. Particular-
ly in light of the failure of the nationalist political enterprise, which had set
itself the double objective of economic development and social justice,
African societies increasingly are looking to young people as instruments of
change. The sense that they are uniquely positioned to speak a language of

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
Engaging Postcolonial Cultures 3
both universal rights and specific African cultures has led to continual
redefinitions of their role in the social sphere.
At the same time, however, the dramatic irruption of young people in
the public and domestic spheres seems to have resulted in the construction
of African youth as a threat, and to have provoked, within society as a
whole, a panic that is simultaneously moral and civic. At issue are the bod-
ies of young people and their behavior, their sexuality and their pleasure.
Also in question is their general presence and status qua social juniors. The
tensions produced by the new situation have consequences for several
ongoing problems. First, the relationship between identity and citizenship
in Africa is in the process of being redefined, particularly in the context of
globalization. Second, new forms of inequality have been produced, along
with their own representations and imaginations. And third, the nature of
the chronological and psychological passage from youth to adulthood has
changed in extraordinary ways.
The new trajectory could be summed up as a radical transformation of
the idea of citizenship, together with the conflation of the domestic and
public spheres, the production of new forms of identification which appeal
to multiple resources, and a refashioning of the indices and signs of
autochthony and membership, of inclusion and exclusion. All of these
changes are associated with the reconfiguration of the national territory,
domestic and sacred spaces, forms of organization, loyalties, and so on. In
most cases, these developments, which are accompanied by the erosion of
state and family obligations, suggest new avenues of political action and
expression that may be violent or nonviolent, formal or informal. And they
often are accompanied by new associative formulas, political commitments,
and esthetic formulations on the margins of institutions and traditional
codes of conduct.
African Youth and the Postcolonial State
With the achievement of independence, African political cultures made

use of both precolonial communitarian resources-that is, of African val-
ues-and the practices of administrative modernity and postcolonial poli-
tics in order to redefine the meaning of young people and youth. The post-
colonial project sought to go beyond an ethnology/anthropology preoc-
cupied with rituals of initiation and socialization to a sociology focused on
the generational and sexual division of labor and on social and economic
mobilization. Postcolonial psychology tried to understand mental struc-
tures, the ritualized and supervised modes of age groups, the construction
of identity in the young person, and the psychosociological stages leading
from infancy, childhood, and adolescence to adult life.
In its cultural and political versions, the nationalist project sought to
do two things: to maintain the frontier between elders and juniors that

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
characterized traditional African values, and to put young people at th

center of its plans for economic development and national liberati
Youth was conceived not only as the hope of African nations under co
struction-the chief actor in African societies' struggle against underd
velopment, poverty, misery, and illiteracy--but also as the hope of th
world.2 As both subjects and objects of training and mobilization, you
people incarnated the future and represented the promises of restore
identity, both national and pan-African, as opposed to colonial alienat
and postcolonial forms of domination and subordination. As bearers of
twofold project of modernity and the return to the sources of African
tures, they were called upon to promote and respect the political
moral obligations of citizenship and of political, social, and cultu
responsibility, with a view to constructing African democracies.3 The
approaches resulted in a representation of young people that put
accent on the cultural prestige of youth as the chief agent of the transf
mation of African societies. The paradox is that youths achieved this sta
only because they were thought of as channeled and supervised by adul
The failures of nationalist economic, cultural, and political models h
particularly dreadful effects on young people. As national models of e
nomic development proved to be inadequate or irrelevant, so did custo
ary rites of socialization through work or education. Requiring extens
investments of money and time, these activities and preparatory stages
longer inspired young people, who preferred risk and immediate prof
(de Latour 2001). At the same time, traditional rites of initiation increa
ingly were associated with, or characterized by, surveillance, harassmen
and repression, which foreshadowed new forms of both public and dom
tic violence. Thus, as a phenomenon produced by the family, the comm
nity, and the nation, youth became transnational.
The Closure of the Nationalist Moment: The New Politics of

Representation
The bankruptcy of the nationalist project of development is manifested in
the economic crisis that has persisted since the beginning of the 1970s,
along with the economic and ideological adjustments that accelerated
migration toward the cities and the West. In this new situation, the con-
struction of youth as "the hope of the world" has been replaced by repre-
sentations of youth as dangerous, criminal, decadent, and given to a sexu-
ality that is unrestrained and threatening for the whole of society.
Not only are young people losing the prestigious status that national-
ism gave them in its ascending phase, but they no longer represent the
national priority. This loss of status is reflected in the physical and intellec-
tual collapse of the institutions of supervision and education, the absence
of health coverage, and the massive and aggressive presence of young peo-

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
pie on the streets, at public garbage dumps, and in urban and rural under-
grounds. The reclassification of young people is manifested in institution-
alized hostility toward them. This takes increasingly violent forms which,
combined with disdain and indifference on the part of the elites, render
their present difficult and their future unpredictable.
Excluded from the arenas of power, work, education, and leisure,
young Africans construct places of socialization and new sociabilities whose
function is to show their difference, either on the margins of society or at
its heart, simultaneously as victims and active agents, and circulating in a
geography that escapes the limits of the national territory. These transfor-
mations, which have been taking place for several years, affect both geog-
raphy and history--especially history conceived as a chronology embracing
age groups that are connected by obligations, rights, and duties. The ideo-
logical and cultural reorganization that flows from this posture of defiance
takes place in the spaces deserted by political power and outside the com-
munities and their dominant cultures, to the advantage of the margins and
the unoccupied areas in which emptiness and indetermination are domi-
nant: places that are ready to be filled, conquered, and named, and which
favor the expression of rites and rituals intended to produce signs of iden-
tity. The function of these spaces, which escape the logics of public and
administrative control, communitarian prescriptions, and state surveil-
lance, is to serve as supports for acts that express within the public sphere,
in a violent, artistic, or spiritual way, a desire for recognition and a pres-
ence.
This geography--often understood (by moralists and pe

geography of delinquency, or (by optimists and dissidents)
of resistance-is first of all that of the street, the suburbs,
of craggy and rugged landscapes, frontier regions, and p
where drugs or mineral riches--gold and diamonds in par
duced. It is also a geography of possible developments outs
tional images of success. Erasing the national territory and
offers African youth opportunities for entry onto the wor
usually in pain, tumult, and violence. As migrant or clandes
sometimes as musicians, artists, and "Golden Boys," they b
the theater of globalization, resolved to make their way into t
ket's economy of desires and consumption. In postcolonial
have become obsolete and above all inefficient, and in wh
dures of socialization through education and work have bec
the street has become a cultural arena in which young
against the dominant cultures (Giroux 1994).
It is not easy to give an account of the history accompan
geography, because it is very diverse and because it present
petition between histories that overlap and feed on each ot
hand, African cultures reflect and participate in the world
tion of inequalities, as well as the globalization of desires a

146.141.13.72fff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
of a young people's market in (mostly American) consumer products. On

the other hand, African states have seen the emergence of the so-called
Golden Boys, who emerged from European and American universities, o
from underground zones of diamond or drug trafficking. These develop
ments are repositioning Africa in mercantile relationships in which revolu
tion, as an approach to liberating the continent, is yielding to negotiation
and bargaining.
The complex history that informs these adjustments challenges
received notions of both nationalist history and personal history, with their
conventional chronologies and stages of development from childhood to
adulthood. Young people's refusal to be embedded in the memory of the
state and the nation is accompanied by a rejection of communitarian mem
ories, and sometimes by rejection of family memory. At the least, the latter
are reconsidered and reworked in order to transfigure or deflect their
morality, in the process confounding the modem or traditional elites wh
find themselves confronted with the contradiction between their rhetoric
and their practices.
In many ways, young Africans can be seen as searching for a narrative
that provides a territory for the free play of their imagination. As J. D. Y.
Peel observes, "Narrative empowers because it enables its possessor to inte-
grate his memories, experiences and aspirations in a schema" (1995:587).
Looking beyond national borders, young people appropriate new tech-
nologies (digital and audiovisual) in such a way as to recreate the dynam-
ics of the oral and the spectacular, along with the literary and iconograph-
ic imagination. The signs that result have the capacity to erase distance and
to create a ritual community whose imagined geography is so powerful that
it challenges the geography of borders. It delocalizes memories and sug-
gests a historicity of a cosmopolitan nature (Cohen 1969:141).
Yet this narrative, constantly preoccupied with erasing ethnic, nation-
al, and continental borderlines, is necessarily fragmented because of the
multiplicity of the sources that produced it. The world that, paradoxically,
is both inhabited by young Africans and escapes them is one of opportuni-
ty and abundance, in which they are perpetually on the margins and the
borderlines of the increasingly xenophobic West (Carter 1997). Mistrusting
both indigenous memories and the nationalist ideology of development,
they present an organized and sometimes violent challenge to the con-
struction of youth as a period of "life on hold" and of their generation in
particular as situated between a glorious past, a present of sacrifices, and a
radiant future. Rejecting the conception of a life that must be prepared for
and supervised by adults, they substitute risky behaviors in the street, the
underground, and informal economic practices, which provide them with
alternative modes of self-expression and new procedures for inhabiting the
public sphere. Thus they are defining new modalities of action and propos-
ing a new language in their musical, iconographic, and military expres-
sions, and sometimes in political, economic, and religious life (see

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
Richards 1996; Abdullah & Bangura 1997; Honwana 1999; Diouf 1996;
Cruise O'Brien 1996).
The best illustration of these youthful gestures of self-creation is the
extraordinary vitality of "born again" Christian movements and sects, in
particular Pentecostalism, and the reform-minded efforts of indigenous
Muslims or the subversive form of Islam that is often called "fundamental-
ist" (see Meyer 1998; Van Djik 1998; Maxwell 2001). Strongly rooted in the
ideology of "renascence" (rebirth, born again) in every sense of the term,
both as purification and as a return to origins, these movements address
themselves to, are strongly dominated by, and mostly are composed of
young people. Taking for granted their despair with regard to the disjunc-
tion between their dreams and aspirations, on one hand, and the oppor-
tunities offered them, on the other, the religious discourse calls for a com-
plete and deliberate rupture with the past and lays out a different future
(Meyer 1998:186). In this way, it promotes new communitarian formulas
and the constitution of individuality on the margins of the ethnic group,
citizenry, and the state. R. Van Djik describes this new situation pertinent-
ly: "On the social plan such temporal orientations acquire political mean-
ing, particularly if the construction of the future ideals and a sense of new
individuality run counter to the postcolonial political project" (1998:158).
The rearrangement of the past favors new ways of understanding the
present: of reconfiguring unemployment, educational failure, domestic
and public violence, corruption, and young people's disappointed expec-
tations. The religious present restores their dignity and speaks to them of
a future that already exists. Religious movements are attractive not only
because they offer modes of being and belonging, but also because they
construct new imaginations of the community and the individual.4 New ver-
sions of history imply a mastery of the present, justify a rejection of the past
of ancestors, traditions, and the state, and also structure the modalities of
passage from the autochthonous to the universal or global.
The recourse to violence, the symbols of purification by fire, the
destruction of the places and monuments of postcolonial munificence are
the elements common to social movements animated chiefly by young peo-
ple. The enterprise of the dtracinement (in the literal sense of the term,
"uprooting") of postcolonial legitimacies is discernible in several activities,
from the musical and iconographic expressions of young Senegalese, to
riots orchestrated by schoolchildren and university students in Mali, to the
activities of "area boys" in the cities of Nigeria, and the crucial role played
by disaffected youth in the armed conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone.5
Influences of media images are apparent in the stagings of violent demon-
strations, from broadcasted images of South African riots to Rambo and Ter-
minator.
In the Senegalese situation, for instance, the 1980s were characterized

by an attitude of defiance on the part of the young with regard to political,
economic, social, and cultural institutions. It manifested itself in the cre-

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
ation of autonomous organizations with strong ethnic and religious con

notations and often centered on a common origin, region, or neighbor-
hood. In urban areas, cultural and athletic associations (associations cul-
turelles et sportives, or ASCs) coordinate intense cultural, social, and ath-
letic activities. They organize clean-up operations, build playgrounds, ope
public libraries and information centers, offer educational classes, and pro
vide vocational training for children. Many of these projects involve them
gradually in tests of strength against political powers and public entrepre
neurs (such as companies providing electricity, water, and transportation
who find that these youth associations are eroding their authority. Through
slow evolution a strongly economics-oriented approach is emerging with
the creation of economic interest groups (groupements d'intr&
&conomique, or GIEs) and small and middle-sized enterprises (petites et
moyennes entreprises, or PMEs).
Structurally, these organizations are far more democratic than those
they have replaced or supplanted, escaping the clientelist logic and the
lure of state-supplied income which typically innervates political action
Thus they achieve better results in terms of communitarian achievement
Contributing to the birth of a social consciousness critical of governmen
projects, these organizations are gradually dissolving centralizing logics
and the subjection of social actors to the state.
In the most dangerous neighborhoods of Dakar, for instance, young
people have seized control of local space by setting up "militias for self
defense and the protection of property and the tranquility of peaceable ci
izens."6 In 1989, the youth of the Medina, seeking to make up for the def
ciencies of the police, organized raids on thieves and drug addicts who
hung out in the grottos of the Corniche along the seafront. In 1990, in th
same neighborhood, groups of young Islamic fundamentalists launched
series of reprisals following an early morning attack on a muezzin. Sever
bars and nightclubs selling alcoholic beverages were burned down. In Sep-
tember and October 1993, in order to fight the noise and accidents cause
by express buses, young people living in the rues Valmy and Petersen in th
center of Dakar blocked the area and forced the governor of the region t
order the vehicles off the streets.
By focusing their activities on the level of the neighborhood, cultural
and athletic associations challenge, to a certain extent, residual colonial
institutions, and sometimes even national ones. Often these challenges
find symbolic representation in the renaming of streets to honor local fig-
ures. In the Medina and the Gueule Tapee/Fann-Hock area, for example,
streets that had been identified by letters of the alphabet ("B street," "G
street," etc.) now bear the names of soccer players or marabouts. These
new modes of identification both name and create new categories of socia-
bility, distinct from those of the nation or the ethnic group. In appropriat-
ing the management of urban space from the state and its subdivisions, the
cultural and athletic associations have, in effect, found a way to erase mem-

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
ory. By selecting their own past and their own "founding fathers," these
groups, and the larger movement that they represent, have thus produced
a private, local memory. Inscribing their own signs in the sand and on the
pillars, they have reconstructed the past for the sake of a socially significant
elaboration of their present.
The political expressions and social practices of young people are not
always, or entirely, motivated by idealism. The young Senegalese who
cleaned up the street and painted walls in 1990 were the very youths who
slaughtered Mauritanians in 1989. The accusations of critics who claim that
young Africans have no anchor-point, that they express themselves merely
in order to destroy, and that they lack any positive mode of expression, are
not without merit. For many youths, idealism, nihilism, and sometimes
even pure, childish naughtiness seem to coexist. Their demonstrations,
even those whose principal idiom is violence, always have an element of
playing hooky (see Diouf 1996). It is difficult to account for this ambiguity,
except perhaps by trying to understand the territory in which both plea-
sure (leisure and clothing) and violence are situated in the most visible
way: on the bodies of young people and the ways in which they display
themselves (or are displayed) and exhibit themselves (or are exhibited) in
the public arena.
Youthful Bodies: The Location of Pleasure and Violence, and

the Site of Agency
In most African societies, distress as well as success adhere to the body and
are read on the body, especially among young people.7 Clothed, adorned
with jewels, powdered, perfumed, and shaped, their bodies also bear the
scars left by the struggle for survival or the longing for "a good life"
through licit or illicit activities such as prostitution, vagrancy, or delin-
quency. By living life on the margin, young people abolish the gap between
adolescence and adulthood, and in some cases, between childhood and
adolescence. Sex and violence become rites of passage and initiation
which, like the new religious practices, produce a historicity of dissidence
and dissent.
By escaping the political and moral discourses that hemmed them in,
and by moving into the cracks opened up by the crisis of the state and soci-
ety, African youth has provoked an unprecedented moral and civic panic.
Young people are now seen and constructed as a menace, as much because
of their pleasures and leisure activities as because of the violence they can
manifest. These two aspects have become indissociable from them, with
their most evident expression in the AIDS epidemic that is ravaging the
continent. To kill, to experience violence and pleasure, to move along the
obscure paths of night and migration, of witchcraft, of the urban and rural
undergrounds--all these impulses produce new cultures, new sociabilities,

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
and new meanings of pleasure, life, and death.

The most tragic illustration of this situation is the crisis of the "penis
shrinkers" (r6tr6cisseurs de sexe) that shook West Africa from Senegal to
Cameroon during the 1990s. This phenomenon moved from one place to
another and ravaged, with brutality, horror, and foolishness, the cities of
these countries. Young people were accused by other youths of having
stolen their penises. In many cases, a hysterical crowd lynched the "guilty"
persons. It is difficult to account for such collective manifestations of pain
and cruelty solely by means of a psychologizing interpretive framework.
Neither can one be satisfied solely with explanations that refer to a mas-
culinity that is supposed to have been lost in African societies and the toll
that unemployment and the social elevation of women have taken on the
male. To move beyond these approaches and understand the conditions
under which such violent deviations came about, we must try to answer the
following questions. First, why has the economic, political, and social crisis
automatically and mechanically expressed itself in a cruel grammar of cas-
tration and death? And second, what accounts for such an obsessive focus
on sex, and in particular on the male sexual organ?
In some strange way, the penis seems to bear (in the literal and figura-
tive sense) the economic and social dream of success and the nightmares
of failure. Borne along by crazy rumors and an intimate acquaintance with
violence, these blind packs of humans followed a strange odyssey that
defies any easy analysis. Somehow the body is also perceived as the site on
which a youth culture, which is also a counterculture, is expressed.8 Pos-
tures and bodily gestures, like music and iconography, are part of this strug-
gle against the dominant culture. The body is a presence that serves as both
weapon and text (Barthes 1991:150-56). If we consider that countercultural
manifestations are above all a language that makes self-expression possible,
then the body can be seen as the main tool of young people, the only
resource at their disposal in the public space. In sensuality or in violence,
youth cultures in many African societies express their outrage and subvert
the social norms.
As actors and resources in the political, economic, and social registers,

as individuals tossed back and forth between supervision and subordina-
tion, on the one hand, and autonomy on the other, or between life at the
center and life on the margins, young people bear on their bodies, in their
heads, and in their hearts the most gaping wounds and the craziest dreams
and hopes of African societies. Combining violence, madness, and plea-
sure, sex and the temptations of religious chastity, the desire for auto-
chthony and the impulse to rip themselves away from the continent and to
erase all attachment to history and place, young Africans symbolize the
uneven trajectory of an Africa in search of its rhythm and its identity. Situ-
ated in a temporality both indigenous and global, they express longings
and demands that are much more creative than murderous.

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
References
Abdullah, I., and Y Bangura, eds. 1997. "Lumpen Youth Culture and Political Vio-
lence: The Sierra Leone Civil War." Africa Development 23 (3-2).
Carter, D. M. 1997. States of Grace: Senegalese in Italy and the New European Immigration.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cohen, A. 1969. Customs and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in
Yoruba Towns. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Coreno, T. 1994. "Guerilla Music: Avant-Garde Voice as Oppositional Discourse." In
J. S. Epstein, ed., Adolescents and Their Music: If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old,
189-224. New York: Garland.
Cruise O'Brien, D. 1996. "A Lost Generation: Youth Identity and State Decay in
West Africa." In R. Webner and T. Ranger, eds., Postcolonial Identities in Africa,
55-74. London: Zed Books.
Barthes, R. 1991. The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980. Translated by Linda
Coverdale. Berkeley: University of California Press.
de Boeck, F. 1999. "Domesticating Diamonds and Dollars: Identity, Expenditure
and Sharing in Southern Zaire." In B. Meyer and P. Geschiere, eds., Globaliza-
tion and Identity: Dialectics ofFlow and Closure, 177-209. Oxford: Blackwell.
de Latour, E. 2001. "Metaphores sociales dans les ghettos de C6te d'Ivoire."
Autrepart 18: 151-67.
Diouf, M. 1996. "Urban Youth and Senegalese Politics: Dakar 1988-1994." Public
Culture 19: 225-49.
Epstein, J. S., ed. 1994. Adolescents and Their Music: If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old.
New York: Garland.
Gilroy, P. 1994. "'After the Love Has Gone': Bio-Politics and Etho-Poetics in the
Black Public Sphere." Public Culture 15 (1): 49-76.
Giroux, H. 1994. Disturbing Pleasure. London: Routledge.
Grossberg, L. 1994. "The Political Status of Youth Culture." InJ. S. Epstein, ed., Ado-
lescents and Their Music: If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old, 22-44. New York: Gar-
land.
Hastings, A. 1997. The Creation of Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.
Honwana, A. 1999. Negotiating Post-War Identities: Child Soldiers in Mozambique

and Angola." Codesria Bulletin 1-2.
Kaplan, R. 1994. "The Coming of Anarchy: How Scarcity, Overpopulation, Tribal-
ism and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet."
Atlantic Monthly (Feb.), 44-76.
Marshall-Frantani, R. 1998. "Mediating the Global and the Local in Nigerian Pen-
tecostalism." Journal of Religion in Africa 28 (3): 278-315.
Maxwell, D. 2001. "'Sacred History, Social History': Traditions and Texts in the Mak-
ing of a Southern African Transnational Religious Movement." Comparative
Studies in History and Society: 502-24.
Meyer, B. 1998. "'Make a Break with the Past': Modernity and Postcolonial Moder-
nity in Ghanaian Pentecostal Discourse." In R. Webner, ed., Memory and the
Postcolonial: African Anthropology and the Critique ofPower, 182-208. London: Zed
Books.
Momoh, A. 1993. "The South-Western Nigeria Case Study." Paper presented at the
West African Long-Term Perspective Study, ADB-CINERGIE Conference, Oct.
11-13, Lagos.

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
Peel, J. D. Y 1995. "For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things. Missionary
Narratives and Historical Anthropology." Comparative Studies in History and Soci-
ety 37 (3): 581-607.
Postman, N. 1981. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte.
Richards, P. 1995 "Liberia and Sierra Leone." In O. W. Furley, ed., Conflict in Africa,
4-5. New York: Tauris.
.1996. Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone.
Oxford: James Currey.
Van Djik, R. 1998. "Pentecostalism, Cultural Memory and the State: Contested Rep-
resentations of Time in Postcolonial Malawi." In R. Webner, ed., Memory and
the Postcolonial: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power,155-81. London:
Zed Books.
Weinstein, D. 1994. "Expendable Youth: The Rise and Fall of Youth Culture." In J.
S. Epstein, ed., Adolescents and Their Music: If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old, 67-86.
New York: Garland.
Notes
1. For an apocalyptic reading of this situation, see Kaplan (1994).

2. "Jeunnesse, Espoir du monde" ('Youth, the Hope of the World,") was the
name of one of the most famous programs on Senegal's national radio in the
1960s. Even as the name has varied, broadcasts directed toward young people
have dominated African radio programming. Another trait common to African
countries is the construction of the national festival as "a festival of youth and
the army."
3. The coextensive nature of the definition of youth and the roles assigned by the
state in the course of this period can be seen is Cruise O'Brien's (1996) analy-
sis.
4. Hastings (1997) refers to such new constructions as "literary imaginations."

5. On the situation in Nigeria, see Momoh (1993:28): "The area boys as a social
category became preponderant, popularised and organised from about 1986
when the Structural Adjustment Programme took its full course. Hence today,
any form of crime or criminal in the entire South-Western Nigeria is identifi-
able or traceable to the area boys. The area boys are the equivalent of 'Yanba-
da' in Hausaland; they are also called allaayes, Omo oni ile (son of the soil, or
landlords) sweet urchins, government pickin, untouchables, or all right sirs."
On Liberia and Sierra Leone, see Richards 1995.
6. The Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil offers vivid illustrations of this process on
a daily basis.
7. See Gilroy (1994) on the changing meanings of the bodies of black youth and
his conception of the body as the "principal mark of identity": "It bears repeti-
tion that bio-politics specifies that the person is identified only in terms of their
body" (67).
8. See the collection of studies edited by Epstein (1994), especially the contribu-
tions of T. Cereno, L. Gossberg, and D. Weinstein.

146.141.13.72 on Fri, 26 Jun 2020 16:00:08 UTC
'REAL MEN REAWAKEN THEIR FATHERS' HOMESTEADS,
THE EDUCATED LEAVE THEM IN RUINS': THE
POLITICS OF DOMESTIC REPRODUCTION IN
POST-APARTHEID RURAL SOUTH AFRICA1
BY
ZOLANI NGWANE
(Haverford College)
ABSTRACT
An historical ethnography of generational conflicts in a rural community in the

Eastern Cape province of South Africa, this paper engages debates on the conse-
quences of global neo-liberalism in local contexts. Through cash from migrant
labor, rural householdheads exercisedpower over domesticeconomics.Ideologically
this power translated into the symbolic articulation of two institutions of social
reproduction-the school and initiation rite such that the educated and poten-
tially alienated subjects yielded by the former were resocializedthrough the latter
into local subjects of the chief and sons of their fathers. With rising unemploy-
ment rates since the 1980s,however, the older men lost the material base for their
monopoly over this symbolic structure. The generational conflicts that ensued
reflected at once the attendant contradictions in social consciousnessand conse-
quent strugglesto renegotiatethe symbolicpurchase of the relations between school-
ing and initiation.
Introduction
In the course of my fieldwork in South Africa in 1996/97 I visited

Cancele, a small rural community in the Eastern Cape Province, in
which I had lived on and off between 1978 and 1989. What drew my
attention almost immediately were unusually high levels of generational
conflicts, particularly between men of thirty-five years and older and
those from about seventeen to thirty years old. At the discursive level
the conflicts turned on an articulation, on the one hand, of images of
progress and modernization associated with schooling with, on the other,
images of masculine social subjectivity institutionalized in the male
initiation rite. For example, the older men disapprovingly referred to
the young men as 'the educated', 'the schooled', 'of the school', 'the
teachers', 'imiphunzo yentaba' (abortions of initiation), and 'girls'-thus
403
associating schooling with lack of proper manhood. The young men,

on their own part, appeared to appropriate some of the same images
like 'the schooled', 'the educated', 'the civilized' to refer to themselves-
clearly locating the concepts in a different semantic register where they
referenced positive and progressive identities-while reserving for their
elders the more pejorative terms such as 'barbarians', 'circumcised boys',
'simple natives', 'Xhosas', and 'boys with gray hair'. Here it is the lack
of proper schooling on the part of the older men that is associated
with improper manhood.
I should point out here that in general people at Cancele regarded
the school as one of their own local social institutions (alongside oth-
ers such as the chief's court and initiation rite) through which young
people were expected to pass in the course of their lives. All the old
men I interviewed recalled their own schooling experiences with fond-
ness approaching nostalgia, while the chief, and senior members of his
Court, were prominent figures in the school committee.2 Both parents
and young people saw education as an investment in the future and a
crucial resource in a changing environment. Given this background,
the problem that concerns me in this paper can be summed up in the
following questions. Why was schooling and images centered round it
in 1996 symbolically mobilized by older men at Cancele to signify what
they perceived as disobedience, lawlessness, and improper initiation on
the part of the younger men? Why and how did schooling, from the
perspective of the latter, become an icon for a masculine progressive
collective identity? Indeed, what can this particular conflict arising at
the intersection of schooling and initiation add to contemporary debates
on the problematic relationship between modernity and tradition, citi-
zenship and domestic reproduction?
This particular phrasing of the problem should distinguish the con-
cerns of this paper from the earlier literature on modernization or 'cul-
tural encounters' (Mair 1934, Malinowski 1936, Krige 1953) in which
the relationship between the school and local community was often cast
in binary categories such as 'Red' versus 'Schooled', 'Traditionalists'
versus 'Modernizers', 'Conservatives' versus 'Progressives', etc. (see Cook
1934, Hammond-Tooke 1962, Mayer 1962, Mayer and Mayer 1970,
Davis Jr. 1971, Saunders 1971). In most of this literature the school,
alongside the church, stood for the foreign culture of western moder-
nity and was sharply contrasted with primordial traditional values and
modes of socialization institutionalized in initiation rites and chiefly
courts. This approach relied on an oversimplified opposition between
tradition and modernity, which uncritically associates the former with
404
precolonial social institutions that were compromised or eradicated by

the latter.
In contrast, recent literature has persuasively argued for the ways in
which modernity itself, and the contradictions accruing with it, was
implicated in the invention, construction and imagination of the cate-
gory of tradition (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Dirks
1995). Here tradition embodies the political genealogy of the constitu-
tion of colonial subjects as barbarians and savages, that is, as both a
political and an ethical problem for modernity. By the same logic tra-
dition also betrays the discursive self-legitimation of the colonial regime
as a requisite civilizing mission (Scott 1995). Neither was this construct
an exclusive prerogative of colonial modernity, for at the hands of
emerging national elites tradition became one of crucial 'resources for
self-objectification' (Comaroff 1985) by means of which the postcolo-
nial became imaginable (see also Chatterjee 1986).
In other words, it has always been through the articulation of the
institutions of modernization with what came to be known as tradition
that the latter was at once produced, transformed and, in many instances,
reinvigorated and maintained. This is not to deny either the reality of
a precolonial moment or the specificity of traditions. It is simply to
emphasize the traces (and their social consequences) of conjuncture and
disjuncture, collusion and rupture that inscribe the relation of the pre-
colonial to the colonial, and of tradition to modernity. In the case of
rural South Africa in general, and Cancele in particular, the very extrac-
tion of men from rural economies and their insertion into the capital-
ist system as migrant laborers not only transformed but also helped
reproduce precolonial forms of gender inequality (Bozzoli 1987). In
other words, the resources accruing with modernity-in the form of
jobs-provided the very possible conditions of maintaining the lifestyles
people associated with tradition.
Following upon this line of thinking about tradition and modernity,
I will approach the problem of generational conflicts at Cancele his-
torically, by looking at ways in which local forms of gerontocracy and
patriarchal control rested on a rearticulated symbolic relation among
institutions of social reproduction such as chiefly court, schooling and
initiation rite. Where earlier the school had represented a hole in the
social structure through which young people leaked out into the wider
world and away from control of their parents, the initiation rite later
resolved the problem by putting a local mark on the bodies of young
men leaving school-entrusting them with the responsibility of invest-
ing their future earnings in their fathers' homesteads. On the ability of
household heads to maintain their control over this complexly articu-
a 405
lated structure of social reproduction depended both its semantic sta-

bility and the concealment of its inherent contradictions, a control that
rested precariously on the vicissitudes of the migrant labor market.
Through the proceeds of their employment, household heads mono-
polized control over the labor of women and children to reproduce
domestic economies based on cattle and small-scale farming. Further,
by sponsoring the schooling of their children, and the initiation cere-
monies for their sons in particular, these older men were investing in
the future of these domestic economies over which they hoped to retain
control even past their working years. My main argument is that the
generational conflicts I observed at Cancele in 1996 reflected shifts in
power relations within local institutions of social reproduction precipi-
tated by nation-wide labor cutbacks that peaked in the mid 1980s, leav-
ing a lot of older men from Cancele unemployed and young men of
school-leaving age with no job prospects. For the older men this meant
that they could no more reproduce the conditions of their control over
domestic economies. Marginalized by the outside world of work, and
thus facing the impossibility of their own future as household heads,
the younger men searched for alternative ways of constructing mas-
culinist identities by rearticulating the symbolic relation of schooling to
initiation in ways that challenged their social infantilization in the com-
munity. In short, I situate the generational conflicts at Cancele in his-
torical shifts within and across local social institutions on the one hand,
and between these and the larger context of national politics and global
capitalism on the other. This approach to the problem views both the
school and institutions such as the chiefly court and the initiation rite
as constituent parts of a single, though by no means self-enclosed, world.
Within this local world each of these social institutions derived its pri-
mary meaning or value in the manner in which it was structurally artic-
ulated with the others.
The Social World
One of the smaller wards forming the district of Mount Frere, Cancele
is a thin ten-kilometer stretch of homesteads lining the feet of the
Drakensberg mountain ranges. Groups of refugees escaping from the
upheavals in Zululand settled in the area in the middle of the 19th
century. The largest body, the Bhacas (refugees), was politically united
under a paramount chief who ruled through subchiefs and headmen,
most of them members of his royal clan. The stronger Bhaca immedi-
ately took under their control the few non-Bhaca clans who were earlier
settlers in the area. For the most part the Bhaca left these clans under
406
their own chiefs who acted as subordinates of the paramount chief

while remaining relatively marginalized from the center of Bhaca pol-
itics. The Zizi of Cancele were one of these smaller subordinate clans.
When the Bhaca came under Cape colonial rule in 1876 their para-
mount chief was made subordinate to a resident magistrate, curtailing
his power and that of his subchiefs. Named Mount Frere after Sir
Bartle Frerc, then Governor of the Cape Colony, the area together
with other territories on the North Eastern border of the Colony, was
consolidated into the Native Reserve of the Transkei which became the
first 'independent' homeland of South Africa in 1976. Following suc-
cessive corrupt and dictatorial regimes the homeland fell apart in the
1990s, was later reincorporated into South Africa, and now forms part
of the Eastern Cape-one of the poorest Provinces in the country.
Consistent with their precolonial experience under the Bhaca para-
mountcy, the Zizi were further marginalized from the center of polit-
ical power by not being represented in the District Council set up to
advise the magistrate on matters pertaining to natives.
The Methodist Church opened the first school at Cancele in the late
19th century. In the early 1950s, following the Bantu Education Act,
the control of black education was legislatively transferred from the
churches to the South African government. From this point on, a new
school building was erected outside the church property and the church
itself lost control over the school while the participation of the local
community was enhanced through a system of school committees with
certain powers over the management of the school. Over the years the
school has grown from a primary to a junior certificate level. In 1996
the Department of Education approved plans to upgrade to a High
School.
Although education for blacks was not compulsory, parents, who
regarded schooling as an investment in the future of their children,
enforced school attendance. Most people in the community would have
had schooling up to the sixth year (standard 4). Those who passed
Junior Certificate would either proceed to other places for high school
or drop out to enter the labor market. A few miners who dropped out
after standard four in about 1988 continued with private studies in the
mines and two of them were completing High School studies in 1996.
Men tended to leave school earlier than women. The latter generally
stayed on until they finished the Junior Certificate, after which most
would go on to high schools elsewhere and then proceed to teacher
training, catering or secretarial colleges, or straight to the job market
where most became tellers in stores or domestic servants.
407
As in other rural communities in South Africa most able-bodied men

from Cancele worked in the mines, coming home for short spells during
the longer December holidays. The men who were constantly in the
community were the old and sickly or otherwise unemployed. By the
middle of the 1980s the ranks of the unemployed had increased rapidly
as people lost their jobs through a series of retrenchments and the col-
lapse of the civil service in the Transkei in the build-up to elections in
1994. By 1996 there was an increased co-residence of young and old
men in the community, as more and more school graduates were not
finding employment. At the same time there was a steady rise of job
opportunities for semi-skilled young women in small sectors such as
grocery stores and beauty salons in local towns as well as domestic and
secretarial service for a growing post-apartheid black middle class.
Thus within a space of twenty years Cancele went through a radi-
cal demographic and economic shift-an increased number of jobless
men (old and young) and an unprecedented control by women of a
crucial resource (money) in the reproduction of homesteads. A remark
by an old man captures the ambivalence of this situation succinctly:
'Men used to stock byres with cattle, now women are filling houses
with furniture
Public Spaces and the Construction of Social Subjectivity
a) The Chiefly Court
Historically, the chiefly court exercised some political control at

Cancele and served as the link between the community and the wider
context of regional and national politics.' In regard to this wider con-
text the chiefly court marked subjecthood for local people. For exam-
ple, since most people in the community would not have had their
births or marriages registered, a letter from the chief was a handy tes-
timonial in applications for an Identity Document or divorce in cases
of customary law. The chiefly court also heard and ruled on cases not
considered serious enough to warrant a report to the paramount chief
or police-theft, fights, disputes over property, etc. It also allocated
land for cultivation and homesteads to new families. The post-apartheid
government mailed the new South African Identity Document care of
the chief who then distributed them among the local people. These
small administrative responsibilities went a long way to consolidate the
symbolic value of the chiefly court particularly in the uncertain days
of the ANC's anti-chief modernist rhetoric.
408
By local standards, therefore, the chiefly court was an effective source

of power. It was a public space upon which individuals availed them-
selves of public justice. Besides this political prominence, the chiefly
court also had an appropriative power on the economic resources of
individuals and households. Through its power to impose fines on
offenders and the almost obligatory gesture of bringing something to
the chief by those with legal matters to process, the chief has been able
to maintain the members of his court with a constant supply of beer
and an occasional feast. This made the chiefly court also a daily leisure
spot for older men, and a source of irritation for women who often
had to attend to such community services as repairing school and clinic
buildings without the help of the men.
The seeming openness of the chiefly court as a public space did not
extend to its composition, however, since only certain social subjects
could become 'inkundla' (the court)-older male household heads. Thus
initiation, as the mark of entry into manhood, was not enough to qualify
one as a political subject. One also had to have further subject-constituting
peripherals such as cattle and a household. Younger unmarried men
without wealth or independent homesteads were thus excluded from
membership to the chiefly court.
In 1990 this political structure was put to a severe test. The crisis
started in mid-year when supporters (mostly women and young peo-
ple) of the recently unbanned African National Congress (ANC) called
a community meeting at the school in which they resolved to form
a local branch of the ANC. Following the meeting the crowd sponta-
neously marched through the community, demanding the demolition
of the chiefly court and its replacement with a democratically consti-
tuted civic structure. When the chief and many of the older men con-
fronted the march they were stoned and had to run for shelter into a
nearby house. Having lost the battle the chief and his men called in
the police after the marchers allegedly burnt down a store owned by
one of the chief's supporters. Almost all the women in the community
were loaded into police trucks and sent to Mount Frere for detention.
The case against them was later dismissed. Shortly after this an ANC
branch was launched and a new civic structure, named SANCO after a
national parent body, the South African National Civic Organization, was
set up. In the meantime the chief and his coterie of older men lingered
on, at one point unsuccessfully setting up a rival political organization.
Two related problems led to the breakdown of the ANC/SANCO
coalition and the comeback of the chiefly court. The first problem had
to do with lack of clarity over matters of jurisdiction, with both the
409
ANC and SANCO claiming responsibility over the area of governance

previously covered by the chiefly court. Leadership and administrative
inexperience, as well as personality differences, fuelled the ensuing inter-
nal conversation into a protracted conflict that divided people and weak-
ened the coalition. The second problem had to do with the ANC and
later the government's own vacillating policy in regard to chiefship and
traditional leadership. Shortly after its banning in 1990 the ANC had
committed itself to a three-tier structure of governance at the bottom
of which were to be 'democratic local authorities' or councils. Many
people saw these local structures as replacements of chiefship, an insti-
tution with a deep history in both colonial and apartheid politics.
Although the institution of chiefship is not mentioned in the new con-
stitution the government, amidst strong resistance from chiefs all over
the country and a realization that they had a formidable credibility in
many places, has shifted its policy on this institution 'from antagonism
to guarded support.' These two factors, internal problems within the
ANC/SANCO coalition and the changing position of the govern-
ment on the institution of chiefship, facilitated the restoration of the
chiefly court at Cancele. Today the ANC and SANCO at Cancele exist
merely as names and the day to day management of community affairs
has once again devolved upon the chiefly court which received a final
stamp of legitimacy with the formation of the government-supported
national Congress for Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa)
and the virtual constitution of the chief as a civil servant under gov-
ernment pay.
b) The School Meeting

The school constituted another public space at Cancele. A school
committee comprising a number of annually elected members of the
community and the teaching staff met at regular intervals. The chief
and some of the influential older men have always been members of
this committee. Unlike the chiefly court, however, the school commit-
tee was open to women and tended to be more diversified. Members
of the committee were voted in by a parents' meeting in which women
always were in the majority, particularly when most men still had jobs
outside the community. Among other responsibilities, the committee
ratified the expulsion of pupils and the hiring of teachers, and over-
saw the general maintenance of the school property.
In addition to the school committee there were also occasional par-
ents' meetings to which the committee and the principal gave reports
410
and which also approved important schemes like erection of additional

buildings, plans for high school and expenditure of school fees. Parents'
meetings also had power to decide on financial and labor contributions
by the community to meet the school projects. These meetings were
called rather randomly at the discretion of the principal. These gen-
eral meetings had a reputation for turning into uncomfortable con-
frontations, with parents complaining about the behavior of teachers
or challenging some decision of the school committee. Because of their
size these meetings could also digress into a discussion of community
matters that might not have much to do with the school. Unpredictable
as they were, these meetings were, however, important sources of legit-
imacy for the school and gave indispensable stamps of approval for its
projects.
The Chief, the Missionary and the Principal: Tensions and Collusions of
Social Power
For various reasons the school meetings, as a public space, seem to

have represented a certain threat to the chiefly court. First, their egal-
itarian constitution tended to embolden the female majority to voice
their dissatisfaction with 'the men who spend their days drinking at the
chief's place instead of helping mend the walls of the primary school."
There is thus a sense in which the school meeting provided a possible
site for the critique of the status quo by voices not represented in it.
Second, the power these meetings sometimes exercised, particularly in
regard to the appropriation of community resources in the form of
financial, labor and related contributions, threatened to transgress into
the jurisdiction of the chiefly court which had the right to appropriate
surplus value of all sorts from the community. Third, there was a widely
assumed regulation (for which the principal credited the District Education
Head Office), whose justice and logic were lost to most of the men,
that school meetings took priority over those of the chiefly court. This
meant that the principal did not have to come to the chief to 'ask for
a date,' but, complained some men, 'merely informed him that on such
and such a date there would be a parents' meeting.'
In many ways the school/chiefly court tension noted above has a
genealogy extending back to the earlier historical conflicts between the
chief and the missionary, conflicts that were often embodied in two
rival institutions-the school and the chiefly court. As an arm of the
civilizing project centered in the mission station, the school was por-
trayed by the missionaries, and experienced by the locals, as a site for
411
reconfiguration of native bodies (drills and uniforms) and a modification

of their habits ('there are certain things an educated person cannot do')
whose purchase was a transformation of social relations and the requi-
site world view ('Only God has the power to make rain') (see Comaroff
and Comaroff 1992). In most of these cases the teacher and the mis-
sionary were the same person. In other words, in the earlier part of
the mission work schooling and conversion tended to merge together
into a package of the civilizing effort:
What is clear from the outset is that most LMS missionariesprotest against attempts
to draw a sharp dividing line between preaching and teaching, since there is no
such line in their own practical experience (LMS 1923: 31/31).
Since at this early stage the missionary effort was largely directed at
penetrating and transforming the everyday forms of social life (Comaroff
and Comaroff 1992), the chiefly court, whose own power rested on the
management of precisely the same terrain, emerged as the strongest
rival to the missionary enterprise. The mission, with its large tracts of
land, and in some instances its own cattle, posed almost as an alter-
native society with its own chief in the person of the missionary. Cook,
who studied schooling among the Bomvana people of the Transkei puts
the tension clearly:
The two most important influences in the question of leadership ... are repre-
sented by the missionaries,the spearhead of de-tribalizing influences,and by the
chiefs, the bulwarks of old tribalism. They have been, unfortunately, in active
opposition to one another from the earliest days ... (Cook 1934: 41).
As the relationship between the church and education changed over
time, so did the tension between school and chiefly court take on a
different form. Many missions lost their control over schools in South
Africa both because of growing financial constraints and as a result of
the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which transferred control of all Black
education to the state. Also, as training for native clergy became more
available, the white missionaries were gradually replaced by rotating
black ministers who stayed in the community for short periods. The
school, without the visible hold of the church over it, and in spite of
being a tool of an even more insidious force, became relatively avail-
able for reinscription with other institutionalized meanings. As the
erection and maintenance of schools became a responsibility of local
communities and as principals, like the new black ministers, turned itin-
erant, the school became open to new influence by the chiefly court
which had survived its nemesis, the missionary. Thus, contrary to some
accounts which privilege the historical successes of the missionary effort
412
over the 'old tribalism' represented by the chief, in places like Cancele
the introduction of Bantu Education opened up opportunities for local
authorities to attempt some control over the school.
The point of this historical sketch is to show that while early in its
history the school was, together with the church, 'not of this world,'
later it became just one in a number of local institutions. This change
came about as a result of a distance, ideological and material, which
developed between the mission and the school, a distance due in turn
to alterations in both the material and the legal situations of the mis-
sion. Once schooling became one of the experiences children went
through, the tension between the school and community took on a
different form. This time it became a tension within a single world, a
tension in people's consciousness of their world which, even as they
were making and remaking it in their everyday lives, was also already
being opened up and reconfigured by the outside world of national
politics and global capital. This outside world did not invade the local
world overnight. It had already become symbolically constituted, locally,
by the school, and in this situated ideological and material iconic form
that same outside world was also being reconfigured and implicated in
the generation of forms of signification that would be crucial in the
reproduction of the local world.
It is important that this symbolic value of the school in the making
of the local world be seen in conjunction with its perceived role as a
point and process of production of translocal subjectivities, the reach
of whose journeys was to be wider than the horizons of the tradition-
ally possible.' This helps put the conflict between old and young men
at Cancele in a broader perspective. The complaints leveled against the
teachers were not so different from the labels tagged on the young
men. In both cases the school was constituted symbolically as a threat
in so far as it gave young people mobility and thus freed them from
the control of their parents. Educated young people often did not, like
young mineworkers for instance, invest their income in cattle, which
were both wealth and a symbolic capital presided over by their fathers.
On the contrary, educated youth, when successful, tended to settle in
towns and kept their income to themselves.
This ambivalent location of the school in the local symbolic struc-
ture-as both a means of escape and a necessity-was, therefore, not
new. Why then did it become so sensitized in the 1990s? This ques-
tion takes us to the center of the conflict between old and young men
at Cancele, a conflict that turned on the relation between schooling
and initiation as related institutions of social reproduction. The fol-
413
lowing section looks further at the social dislocations brought about by

unemployment and their effects on the symbolic relation of schooling
to initiation. In order to do so, however, we first need to answer the
question: how did the school, an icon of the undoing of traditional cul-
ture, become, at the same time, a central element in the reconstitu-
tion-imagined and otherwise-of such traditional culture?
Initiation and the Socialization of Educated Suf?jectivities
a) The Ritual
Historically a subject of major theological disputations by mission-

aries and a source of logistical nightmares for the school calendar, ini-
tiation rites in most of the Eastern Cape have come a long way to
adjust to an annual cycle thoroughly remapped by the temporal logics
of modernity. Moved from its traditional winter time-hygienically
preferable for healing wounds, but impossible to fit within the short
winter school holidays-initiation rites now mostly take place during
the longer December school break.
In general the Bhaca did not practice initiation. It is not even clear
if they, like the neighboring Pondo, abandoned the practice in the
upheavals of the 19th century as some scholars have suggested (Hunter
1936; Hammond-Tooke 1962). A few non-Bhaca chiefdoms in the area,
like the Zizi in Cancele, practiced the ritual. It is possible that in such
areas whose chiefs were marginalized in Bhaca politics the ritual became
a means by which chiefs consolidated their political and symbolic power
within their constituencies.
Traditionally the ritual centered on the person of the chief whose
permission the parents of the initiands had to solicit (cf. Comaroff 1985).
He allocated sites for the seclusion huts and decided on the two most
sensitive appointments in regard to the ritual-ingcibi (surgeon) and
ixhwele (medical expert). He also influenced the appointment of the
two men who would be the initiates' principal guardians during their
seclusion, and oversaw the building of the seclusion hut and the admin-
istration of defensive medicines to protect it from witchcraft. This was
the first stage of the ritual during which the initiates still lived in their
homes, spending their days hauling wood they would later use for fuel
during seclusion.
After about two weeks the second stage began with circumcision and
the novices started their seclusion period, which would last for about
four to six weeks. During this time the chief disappeared from the
414
scene, hardly visiting the seclusion hut. The people who frequented the
hut, required to do so as part of their pedagogical responsibility to the
novices, were initiated men up to middle age. Younger initiated men
helped with the cooking and provision of wood and water. All these
men were responsible to the village elders who only came to the hut
on occasional inspection trips on behalf of the chief. No one knew the
reasons behind the chief's avoidance of the seclusion hut.
The chief reappeared at the third stage of the ritual when the ini-
tiates were led back to the village. The procession from the river, where
the novices would have had their white ochre washed ofl' and a red
one applied, was very slow, with men moving in a tight circle around
the novices, singing, dancing and mock fighting. Usually the only one
on horseback, the chief would ride behind and along the procession
changing sides regularly like a sheep dog. Now and then he would take
off at high speed to the settlement and back, repeating the same thing
until the procession reached the settlement. This was also the only occa-
sion when the chief would publicly carry his shotgun, 'intonga ycnkosi'
(the chief's stick) as he called it, a relic that came down the royal fam-
ily for most of the twentieth century. Several times along the way he
would fire a shot, bringing the procession to a momentary halt and
silence. These violent interjections seemed like calculated reassertion of
chiefly power following its marginalization during the preceding seclu-
sion period. The gunshots might even have been a public demonstra-
tion of the chief's monopoly of legitimate violence. This was the moment
at which the potency of the chief, the social father of the newly made
subjects, was most dramatically displayed.
This display of paternal power, however, came after a period of
intense vulnerability for the chief. As a father to the novices, and thus
a begetter of social subjects, any serious complications during their
seclusion would be a liability on both his power as a father and his
legitimacy as the protector of his people. Witchcraft was the major
source of worry for the chief in this regard. Although the initiation site
was outside the jurisdiction of witches (ixhwele saw to this), a skilled
witch could either bribe a man to smuggle a dangerous potion into the
hut or she (very infrequently were men witches) could secretly rub it
on an unsuspecting man who would then carry it into the hut. The
men themselves posed another danger to the initiates. Should anyone
who had had sex within a day get into the hut the impurity would
inflame initiates' penises.
For these reasons entry and exit procedures were highly ritualized.
The gatekeepers, the people who made sure that everyone entering the
seclusion hut was clean and that those leaving did so without taking
415
away anything which might be used to bewitch the novices were, how-
ever, the very same men. The chief had thus to delegate the protec-
tion of his brood to people who could potentially cause it serious harm.
Given this situation, the dramatic display of triumph by the chief at
the end of the process is understandable. It was not only a celebration
of victory but also a warning and an assertive closure to the period
when his power as a protector of the community was threatened by
his male subjects.
More than a power struggle between the chief and adult males, ini-
tiation was the birthing of social subjects and therefore a critical moment
in social reproduction. As a construction of socially legitimated sexual-
ized subjects the ritual was also a form of control on the reproductive
potential of young people. It was here too that the ambivalence asso-
ciated with young people's sexuality was both displayed and resolved.
As boys, their sexual energy could be dangerous because the boys
themselves were located on the margins of social constraints. As men,
however, their sexual energy was a positive, if controlled, reproductive
potential. From this perspective it is obvious that for the process to
achieve its end it had to be controlled by the chief and the hierarchy
of men. It is this hierarchy that was being reproduced and naturalized
at that point. Men were being made.
If initiation, as this reading has suggested, was a productive process
through which society continued to be the same all over again, how
was this related to the symbolic character of the school as the open-
ing up, and breaking down, of precisely such a social whole? In other
words, how did the two relate?
b) Èducated ... Good; Educated and Man... Better'
Although teachers have traditionally come from outside the com-

munity,' this in itself was never an issue for complaints. Neither did
people make much of the corporal punishments, sometimes highly
incommensurate with the offence, which teachers notoriously inflicted
on students. The image of the teacher as a disciplinarian and enforcer
of correct behavior was widely applauded by parents. Recurring com-
plaints against teachers had to do with their behavior in relation to
accepted local standards of civility: 'Uphakamile lowo' (that one thinks
highly of himself), 'usisifundiswa esizigqatsayo' (she is the 'show off' type
of educated), or 'imfundo imkhuphe ubuntu' (education has purged human-
ness out of her). People were also very critical of teachers who did not
participate in local social ceremonies like initiation celebrations, funer-
als and weddings,' or who did not stop and greet people they passed.
416
This behavior was criticized as being 'educated', 'showy', and

These complaints seemed to reflect the community's ambivalence towards
the kind of translocality and independence the teachers as schooled
subjectivities represented. It was not merely as role models for their
children that parents looked at teachers with such critical eyes, but pre-
cisely because their status as migrants mirrored what would become of
their own children. Education meant both physical and potential ideo-
logical departure from the community. It was in this sense that the
teachers were constantly viewed as potentially antisocial. The people
were more sensitive to the behavior that suggested that the teachers
had risen beyond the local ways of life, that they did not belong to
the community.
The school was, however, more than a space in which local chil-
dren were turned into citizens of a larger society; it was also a point
of entry into, and reception by, the local community of the politics and
commodities of that wider society. Homeland and, in recent years,
regional and national elections were held at the school. Occasionally,
women would assemble at the school for a demonstration by some
company of a new line of products-pots, sheets, etc. Before the com-
munity built its own clinic district health officials used the school build-
ings for mass inoculations and irregular lessons on basic hygiene. It was
clear that the school had other significatory capacities, which were not
exhausted by reference to the local alone. In practice this meant that
the symbolism that the school accrued from its articulation with other
social institutions (such as initiation) was never 'exhausted' semantically
by those local institutions, nor was the symbolism stable and unchang-
ing. Rather the symbolism was always open to new interpretations from
outside the local community-a reinscription of other values. This sym-
bolic 'inexhaustibility' made the school all the more ambivalent in its
relation to the local politics of social subjectivity.
The central issue here turns on the relations between schooling and
initiation as processes inscribing not only the same category of people
but also the same bodies. It is not a question of juxtaposing schooled
with.initiated subjects, but rather one of the convergence of two processes,
two systems of codification, on the same bodies. This alone should warn
us against a tendency to assume that schooling would maintain a con-
stant and singular meaning prior to its being experienced socially.
Schools are not just the foreign institutional marks of modernity and
its transformative power over local cultures. Over time they become
incorporated into the world of local people, and, when looked at from
within such a world, their relationship with the general culture becomes
417
markedly different. In the present case school and initiation played

related roles and occupied, arguably, the same conceptual space in the
local cosmos: they both stood in a ritual relation to the community.
While initiation, particularly in its liminal state, staged a simulated
drama of social contradictions and conflicts, it also, in its final phase,
dramatized renewed confidcnce in, and restored legitimacy to, social
hierarchies. Closure here was as significant as the openness represented
by the wounded novices at an earlier stage. Closure is the very visible
productive moment of the whole process. It also resolved the potential
power and danger posed by males to structured social life embodied
by the chief. The whole community of males, in its solemn march from
the bush, was being resocialized as loyal and united subjects of their
chief. Every moment of social reproduction imbricates all social sub-
jects. It is in this sense that initiation, as a social reproductive process,
needed a definite start and a definite end, both of which were presided
over by the chief.
The school, however, appears to have given an indefinite expression
to the same social contradictions. Although the school year has a begin-
ning and an end, such an end is not determinate not only because of
its repetitive inscription on the same body over a long period but also
because, unlike initiation, its own graduates march the opposite way at
the end of their tenure. In short the school does not produce the kind
of subject the local community can retain. The main reason for this
counterintuitive course of African intellectual subjects is lack of oppor-
tunities in rural areas. By equipping them with skills and wants that
the local community could not absorb or satisfy, the school effectively
became a point of exit for many educated young people. In addition
to disrupting social continuity, this situation also compromised parents'
control over their children and their labor. As stated earlier, only one
of the teachers at Cancele was born in the community. There are about
20 other locally born teachers scattered all over the District. The few
insurance and furniture salesmen from the community resided in Mount
Frere and came to Cancele only occasionally to visit family. A num-
ber of literate women were hawkers who bought their goods in Durban
and sold them in stalls in Mount Frere. These people commuted reg-
ularly between Cancele and Mount Frere.
It was in this sense that the school was imagined as a constant 'flow'
through which young people 'leaked' out of the community both ideo-
logically and physically. The school, remarked a man opposing a sug-
gestion for further financial contributions by the community to the High
School bid, 'has its mouth towards our fields and its posterior across
418
the Cancele' (Cancele is also the name of the river). In this reckoning
the school feeds locally but delivers the manure in a foreign field. As
an opening in the social body the school is a tangible symbol of the
intervention of the outside world into the community. That is part of
the problematic nature of school-it makes insiders into potential inhab-
itors of other worlds. Shaped like a train, the school embodied the
almost uncontrollable mobility of subjects and commodities of modernity.
It was as a way of coping with this image of the school as a con-
stant 'leaking' spot in society that initiation received an added value.
From being merely a means of socially constituting local men out of
local boys it became also an institutionalized way of resocializing edu-
cated and potentially alienable young people. A local headman put it
aptly thus: `.sibanika uphawu lze?ekhaya'(we are branding them with the
marks of home). In other words, instead of retaining a binary opposite
relationship the two institutions together constituted a complex struc-
ture of symbols upon whose manipulation depended the control of the
means of social reproduction.
Thus, just as going to school for boys was being taken for granted
as inevitable, it became equally necessary that they also be given a
social identity which would make their participation in local adult soci-
ety imaginable. In other words, because of this character as a perma-
nent 'flow', the school had to be controlled, if not in practice at least
symbolically. There had to be a way of confining it into a definite
semantic space in which its own 'mystery,' if it proved uncontrollable,
could at least be attributed meaning. The point was never to eject the
school but to incorporate it into the semantic structure, to control it;
and, as we have seen above, the chiefs at Cancele have tried over time
to associate themselves with the school. As long as this symbolic rela-
tion among social institutions and subjects remained constant, life was
normal. As long as the antisocial propensities of young people and the
school continued to be ritually mitigated, perhaps contested, through
initiation, the status quo prevailed. If it was good to be educated, it
was even better to be a man and educated.
Migrant Labor and the Economics of Tradition

As long as the symbolic, albeit always tenuous, balance between the
'bleeding out' of the community (through the school) and its ritual
renewal and reconstitution (through initiation) held, the threat represented
by the school remained unarticulated and initiation itself did not appear
to have anything to do with schooling. Such a balance, however,
depended on the ability of the community's elderly males to retain con-
419
trol of the means of social reproduction. If investment in the school-

ing of one's sons meant improving their chances of success in the world,
then further investing in their initiation meant a claim on the proceeds
of their prospective employment. Indeed, if schooling accounted for a
large part of a household's expenses, the initiation ceremony was a par-
ticularly spectacular display of the economic implications of producing
new male social subjects. Money had to be paid to the surgeon and
medicine man and each family had to supply food for the initiates and
all their teachers throughout the seclusion period. The most dazzling
display of expenditure was during the coming home celebrations, when
the new men would be furnished with new clothing, bedding, etc. Each
family lavishly provided food and drinks for the whole village for a day
or two, including a cow slaughtered for the initiate. The public 'spilling'
of a household's wealth on this occasion continued to mark the young
men, then in the process of becoming, as potential local subjects, a
potential that would become reality when they would in turn reinvest
their own earnings in the reproduction of the same wealth-hence
reawakening their fathers' homesteads.
Historically, what had made this investment on the part of fathers
possible was migrant labor. Through their monopoly over cash (from
their wages), absentee husbands and fathers could retain control over
domestic economies in two crucial ways. First, because of the poor ara-
bility of South Africa's rural areas like Cancele, cash became central
in subsidizing the declining output of subsistence farming. This included
paying for children's education. Second, their ability to convert their
wages into cattle-a traditional form of value by means of which women
were exchanged and boys' initiation rites underwritten-ensured the
domination of these working men over domestic economies and legit-
imated their claims to the future wages of their sons. Thus through
cattle and cash men could not only acquire women and rights over
their children, they were also able to preside over the transformation
of their sons into full social subjects through initiation. By putting a
local mark on schooled youth the pedagogic focus of initiation came
to rest on preparing them for the world of work-emphasizing the 'cul-
tural imperative' of converting the proceeds of their labor into 'tradi-
tional' forms of value-cattle-by means of which their fathers' legacy
would be perpetuated. In this sense also migrant labor underwrote an
order of gender relations which privileged men.
I have already indicated that the economic base for the production
of this traditional form of social value had begun to unravel in the
mid-1980s as men began to lose jobs. By the middle of the 1990s ini-
tiation ceremonies had lost their previous lavishness. Some parents
420
slaughtered a goat instead of a cow. In a few instances families post-

poned the coming-out ceremonies until they had enough resources. In
some cases the ceremonies were held retrospectively when the young
men themselves had the means to underwrite the costs.
Thus, by 1996 both schooling and initiation-previously rituals of
transition into a world of adulthood-had become dead-end streets,
semi-permanent spaces within which young men were no longer pas-
sive recipients of social branding with their eyes on the other side. With
no more clear exit doors, both schooling and initiation were mobilized
by these young men to renegotiate their position inside the community
and in relation to the wider world. The next section describes the
process by which this became possible.
Impossible Manhood and Masculinist Fantasies

The roots of the conflict I observed in 1996 date back to 1980 when
five local boys who were attending High School in another part of the
district were initiated together at Phalane, a Hlubi area near Matatiele,
about 40 kilometers from Cancele.10 The Hlubi initiation system has a
Sotho-Tswana linguistic base, making it almost totally incomprehensi-
ble to those initiated in the Xhosa-based system of Cancele. For this
reason, among others, when the initiates were brought back by a con-
tingent of men from Phalane the local men had to defer to the strangers
to preside over the homecoming ceremonies.
Under the Cancele system men dominated the homecoming cere-
monies-singing, dancing and staging stick fights-while the novices
remained quiet and hidden from public view. Under the Hlubi tradi-
tion, however, the novices were the most dominant participants in the
ceremonies. They publicly performed songs and recited praise poems
they had learnt while in seclusion. This invasion by a foreign system
caused a lot of tension. Not only was the chief left out of the process
but the local male community also felt marginalized. When the cere-
monies were over the local men refused to recognize the manhood of
the young men from Phalane, arguing that they were not properly ini-
tiated. The notion of 'school initiation' (ukweluka isikolo) was first used
at this time, probably to signify the potential danger that the status of
these young men entailed for the local system which, as we have seen,
was centered around a reproduction of the chiefly power. The notion
of school here was clearly used negatively and we may read it as the
beginning of a conscious articulation of the indeterminate position of
the school in people's consciousness of their world. 'Ukweluka isikolo'
421
would then mean a disruption of precisely that process through which

young educated boys were also made into social subjects.
The spectacle of performance and the colorful display of oratory that
characterized the Hlubi homecoming ceremonies became very popular
among local boys, while the fact that the young men who had brought
the new system generally kept away from drinking parties appealed to
a number of parents. In 1985 the first Hlubi initiation hut was built
at Cancele at the request of some parents. The chief, perhaps not want-
ing to alienate the parents, reluctantly gave his permission and granted
a site. Problems started to multiply. First, ritual experts who knew the
Hlubi system and men who would be part of the teaching in general
had to be imported and this started a territorial conflict with the locals.
Second, since the two systems had very different linguistic bases, the
local men were unable to dominate the everyday processes in the Hlubi
initiation hut and this tended to discourage them from attending. The
conflict between the two traditions developed to a point where at one
stage the Hlubis had to call in the police to restore order. Throughout
the 1980s the two traditions coexisted and generally tolerated each
other. There would be two initiation huts at any one time with pro-
ducts of each tending to keep to themselves.
The damage to the ideological framework upon which local politi-
cal power depended for legitimation had, however, been done. The
new initiation system not only decentered the chief and the political
structure he represented, but it also produced social subjects whose
position in political society was ambivalent at best. Here was another
practice that duplicated the work of the school in turning young people
loose from the authority of the community. In 1996 when I visited the
community there were thus two initiation huts at opposite ends of the
settlement, representing the two systems. Something else, however, had
changed remarkably. When I visited both huts I was immediately struck
by the absence of older men, between ages 35-45, a group that tradi-
tionally assumed the main pedagogical responsibility over the novices.
Both places were filled with young men, in their late teens and twen-
ties, who kept arguing with one another the whole night. I could hardly
hear what they were saying both because they were speaking very fast
and because they had developed an impressively extensive vocabulary
since the last time I was in the community. One of the traditional dis-
tinctions between the local and Hlubi systems is that the latter empha-
sized rhetorical skills while the former emphasized observation of ritual
procedures. For instance, both traditions shared a preoccupation with
the policing of entry and exit points from the seclusion hut. According
422
to the local system anyone coming into the hut had to bite a certain
tubor (Tambookie grass) as a way of cleansing themselves and to pro-
tect the novices. In the Hlubi system, however, a newcomer had to
count all the things he could think of that might be dangerous to the
novices and declare his intention to argue that he did not do any of
them. It was then up to the men already inside to take him up. These
arguments about entering and cleanliness took the better part of each
night. A person got in and out of trouble depending on his rhetorical
skills. This was an important development not least because of the
power of self-articulation, self-presentation, and self-construction with
which it endowed the young men.
Also, in 1996 both huts were completely bilingual and the novices
were taught both languages while the ritual procedures showed some
syncretic character. Both huts, however, kept their respective identities
as Hlubi and Cancele with novices on each naming the other tradi-
tion as their second language. The teaching of the novices was largely
done during the day by the two men in charge, while in the evening
the men argued among themselves, with the novices randomly called
upon to support one argument or the other. In between such argu-
ments the men taught the novices some praise poems. With more time
spent among the men the novices had more space to observe and mar-
ginally participate in ongoing discourses. This meant that by the time
the novices came out they were also extremely proficient in both lan-
guages, a goal that seemed to be at the center of the whole process.
These young men (from both traditions) distinguished themselves
from the older generation by claiming that their business was 'the mak-
ing of men' whereas the older generation knew only how to 'wound'
penises. The novices were told that they had not come here merely to
bring penises: 'A wound will not make you a man.' Unlike the older
men, these young men were less interested in the bodies of the novices;
only the two designated guardians could touch them. The older gen-
eration was accused of reducing initiation to circumcision, which, accord-
ing to the younger men, was only one, and not even the most significant,
part of the process. This shift from a concern with disciplining the
bodies of the novices to an emphasis on developing their rhetorical
skills is a significant clue as to the type of subjectivity the young men
saw themselves producing. The whole process was geared towards
constructing speaking subjects, which becomes very significant when
compared with the approach of the older generation in which empha-
sis was put on developing the novices' capacity to listen and recite back
lists of rules.
423
The gradual removal of older men from the space of seclusion and
their alienation in general from the initiation ritual happened rather
easily. First, the young men started using the foreign language as medium
of instruction and general discourse, and since the older men could not
understand it they were forced to retreat." Second, a growing anti-
youth sentiment among the older men following the arrival of the new
initiation system affected all young men across the board. A combina-
tion of this intensifying marginalization of all young males, an increas-
ing popularity of the Hlubi initiation system, and a conscious search
for alternative forms and spaces of self-expression by young men, led
to their unity and adoption of a bilingual approach to initiation.
The composition of this group of young men was also interesting.
Most of them were still students in the local school while the opening
of the high school drew many more young people from outside the
community. Most of these would be Hlubis from within the Mount
Frere district. A significant number of young teachers both at Junior
and High Schools were also part of the group. Some of the young peo-
ple in the group had dropped out of school before the fifth standard.
The high rate of unemployment also meant there were a large num-
ber of young people floating around the community. Initiation season
gave them all something to do, and guaranteed them free food.
As a male public space the hut was very democratic, but as a rit-
ual space it was more conservative than even the older men could take.
Close attention was paid to unbecoming behavior in the everyday life
of the men. All cases involving men, whether they occurred in the com-
munity or school were tried here. Men were supposed to behave like
educated people. The initiation was a school which instilled in them a
way of life which was different from that of the 'Xhosas' out there. A
teacher could take a student to task for unbecoming behavior observed
at school, and vice versa. So just as corporal punishment was being
abolished in schools, it merely relocated, but this time it applied both
to teacher and student.
This new male space was a remarkable development because unlike
other places in the region (McAllister and Deliwe 1994; Beinart 1982,
1986, 1988; Mayer 1971, Mayer and Mayer 1972; O'Connell 1980),
Cancele had had no distinguishable male voluntary associations since
at least the 1970s. Indlavini, which in the literature cited above referred
to a formal association, merely meant an initiated person who had not
yet become an old man. The only formal association was a soccer
team, which brought together men and boys. Thus the initiation hut,
a space already reserved for masculine identities and one located at an
424
ambivalent remove from the heart of social life, became a choice site
for the construction of new masculine identities. By thus occupying a
liminal space and turning it into a 'community of men', the young men
at Cancele not only held hostage the whole process of social repro-
duction but this very act dramatized a general sense of social canni-
balism riding in the wings of post-apartheid neoliberal capitalism.
Conclusion
I have shown that while the school at Cancele had come to be taken
for granted, this merely concealed a potent tension between schooling
and community (in the experiences of parents who were losing control
over the labor and persons of their children), and between the school
and the chiefly court (in their reflection of rival modalities for social
subjectivity). I argued that one of the ways in which these latent tensions
were dealt with and ameliorated was by reconstituting the initiation rite
as reclamation of the bodies and consciousness of educated young men.
As long as this held there was no expressed tension between school and
community. The uses of the concepts of 'school' and proper masculinity
by both old and young men in their conflicts in the 1990s expressed
a deeper sense in which the two institutions had become disarticulated
from one perspective and alternatively rearticulated from another.
From the perspective of older men the hegemony of young men over
the initiation rites amounted to a collapsing of schooling with initiation
or, as they put it 'the schooling of the initiation rite' instead of the
other way round. For older men the school, juxtaposed with incom-
plete manhood, referenced a perceived threat to their control of the
means of social reproduction while for younger men the school, juxta-
posed with proper manhood, referenced an alternative site for, and
mode of, producing social subjectivity: one which ameliorated both their
politically infantilized relation to older men and their economically dis-
advantaged relation to women. It was only in the running together of
the two fields, as was the case for older men too, that the younger
men could, at the same time, deal with their oppression by older men
and the loss of competition for productive labor to women.
NOTES
1. This paper was first presented at a conference on Education and Anthropology

held at the University of Chicago in 1998 under the sponsorship of the Spencer
Foundation. I wish to thank Jean and John Comaroff who gave comments and sug-
gestions at the early stages of the paper.
425
2. When the government approved plans to upgrade the local school into a high
school in 1996 the chief campaigned, but failed, to have the school named after him.
3. It is interesting to note here that modern furniture, because it homogenizesthe
enclosed space, altering its aesthetic value and limiting the range of possible modes of
its occupation, effectivelysubverts the gender-based differential distribution of human
beings on enclosed space in conservativerural communities.By converting their money
into furniture instead of cattle, working women were also negotiating their location
within the household.
4. In this regard it was comparable to the school.
5. This point was made by a women in a parents' meeting in August 1998. Since
she spoke out of turn, her point was not entertained by the meeting.
6. The notion of a pilgrimage or journey towards a commercialcenter as a defining
characteristic for peripheral intellectual subjects derives from Benedict Anderson 1992,
see pages 51-58.
7. Only one locally born person ever taught at the school. By 1996 there were
about five locally born teachers and they all worked in other schools in the district.
Most teachers preferred jobs outside their own villages in order to have some inde-
pendence from parents and other obligations.
8. There was always a critical shortage of human resources in such labor intensive
events, particularly since most able-bodied men would be in the mines at any one time
during the course of a year.
9. 'Ubulose'refers to a condition of being without identity. It probably derives from
the English word 'lost'.
10. It was a common practice for boys to elope to an existing initiation school with-
out informing their parents. In this case the Canccle boys went straight from school to
join their friends from Phalane who were being initiated over the December holidays.
11. Customarily, it is considered a serious offencefor a man to ask for translation.
This, of course, presupposes a homogenous language. When that presupposition fell
through the taboo remained in place but serviced a different cause.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Benedict
1983 ImaginedCommunities. London: Verso.
Beinart, William
1982 ThePolitical Economy 1860-1930.Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity
of Pondoland,
Press.
1986 'Worker Consciousness,Ethnic Particularismand Nationalism:The Experience
of a South African Migrant, 1930-1960'. Unpublished seminar paper pre-
sented at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town.
1988 'The Origins of the Indlavini'. Unpublishedpaper presented at the Southern
African Research Program Seminar, University of Bristol.
Bozzoli, Belinda
1987 'Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies', Journal of SouthernAfrican
Studies14.1: 139-171.
Chatterjee, Partha
1986 NationalistThoughtand the ColonialWorld:A Derivative Discourse.Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press.
Comaroff,Jean
1985 Bodyof Power,Spiritof Resistance:The Cultureand Historyof a SouthAfricanPeople.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comaroff,Jean and John
1992 Of Revelation and Revolution:
Christianity,Colonialism
and Consciousnessin South
Africa,vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
426
Cook, P.A.W.
1934 The Educationof a SouthAfricanTribe.Cape Town: Juta.
Davis, R. Hunt Jr.
1971 'School vs. Blanket and Settler: Elijah Makhiwane and the Leadership of
the Cape School Community', AfricanAffairs78.310: 12-31.
Dirks, Nicholas
1995 'The Invention of Modernity in Colonial India,' in Rosenstone.
Hammond-Tooke, W.D.
1962 TheBhacaSociety.Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger
1983 The Inventionof Tradition.New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hunter, Monica
1936 Reactionto Conquest: Effectof Contactwith Europeanson the Pondoof SouthAfrica.
London: Oxford University Press.
Krige, EJ.
1953 'Some Aspects of the Educational Pattern of the Bantu', Theoria15.
Mair, Lucy
1934 'The Study of Culture Contact as a Practical Problem', Africavii.4: 415-
422.
Malinowski,Bronislaw
1936 'Native Education and Culture Contact', International Reviewof Missions25:
480-515.
Mayer, Philip
1962 Townsmenor Tribesmen: Conservatismand the Processof Urbanizationin a South
AfricanCity.Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Mayer, Philip (ed.)
1970 Socialization: TheApproach from SocialAnthropology.London: Tavistock.
1980 BlackVillagers in an IndustrialSociety:
Anthropological on Labourin South
Perspectives
Africa.Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Mayer, Philip and Iona
1970 'Socialization by Peers: The Youth Organization of the Red Xhosa,' in
Mayer 1970.
1972 'Self-Organisationby Xhosa Youth Among the Xhosa-SpeakingPeoples of
the Ciskei and Transkei.' Unpublished manuscript. Grahamstown: Institute
of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University.
McAllister,Patrick and Dumisani Deliwe
1994 'Youth in Rural Transkei: The Demise of "Traditional" Youth Associations
and the Development of New Forms of Association and Activity, 1975-
1993', Instituteof Socialand Economic ResearchDevelopment StudiesWorkingPaper
No. 61. Grahamstown: Rhodes University.
O'Connell, M.
1980 'Xesibe Reds, Rascals and Gentlemen at Home and at Work,' in Mayer
1980.
Rosenstone, Robert A. (ed.)
1995 Revisioning History:Filmand the Construction of a NewPast. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Saunders, C.C.
1971 'The New African Elite in the Eastern Cape and Some Late Nineteenth
Century Origins of African Nationalism', The Societies of Southern
Africain the
19th and 20th Centuries, ICS Collected SeminarPapers.University of London.
Scott, David
1995 'Colonial Governmentality' SocialText43: 191-220.
South African Review of Sociology
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rssr20
“The Boy Has to Be a Man in Order for Life to

Start”: AmaXhosa, Black Boyhood Studies, and the
Anthropology of Boyhoods
Gcobani Qambela
To cite this article: Gcobani Qambela (2022) “The Boy Has to Be a Man in Order for Life to
Start”: AmaXhosa, Black Boyhood Studies, and the Anthropology of Boyhoods, South African
Review of Sociology, 52:2, 40-56, DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2022.2067592
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2022.2067592
Published online: 18 May 2022.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 415
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Citing articles: 1 View citing articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rssr20
SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY
2022, VOL. 52, NO. 2, 40–56
https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2022.2067592
“The Boy Has to Be a Man in Order for Life to Start”:

AmaXhosa, Black Boyhood Studies, and the Anthropology of
Boyhoods
Gcobani Qambela
Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Contemporary and historically focused social science studies of amaXhosa; boyhood;
amaXhosa (Xhosa) men have focused predominantly on Xhosa socialization; Black Boyhood
men attaining manhood through ritualised initiation (ulwaluko) Studies; the Anthropology of
and heterosexual homemaking (ukwakha umzi). These studies Boyhoods
have left critical knowledge gaps of the pre-initiation lives of
Xhosa men throughout the lifecycle, along with processes of 1) initiation is an event
socialisation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning over a
year (2013–2014) conducted in rural and peri-urban Peddie in the in the course of a
Eastern Cape, my ethnography shows the necessity of examining
the formation of Xhosa masculinities prior to ulwaluko. My
longer story of
research illustrates the importance of boyhood kwaXhosa. I argue masculine life from
that Xhosa masculinities are viable long before initiation and that
it is not in manhood that “life” starts for men as one of my birth to death; 2) there
research interlocutors, Mthuthu, alluded. My ethnography are other ways that
necessarily challenges recent theorisations and conceptualisations
of Xhosa masculinities as well as older canonical writings as far as manhood is assessed
they place primacy on the initiated Xhosa male phallus in the
attainment of masculinity. I argue for scholarly consideration of
and understood in the
the nuances and complexities of being a boy. Although there is a Eastern Cape; and 3)
developing corpus of work from Black Boyhood studies, I note
the limitations of this field especially for its rootedness in the we need to have a
North American Black boyhood experiences that do not have the more fluid
cultural context of ulwaluko. Ultimately, I argue for an
Anthropology of Boyhoods. Through concentrated effort on understanding of
boyhood, in the study of masculinities, ultimately we can attain
more contextual, varied and multifaceted experiences of how gendered
men experience masculinity across the life course. constructions such as
masculinities.
Introduction
All Black males need boyhoods: the foundational passion for learning … boyhood … is not
limited to a specific life phase. That is, while boyhood is a construct most identified with
the years of early to middle childhood … memories of a rich, meaningful boyhood—and
the experience of having our boyhoods acknowledged and embraced—serve us as Black
men throughout our lives, and keep us connected to creativity, wonderment and play.
(Dumas and Nelson 2016: 39–40)
CONTACT Gcobani Qambela qambela@gmail.com Department of Anthropology and Development Studies,

University of Johannesburg
© 2022 South African Sociological Association
SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 41
Writing in relation to education research in the USA, Dumas and Nelson (2016) share the
ways Black boys are imagined as adults and their childhoods and boyhood phase remains
“unimagined and unimaginable” (p. 28). As Black boyhood remains unimaginable, there is
a denial of the subjective experiences of Black boys as they come into themselves. As
hooks and Powell (2015) contend, there is often little interest in the boyhoods of Black
boys and the social preparations of Black boys into their social beings. Admittedly, the
initial focus of my research fell into this neglect of Black boyhood observed by Dumas
and Nelson (2016) as well as hooks and Powell (2015).
At the outset of my research, I sought to explore responsibility, vulnerability and risk in
the lifeworlds of Xhosa men living in the context of HIV/AIDS in a rural and peri-urban
context. Understanding the ways in which HIV/AIDS affects relational dynamics (Rice,
2014), I sought to understand through ethnographic exploration the adult lives of
Xhosa men living in the context of HIV/AIDS. Yet, as is common in ethnography, what I
sought to investigate was different to what I found on living and talking to people in
the particular context of my study. Connell (2009: 14) reminds us that in doing ethnogra-
phy well, one has to remain open to expected and unexpected experiences and infor-
mation. My focus in the process of doing fieldwork ultimately shifted to a focus on
boyhood and socialisation of Xhosa men.
Existing studies of amaXhosa men focus primarily on two aspects of their lives in
relation to manhood. The first relates to Xhosa men attaining manhood through ritualised
initiation (Douglas 2013; Kaschula 1997; Kepe 2010; Mfecane 2016; Mavundla et al. 2009;
Mhlahlo 2009; Mtuze 1976; Mtuze 2004; Ntombana 2011; Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016;
Sipungu 2021; Vincent 2008). The second relates to Xhosa men attaining manhood
through heterosexual homemaking by ukwakha umzi (building a homestead; Bank
2002; Mayer 1963; Mayer and Mayer 1971; Switzer 1993). Although illuminating, these
studies have privileged the lives of Xhosa men during, or post initiation—leaving us
with little knowledge of the pre-initiation lives of Xhosa men.
The disregard of Black boyhood, and in this particular paper, the boyhoods of amaX-
hosa men, is evident not only in the absence of literature, but further in social imagin-
ation. One of my primary interlocutors, 20-year-old Mthuthu shared,
People [growing up] said that a boy is not a person that you would have to tend after … a boy
is taken as a person who is not fully mature. For him to mature, he has to be a man and that is
when he will mature properly in the mind. A boy was rarely tended to a lot, because they said
a boy just does things [for no reason]—there is no mind, the boy has to be a man in order for
him to see that “yah, life is starting”
I contest Mthuthu’s experiences and early understandings that the boyhood phase should
be ignored. Rather, through ethnographic data1 and narratives of young Xhosa men col-
lected while living in rural and peri-urban Peddie in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, I argue
the boyhood phase is important and should not continue to be ignored in scholarship or
social imagination. What happens in the boyhood phase is important to the creation of
particularised adulthoods for men. Dumas and Nelson (2016) show that the experience
of boyhood is mitigated by many factors, such as gender, class and the historical,
1
The research made use of various anthropological research techniques including participant observation, informal and
semi-structured interviews as well as life histories among others. In this paper, I focus principally on data collected
through life histories, immersion as well as semi-structured interviews.
42 G. QAMBELA
economic and cultural context that one is reared in. Yet, a major limitation of Dumas and
Nelson’s (2016) work is the US centredness. My work fills an important gap by expanding
knowledge of boyhood beyond the particularised experiences of Black American boys.
Ultimately, I maintain that we need an Anthropology of Boyhoods. While important
subfields as the Anthropology of Masculinities and the Anthropology of Childhoods
and Youth exist, I argue, through the young amaXhosa men in my study that we need
an Anthropology of Boyhoods, and social science more expansively, that responds to
the nuanced specificities that come with the experience of being a boy, across
different cultural contexts.
We have to account for the early years in the lives of men. As humans, we are always
intimately involved in various social exchanges, explorations and (re)learnings. In
accounting for these exchanges across the life course, we can start uncovering the
roles of families, communities, peers, along with the political, economic and ecological
factors that shape the formation of masculinities and the work it takes after being born
to become a man in society.
Moving beyond US focus and depathologising Black African boyhoods

and masculinities
In order to be able to study the experiences of Black boys, and in this particular paper,
amaXhosa boyhoods, I argue we have to first depathologise Black boyhoods. Under apart-
heid, Shefer and Ratele (2011) argue, Black masculinity was constructed as dangerous.
These characterisations of Black masculinity have continued in the post-apartheid
context in South Africa (Shefer and Ratele 2011). As a result of such characterisations,
we have a limited scope of knowledge about diverse and varied expressions of Black mas-
culinities together with the processes through which Black men form their masculinities.
As Black masculinities are constructed as monolithic, the diverse ways in which Black men,
and Xhosa men here specifically express, learn and un/re/learn masculinities across their
life courses has remained underexplored, erased or simply ignored.
The experiences of Xhosa men and boys that I have painted mirrors a trend interna-
tionally in the treatment of Black boys. Drake (2016) writing about the contextual experi-
ences of Black boys in the United States observes that there are very few disciplines that
have or take seriously the study of Black boyhood. In much scholarship, locally in South
Africa and internationally more broadly as Drake (2016: 452) notes, Black boyhood does
not show up or exist until adolescence at which point Black boys show up as “problems”
and in “a perpetual state of crisis” (Drake 2016: 452).
There is a growing body of scholarship on Black urban youth lifestyles and experiences
(Motsemme 2002), yet it is important that we do not neglect the experiences of those
young people in rural and peri-urban contexts. We are lacking accounts of these young
people’s experiences of South Africa’s democracy (Zegeye and Motsemme 2004). We
need accounts of the contextual environments young people are produced in where
boys are not pathologised (Dumas and Nelson 2016). Under both apartheid and in the
colonial era, as Gqola (2009) shows, adult Africans across gender identity were often
deemed or designated “girls” or “boys” as a form of infantilisation to index power relations
between the coloniser and the oppressed. Asserting masculinity and manhood, therefore,
historically has been important in defying infantilising colonial and apartheid regimes and
did not necessarily always entail an indexing of patriarchal relations.
There is thus a particular historical context in the experience of boyhoods in South
Africa that is not represented in the unique context under which Black Boyhood
studies emerges in the US. Magadla and Chitando (2014: 189) correctly inform us that
the precolonial era, colonial era, apartheid era and the “postcolonial” era have greatly
affected the experience of masculinities. As Gqola notes, we have many untidy
moments in our past in South Africa, such as periods of jackrolling, where many Black
women were gang-raped and kidnapped in a period spanning over a decade. Importantly,
as a society constituted though violence, we have to ask the socialising impact that this
had on young boys and men watching and or participating in mass violence and rape
(Gqola 2007).
Gqola (2007: 120) asks:
… what (unintended) consequences for masculinities and femininities followed from this?
How much of what has become normal has some roots here?
Jewkes et al. (2015) argue men’s experiences in childhood are important, and that press-
ures from peer groups on boys and young men to exert violence work to legitimate vio-
lence as a social norm. Because gender is learned, enacted and embodied through
everyday interactions, we have to engage the vulnerabilities of boys in how they come
to form their masculine identities (Jewkes et al. 2015).
In gendering men, Gqola asks that we pay attention to “the common textures of
people’s lives and interiority”, meaning we have to move away from focuses on “the spec-
tacular” (Gqola 2009: 62) that tends to concern South African studies of masculinities, and
increasingly Black boyhood studies in South Africa as Motimele (2022) argues. Writing in
relation to Langa’s (2020) monograph on Black masculinities in Alexandra township in
Johannesburg, Motimele (2022) observes that, despite the promise of Langa’s (2020)
work to care for Black boys,
… the study of [Black] male experience—as this type of research claims to be concerned with
—as it relates to black boys and men becomes totalised by themes characterised by
deviance/deficiency: violence, hypersexuality, aggression, etc. … Langa (2020) chooses to
focus on absent fathers, risk-taking behaviours, preoccupation with sex and girls, imprison-
ment, performance anxieties—[which] don’t expand the field [of Black boyhood studies]
beyond “aberration”. (Motimele 2022: 4)
Motimele’s (2022) critique of Langa (2020) is further echoed by Siziba (2021), who notes
that Langa’s book paints a stereotypical picture of Black masculinities and boys in town-
ships. Writing as a Black young man living in a township, Siziba (2021: 72) concludes the
review by sharing concerns about the “stereotypes about black lives and black masculi-
nities that play into ‘exotic’ underpinnings of what it means to be a black man in town-
ships” and that he would be unsure about recommending Langa’s (2020) book to those
seeking in-depth understandings of Black masculinities in townships. In order to attempt
a “radical rereading” of Black boyhood, Motimele (2022: 4) asks that we exorcise Black
masculinities from both “its contact and construction through whiteness and its long
history of dispossession and dehumanisation within black communities”. To do this, we
have to take seriously the life courses of men and the developments of personalities
44 G. QAMBELA
and characters across that time. In the African continent, masculinity is often regarded
and treated as inborn despite the knowledge that gender identities on the continent
are “precarious and explosive” (Miescher 2007: 5). As such, as Connell (2001a) asks, we
have to study masculinities through a considered focus on social relations.
Although studies such as those focused on Xhosa men tend to focus on men’s relation-
ship with their phallus, early ethnographers as Gutman (1997) have shown that very few
men in actuality equate their manhood to their genitalia. Men’s experiences of gender are
always dynamic and fluid, and thus the phallus cannot continue to be the primary point of
reference. We cannot continue to make use of approaches that essentialise men while
ignoring the social relations and social structures that are central to the formation of
men’s identities.
What happens to men in boyhood is important for the adult lives of men and has
varying impacts on their lives. Studies in sexual and reproductive health suggest and
show that men who have early childhood experiences of sexual abuse are often more
likely to participate in ‘risky’ sexual behaviour in comparison to women counterparts
because they start sexual careers early and continue on into their thirties (Dudgeon
and Inhorn 2003). Throughout their ongoing development phases, men learn and pick
up social gender cues in the creation of their personhood based on their observed
relations (Kaufman 2001). The early years are critically important, for as Kaufman (2001:
6–7) argues: “by the time the child is five or six years old, the basis for lifelong masculinity
has already been established”. We have to understand the histories men carry from
boyhood and their various lived experiences across the life course—in this way, we under-
stand men as embodied and sensorial with experiences that they carry and have stuck
with them (Berggren 2014).
The importance of early histories of young men

How children come to be gendered and are enculturated into their gendered beings has
been a fascination of scholars for a long time (Nayak and Kehily 2008). The entry of young
people into selfhood as gendered beings is variously embodied in terms as baby, toddler,
infant and many others that are used across the life cycle to mark the bodies of young
people. In the Australian context, Connell (2009) has shown that socialisation of boys
into gender starts in boyhood. Despite this knowledge, we are still lacking studies of
the boyhoods and socialisation processes of Xhosa men.
Ramphele (2002) is one of the few anthropologists who comes close to doing this
when she writes about amanqalathi—who are the young boys who visit and sometimes
stay with the initiate at initiation school. Amanqalathi are exposed to various aspects of
initiation, although they are not directly under initiation. As Mfecane (2016) also writes,
the boys stay in the hut with the initiate, and by listening and observing, learn about
aspects of initiation without directly being under initiation. Yet, with both Mfecane
(2016) and Ramphele (2002) the role of being inqalathi is not fully explored and devel-
oped, thus depriving us of knowledge of cultural identity as a process of being and
becoming (hooks 1992).
Shifting life circumstances as Silberschmidt (2001) has written greatly influence the
lives of men and interact with men’s behaviours including in the sexual domain—yet
changes often go unexplored along with changing sociocultural factors. In rural areas
especially, there are strong interplays between gender and sexuality (Connell 2009).
Leclerc-Madlala (2008) observes that in rural contexts, often women and girls are sub-
jected traditional mores to govern their relations with other women and men as well
as different generations. In her work in St Wendolin’s in Durban, she notes the ideal of
isoka. This isoka ideal entails men having multiple ongoing partnerships as a part of
the process of becoming umnumzane—the most valued way of being a Zulu man
(Leclerc- Madlala 2001a).
We have some knowledge about how girls are taught to respond to their developing
sexuality. Among amaZulu, it is documented that as a girl matures and boys started to
show sexual interest in her, the older women relatives in the girl’s family would teach
her about the practice of ukusoma. Ukusoma is intracural sex between the thighs,
which allows for sexual pleasure for the man without penetrative sex having to occur
(Leclerc-Madlala 2001a). Yet we know very little about how men and boys learn about
sexual responsibility and accompanying notions of masculinity.
Zungu (2019, personal communication) intimates that among amaZulu, boys learn
similarly to girls about masculinity and associated practices of sexuality. Zungu (2019)
notes that Zulu girls had amaqhikiza. Amaqhikiza were older and experienced single
women who taught the girls about womanhood and sex. She shares, similarly, that
“the same happens for boys”. Among Zulu boys, they move from being young boys
herding livestock (“abafana abelusayo”) to being young men (“instizwa”) and other intsiz-
was play a key role in initiating them until they reach the ubunumzane phase. Abanumn-
zane, similarly, play a critical role in initiating izintsizwa to become “obaba bemizi” (the
men of the house).
While we have some of this knowledge in the context of amaZulu girls and boys, I
argue this work is yet to be expanded to the experiences of contemporary Xhosa boy-
hoods. Expanding studies of boyhood and socialisation to other contexts, as with amaX-
hosa as I argue, can provide much understanding and historical context to the everyday
experiences and socialisation of boys, adolescents and young men. As Matebeni (2011: 9)
writes, we need nuanced and wide ranging experiences of “localised gender, race, space
and class structures” (Matebeni 2011: 9). Through a consideration of different contexts of
men’s lives and their expressions of gender, we can start seeing things that often go over-
looked (De Valle 1993).
Returning to boyhood: men, boys, and socialisation

In order to consider boyhood among amaXhosa, I ask for considerations of Xhosa mas-
culinities that are not based on ulwaluko (initiation) or heterosexual homemaking
through the construction of umzi (a homestead). This is important because as Groth
(2007) observes, despite the existence of many different cultural contexts where
there are initiation rites that seek to eliminate boyhood, the boy remains important
to men. Importantly, this lingering boy in the lives of men continues even in
manhood to exert influence not only on other men, but further on women and the
larger society (Groth 2007).
As conversation is central to the production of rich ethnographic data (Povinelli 2011), I
share below an extensive conversation with 27-year-old Siyasanga which illustrates the
importance of not only looking at adult Xhosa men’s experiences, but further consider
46 G. QAMBELA
boyhood. Siyasanga and I were talking about his sexual and reproductive experiences. In
this conversation, he shares about going to the clinic as a man,
Siyasanga: Man, I go to the clinic … The nurses [at the clinic] advise me that, Siyasanga, “there
are condoms here, because we [the nurses] know you are men.” The nurses say they know
that as men we meet up with young women, and when we are with girls, we have to condo-
mise. So I understand that I have to condomise because I do have [sexual] exchanges with
girls. And where do I meet the girls? Esimokolweni.
Inquirer: Where is esimokolweni? The drinking places?
Siyasanga: Yes, the drinking places. You will meet the girl there and you will find that
niyathandana [are in love] and it’s great. In the drinking places, there are condoms … My
mother advised me because she frequents doctors because of ill-health; she said that she
is told a lot about condoms, and that she would advise me as her child to use a condom
because I do not know the sexual history of the person that I am with. I have been watchful
of using a condom because of what my mother said. I have to listen to her. She said to me life
does not come back. Once you get that disease [HIV/AIDS] … you move toward the end of
your life. Because I was advised like this, I thought I should do that, condomise, and I did.
When I went to the clinic to draw blood [for HIV test], I found that I was alright [negative],
so I thought that from there onwards that I must use a condom. I had taken a lot of risks
by having unprotected sex. Now I do not want nyama to nyama [“flesh to flesh”—meaning
unprotected sex]. So even the [girlfriend] that I am with, she can at certain times say “no, I
do not want a condom”, and I say “no, I cannot do that, we must condomise”, except if I
was sure and trust that she is mine only.
The issues Siyasanga raises are not new and have concerned social scientists greatly in
the decades of HIV/AIDS (Silberschmidt 2001). There is now recognition in much of
social science that social and behavioural change with men cannot be achieved
without understanding and scrutinising men’s behaviours. Siyasanga’s narrative and
experiences provide illumination on his life as a man and socially ascribed notions
of being a man in relation to sex held by him and the nurse(s). The nurse and her
belief that men meet with women primarily out of interest for pursuing sex shows
this, for instance. In addition to the nurse, Siyasanga acknowledging the truth of the
nurses’ sentiment and deciding to use condoms, as well as Siyasanga’s mother’s
addition, shows the widespread social ideas relating to men and their relationship
to sex in adulthood.
I argue and show that Siyasanga’s narrative, along with the existing literature, leave
essential lacunas. The narrative and the literature on amaXhosa does not tell us how Siya-
sanga and the nurse came to hold particularised notions about manhood and sex. In the
narrative and in Siyasanga’s experience, we learn nothing about the origins of these ideas.
The ideas are taken for granted, as if they are “natural”, and ingrained in the experiences
of men. Yet, questions remain about where and how did Siyasanga learn these ideas? I
posit, a return to boyhood can help us.2
2
It is worth noting that in arguing for the consideration of Black boyhood, and amaXhosa boyhood specifically, is not
intended to imply boyhood is formed in isolation from girlhood, or that Black girls and amaXhosa girls are not margin-
alised in literature and scholarship. In this particular context, my research only allows me to speak, with ethnography, to
the particularised experience of Black amaXhosa boyhoods.
Young Xhosa boys, men, and socialisation

I want to share two conversations with 26-year-old Yandisa that relate to boyhood, mas-
culinities and sexual socialisation. Yandisa’s experience and story show that Xhosa boys
learn about masculinities long before initiation through various avenues that include
interpersonal relations with other boys. Boys learn from each other expectations about
how and what it means to be a boy, in this particular case in relation to girls—and
what boys should do with girls. Thus far, Vincent (2008) is one of the few scholarly con-
tributions that we have available that tries to probe into sexual socialisation among Xhosa
men. Yet, as Yandisa’s narrative will reveal, her works ends up extremely limited. The first,
and perhaps most important limitation, is that Vincent (2008) focuses primarily on circum-
cision school as the space where Xhosa boys are socialised into their sexualities. For
Yandisa, peers and many of the young Xhosa men in my study, sexual socialisation pre-
dated initiation and took place in multiple contexts outside and prior to initiation.
In the extract, Yandisa shares about learning the practice of “ukutshekha” (“going to
check”) specifically from, and among older men and boys. During ukutshekha, older
boys and men go and “check” on a girl, often later in the day before it gets dark, or
shortly thereafter. The checking takes place near the girl or young woman’s home. Ukut-
shekha, while entailing forms of intimacy including kissing, does not often include sexual
intercourse. Sexual intercourse is understood to take place during the practice of “uku-
outha”, outing overnight to a boy or man’s place.
I started dating when I was in Standard 6 (Grade 8), but when I was in primary school I would
hear and ask “Bra man, what do you mean when you go check all the time?” I did not under-
stand because everyday late in the day there was this thing of going to check … but I grew.
When I was in Grade 8, there is you know, peer pressure when you get to Grade 8 … I saw
with the guys, and I also heard from another boy who came from Port Elizabeth who said
he had a cherrie [“girlfriend”]. I would ask him, “Mfondini [guy] what is it that you do with
this cherrie of yours?” and he would respond “hay suka [“no, man”], don’t you know what
a cherrie is for?” He would tell me his things, and I also became curious. So there was this
girl, she was also in my class and I talked to her and asked that we date and we did. I was
in Grade 8, and we continued to Grade 9 but I was reluctant to even kiss her. I did not
know where to even start … but lamajita [guys] would often tell me I should kiss her. I
kissed her in Grade 9, it was in August. I remember because it was on my birthday. We
stayed together but we were not having sex [yet].
One of the prevailing understandings of sexual socialisation of Xhosa men in literature as

Vincent’s (2008) is that initiation allows young Xhosa men the opportunity to access sex.
Yet, as Yandisa shows in part, sexual socialisation processes start pre-initiation, and thus
Vincent’s (2008: 437) intimation that initiation is a “permit for sex” for Xhosa young men
cannot stand. Many of the young men forming part of this study not only learned and
experimented sexually in boyhood, but further debuted sexually much earlier before
undergoing initiation. In this way, Vincent (2008) ends up limited in providing knowledge
about socialisation of Xhosa men prior to and outside of the context of initiation. More-
over, that Vincent’s (2008) work draws principally on archival, media reports and second-
ary data deprives us of ethnographic based research that illuminates the pre-initiation
lives of Xhosa boys and men.
In addition to these absences on the lives of the Xhosa men in relation to sexual socia-
lisation in boyhood, I further want to use another excerpt from another conversation with
48 G. QAMBELA
Yandisa to show the limitations of looking only at initiation as the space of enactment and
practice of masculinity among amaXhosa. In sharing with me his early understandings of
what a “man” is, Yandisa reflects and shares that:
[Growing up] I thought a man is someone who has children, a father—someone with chil-
dren. People would say “ngubhuti lowa” [the term means “brother” and is also used to collo-
quially address an older male to show respect—that is a man], “bhuti”, “‘bhuti”, “bhuti” but
while living in Cape Town I would also have a question mark. You would find that a man
is old, maybe 42 years old, but yet you would find that zange oluke [did not undergo tra-
ditional initiation], yinkwenkwe [he is a boy] and he is a Xhosa. But you will find that this
person has taxis … has cars and has lots of things. He stays in town in Cape Town at the
[affluent] Waterfront. When people talked they said he is a boy but when you see him you
cannot believe it because he has a car, he has money, he has power, everything. When
you see him you cannot say he is a boy. I would see that this person sits with other older
men and then I wondered what it is that says someone is a man; because this person has
money …
Yandisa’s reflections show that earlier in boyhood, prior to initiation, boys are thinking cri-
tically about masculinity and manhood. Additionally, boys are formulating ideas about
what one has to do to be a man. Boys note various avenues to attaining manhood that
include initiation, heterosexual reproduction and becoming fathers. Boys are also thinking
about who is not a man in society.
Importantly, Yandisa underscores that pre-initiation, boys are not passively accepting
of what they have been told about manhood—but are going through their own processes
of thinking about “what makes a man” in their contexts. Lastly, Yandisa shows an often-
ignored aspect in Xhosa masculinities literature and this is the aspect of social class and
economic status (Qambela 2021). According to Yandisa, class complicates hegemonic
conceptualisations of Xhosa masculinity, for men who wield incredible economic might
can in some instances, as shown, access Xhosa manhood unquestioned without having
to undergo traditional initiation.
Yandisa’s experiences complicate existing theorisations on the constitution of Xhosa
masculinities. Mfecane (2016) argues that in Xhosa manhood traditional initiation is
central to becoming indoda—a man—among amaXhosa. Yandisa’s experiences show
that not in every context is Xhosa manhood “grounded primarily in the physical body
(penis)” (Mfecane 2016: 207). Furthermore, experiences such as Yandisa’s show that
unlike the literature (Vincent 2008) that suggests Xhosa men who have not undergone
traditional initiation are socially stigmatised and treated as inferiors, this does not hold
across all Xhosa men. For Yandisa, social class, rather than traditional initiation status,
becomes important to how Xhosa men and boys experience their masculinity.
Reynolds’ (2005) work on children, pain and trauma informs us of the vitality of “earlier
handling” of children, and yet studies of amaXhosa have ignored this important phase. As
we see from Yandisa, from early on, young Xhosa children are socialised prior to initiation
into their sexualities and masculinities and these early experiences continue to resonate
throughout their lives as individuals.
We have to take an intersectional approach to studying men as advocated by mascu-
linities researchers such as Kahn (2009) so as to better account for social categories like
age and class and how such categories shape masculinities. This necessarily asks that
we move away from hegemonic and homogenising approaches to the study of men,
and Xhosa men specifically through the taking seriously of the process of becoming as a
“place of struggle” (hooks 1992: 3).
The construction of gender is processual across the life course. Throughout their life
courses, men encounter many social actors who play pivotal roles in their socialisation.
At the same time, boys themselves are critical to the cultural production through their
own enactments of changes. This is evident in the vignette below from a conversation
with 38-year-old Xola and the role models that he had growing up. In the vignette, his
grandfather and teacher appear to strong influence the masculinity he came to idealise.
Xola shares,
There is ubhuti from [mentions surname3], he is still alive even now. He stays in Port Elizabeth.
It was him who was the most educated among us in the area. He was a teacher, and is still a
teacher even now. I would say I wanted to be [like] him. At home, my grandfather sometimes
called me to sit on his lap and to tell him what I had covered [learnt] at school [in curricula]. I
would tell him what we had done at school and he would be proud and affectionate—and
play with my ears. He would say that I was like a teacher. So I saw that being a teacher is
something that is right. So, the teacher is really ubhuti that I was at ease with. That man is
quiet and dignified. So quiet and dignified. He teaches in Port Elizabeth, and when he is
back, he liked coming to our house. He is the person that I thought was alright—other
men were working with chickens and at the farms for pineapples. When you see a person
dressed right, you [as a boy] admired how they dressed. Take ties for instance, you see
that thing of ties back then—you would think this person [wearing a tie] is the person
that that is right. So it is the teacher that I wanted to be like, although I was never able to
get to his level because money ran out [for schooling]. If it didn’t, maybe I would be far as
well now.
It is noteworthy that Xola idolised not only his teacher’s education, but personal attributes
such as the teacher’s comportment were central to his admiration. Xola especially
admired that that the teacher “umaka” [is timid]. This is a trait that Xola himself possesses
in personality and conduct. Xola himself has a dignified timid personality that is almost
unexpected because of his tall, lean body frame. His dress choices further mirrored this
personality, especially his usual choice of formal shoes, formal pants and a t-shirt for
everyday wear. Depending on the weather, he would often wear a cardigan. I teased
him that he had become the teacher he wished to become. He would lovingly respond
that indeed he was very similar to this teacher especially in temperament, but continued
to delineate the ways they are different.
It was a sore point for Xola that he was never able to complete his studies due to family
financial constraints experienced. Upon passing Grade 10 (Standard 8), Xola was forced to
seek employment. Xola’s grandmother—one of the central breadwinners in his house-
hold—passed away and resources started to dwindle. In leaving school, Xola started
the process of being “adultificated” where, in boyhood, he became “adult-like” by
having to find employment. This adultification meant that Xola was not able to fully
emulate his teacher. As observed in scholarship, children growing up in low-income
families often have “adultificated” childhoods through their engagements in labour
that is traditionally associated with adulthood (Linda Burton in Luttrell 2012: 189).
3
In Peddie, and much of the Eastern Cape, it is not uncommon among amaXhosa that people refer to someone, particu-
larly a man, endearingly through their surname. In this instance with Xola, the surname not only identified the person,
but further the house and homestead that the person hails from.
50 G. QAMBELA
Adultificated labour includes the care children provide to other children and their kin, as
well as the roles children play in assisting with school-related work and home responsi-
bilities, which includes paying the bills (Luttrell 2012).
Through life course study of the boyhoods of men, we gain windows into the develop-
ment of masculinities and accompanying ideologies. Additionally, we are able to peek
into the earlier interior lives of boys (e.g. Xola’s admiration for the dress and mannerisms
of the teacher he admired), and thus we are able to better appreciate boys’ agency in how
their identities are formed (such as Xola taking active steps to emulate his teacher). Impor-
tantly, we further see the limitations and constraints (in this case Xola not having
sufficient financial resources to be able to study towards a teaching qualification). It is
evident through Xola that across the life course boys develop their own ideas about
admirable masculinity, learned from various actors including family and educators.
Towards an Anthropology of Boyhoods

Mfecane (2011: 133) has written that men do not come as “blank slates”, intimating that
men carry histories that predate their lives in adulthood. Ultimately, I argue that we need
to focus scholarship in anthropology and social sciences more broadly on the early
boyhood years of boys and how they came to learn different forms of manhood (Bourgois
1996). Through relational and life course approaches, as Boris (2007) writes, we under-
stand better the role of location and the ways men negotiate masculinity across the
life course. This way we can see the intersections between age, for example, and
gender (Miescher 2007) through the lens of life-cycle socialisation.
hooks (2004: 175) writes,
… men in the process of self-recovery usually begin by returning to boyhood and evaluating
what they learned about masculinity and how they learned it. Many males find it useful to
pin-point the moments when they realised who they were, what they felt, then suppressed
that knowledge because it was displeasing to others. Understanding the roots of male dis-
ease helps many men begin the work of repairing the damage.
As hooks (2004) observes, it is pivotal that we return to boyhood for we cannot fully com-
prehend the lives of men if this phase is not accounted for. In sharing his experiences of
coming to learn who is “a man”, 38-year-old Xola tells me of a particular interaction
between his grandmother and grandfather,
Xola: A man they say is instika yekhaya [a pillar of the home]. Like, growing up you would hear
omama4 chatting—and if there is a disagreement you will hear utata saying “I am the man
here, this house, is my house, I am intsika of this home … ” You will also hear umama some-
times when she is talking with other women—when describing utata she will say “here is the
pillar of this home, a man of this house.” Then you will see there is a difference between
umama and utata even though they stay in the same house together. There is this one
who is in control. There is one [utata] who leads, because umama would not talk and have
the last word with utata. It is utata who would talk and finish whatever he wanted to say.
Me: utata is your grandfather?
Xola: Yes.
4
Omama translates to “mothers”, and in this instance Xola is using “Omama” to show the seniority of the women he was
listening to, and not necessarily reflecting motherhood status of the women.
Me: You stayed with your grandmother and grandfather growing up?
Xola: Yes.
Me: You saw that growing up?
Xola: Yes.
In this narrative, Xola shares how the idealised masculinity growing up was that of utata—
his grandfather—being intsika of the home. Certainly, scholars of masculinities have
observed that while there is no one form of masculinity, particular versions of masculinity
can hold dominance and become hegemonic in particular contexts and time (Morrell
1998). Importantly, masculinities scholars have further illuminated that hegemonic mas-
culinity is not only manifest in adult males, but that from childhood onwards it is variously
manifest, for instance, through childhood play. McGuffey and Rich (2001: 73) posit that
children often use hegemonic masculinity to “recreate a gender order among children
wherein the larger social relations of men’s dominance are learned, employed, reinforced,
and potentially changed”. In this way, Xola observing the hierarchy in his household as
dominated by his grandfather is not unremarkable, for it is an important aspect though
which boys in society learn masculinity.
Also sharing his boyhood conceptualisations of manhood and who is “a man”, 28-year-
old Ndixolile remembered,
… when we were little, it was not easy at the time [to know who is a man]. Amakhwenkwe
ayemadala kakhulu [the uninitiated boys were really old—in age], and we were forced to
call them bhuti [a form of respect—usually by younger uninitiated boys to initiated men].
You would find yourself confused and unable to tell which one is ubhuti. We did not know
that there is initiation … yes, you saw that there were [the boys] who left for initiation
school and we were told ngumkhwetha [an initiate] and when he came back he was ubhuti
[a man—in this context]. But, you would find that there are other boys who are old and
you will still have to call them bhuti [even though they have not gone to initiation school].
So, when you are little you cannot make a distinction [between who is a man and not].
Around six, seven, and eight years it was not easy to distinguish because the [uninitiated]
boys were really old and you would find that [uninitiated] boys sometimes have beards
and there is no [visible physical] difference to [initiated] men. Because you are a child, you
say bhuti to whoever they are, even though he is an [uninitiated] boy you say bhuti when
you address them …
Ndixolile’s uncle only went to initiation at the age of 28 years. Ndixolile continued to share
with me that “there was none of this thing of getting initiated when you are young”. Ndix-
olile is worried that the age of going to initiation has changed to much earlier for boys and
now boys are going to initiation between the ages of 17 and 21 years. In the past, he felt
boys went to initiation much later because the parents and guardians wanted them
“bagqibe ubukhwenkwe”—to conclude boyhood. Their parents wanted their sons to
finish into zobukhwenkwe–boyhood things–so that they go to initiation when they
were much more mature and solid. At a later age in a boy’s life, the parents were
better able to determine “ingqondo ibuyile ngoku, angakwazi ukuba yindoda” (i.e. that
the mind has returned/matured, and that they can now be men). Now, Ndixolile feels
that boys even undergo initiation without completely letting go of boyhood, and thus
even after initiation, the boy lingers in many men’s lives.
52 G. QAMBELA
What Ndixolile further shows is that ideas about manhood even among amaXhosa are
constantly changing and are not as static as the literature suggests. Rather, across
different generations, from boyhood, there are differing and changing conceptions
about how, when and how to attain manhood. Masculinities and accompanying ideas
about masculinity are constantly shifting at societal, social and individual level. Twenty-
five-year-old Xolela notes,
… back then [when I was young] I would not [know] so and so is not a man. I would see by
what they were wearing and think “he’s wearing that suit” [uniform for new initiates], and so
ngubhuti [a man] now. There is nothing else beyond that that I understood. Thereafter after I
saw and started to learn for myself it is not just about wearing the clothes, you experience
your life changing and see that you are someone else now [after undergoing initiation]—
[after] you have to do other things now and leave the others. You cannot say you are a
man now, yet you are still doing the things that you were doing when you were a boy;
[things like] going swearing [at people] in the area, taking off your shirt, exposing your
body … these are things you could do as a boy but cannot as a man. You can tell
someone is not a man also by their actions. You cannot see someone on the street and
know that they are a man, unless he is wearing the clothes for ubukrwala [new initiates],
then you know he is a man because he is wearing the clothes for new initiates.
Xolela centres not only initiation, but further other external aesthetic factors including
dress and external behaviours to mark manhood. All of these experiences by Xolela
and many of my other interlocutors were central in boyhood and in how they learn
about masculinity, yet such narratives do not show up in literature on amaXhosa, and
Black boyhood more broadly. I argue that anthropology needs considered focus on
boyhood, and that ethnography and life histories of boyhood can, as Connell and Mes-
serschmidt (2005: 852) write, “reflect contradictory commitments and institutional tran-
sitions that reflect different hegemonic masculinities and also hold seeds of change”.
Moreover, as Kimmel and Messner (2001a: xv) reflect, life course studies of men can
allow us to map and consider the “institutional locations during a man’s life in which
the meanings of masculinity are articulated”.
Leon (2017), sharing his story of being sexually assaulted in boyhood, shares that,
I am a man now, but my five-year-old-self is here, too. He is here, along with the names and
bodies and selves of others seeking closure, or redemption, or a hug. He is not so far removed
from the adult me …
As shown through various narratives, observations and vignettes throughout the paper,
Leon (2017) is not alone in carrying experiences of boyhood into adulthood as a man. Ulti-
mately, by “re-memorying” (Erasmus 2000: 81) the life course, or lifeways (Owen 2015) of
men, we can better illuminate on the experience of both boyhood and coming into
manhood. An “Anthropology of Boyhoods” can help us excavate these hidden histories
of men’s early formative lives.
Conclusion
… is there no context for our lives? No song? No literature? No poem full of vitamins? No
history connected to experience? (Morrison 1993)
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison in her 1993 Nobel Lecture (Morrison 1993) shares that nar-
rative is one of the principal ways through which we “acquire, hold and digest
information”, and thus “narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being
created”. I argue that the boyhood experiences of the young men of Peddie contribute
to our understanding and a deepening of knowledge of sociocultural context (Leclerc-
Madlala 2008) and their introduction to masculinities and sexualities prior to initiation.
I do not argue that this experience is necessarily representative of all Xhosa men and
boys—yet in the tradition of all ethnographies, I posit that they do represent “a synthesis
of the diverse experiences” (Susser 2009: xx) of Xhosa men and boyhoods that should be
taken more seriously than has been in current research scholarship. In writing this paper, I
have attempted to centre three voices: my own, the available literature and those of my
interlocutors. This is aligned with the need to ensure that marginalised groups in the past
treated as objects of study can participate in challenging the knowledge that is con-
structed about them by “academic ‘others’” (Uddin 2011: 460). In this way, although
not explicitly stated, I hope it contributes to the decolonisation of anthropological knowl-
edge through the multiplication of a plurality of voices (Mfecane 2016; Motsemme 2011).
Ultimately, the paper shows the strength of anthropological ethnographic research in
not only forcing a re-questioning of hegemonic theoretical positions—but further
through its uncovering of knowledges relegated either to the margin, and or that has
been silenced and in this way affirming the “revolutionary” (Shah 2017: 47) potential of
anthropological research for the study of boyhood. Through participant observation,
observation, life histories and immersion, my work has thus been situated in what
Gqola (2010: 6) calls “memorying” through looking back on the boyhoods of Xhosa
men in order to situate the ways in which that boyhood is negotiated in men’s lives in
the present.
I have argued that we have to take a relational approach to the study of men and mas-
culinities in order to uncover the conscious and unconscious processes of becoming and
“doing gender” of men (Kaufman 2001). hooks (2004, 35) shares:
Patriarchal assault on the emotional life of boys begins at the moment of their birth. Contrary
to sexist mythology, in the real world of male and female babies, male babies express them-
selves more. They cry longer and louder. They come into the world wanting to be seen and
heard. Sexist thinking at its worst leads many parents to let male infants cry without a com-
forting touch because they fear that holding baby boys too much, comforting them too
much, might cause them to grow up wimpy … patriarchal culture influences parents to
devalue the emotional development of boys. Naturally this disregard affects boys’ capacity
to love and be loving.
I therefore argue, as per the title and Mthuthu, that we should not wait till boys are men in
order to consider masculinities. Through the Anthropology of Boyhoods, we can avoid the
sexist trap hooks (2004) notes by not assuming that boys do not need tending to. Rather,
through a consideration of boyhoods we can observe the particular nuances of growing
up a boy, not only among amaXhosa, but across contexts.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Sakhumzi Mfecane and Dr Mpumi Zungu for comments on an earlier
version of this paper. I would like to acknowledge colleagues in the Working Group on African Mas-
culinities for helpful comments on earlier presentation of this paper. Lastly, I thank the anonymous
reviewers and the members of The Editorial Collective at the South African Review of Sociology. All
errors remain my own.
54 G. QAMBELA
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Gcobani Qambela http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0634-4704
References
Bank, L. J. 2002. “Xhosa in Town Revisited: From Urban Anthropology to an Anthropology of
Urbanism.” (Dissertation Presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department
of Social Anthropology). University of Cape Town.
Berggren, K. 2014. “Sticky Masculinity: Post-Structuralism, Phenomenology and Subjectivity in
Critical Studies on Men.” Men and Masculinities 17 (3): 231–252.
Boris, E. 2007. “Gender After Africa!.” In Africa After Gender?, edited by S. F. Miescher, C. M. Cole, and
T. Manuh, 191–204. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bourgois, P. 1996. “In Search of Masculinity: Violence, Respect, and Sexuality among Puerto Rican
Crack Dealers in East Harlem.” British Journal of Criminology. 36. doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.
a014103.
Connell, R. W. 2000a. “Understanding men: Gender, Sociology And The New International Research
On Men”, Clark lecture, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, 19 September 2000.
Connell, R. 2009. Gender In World Perspective (2nd ed). Cambridge: Polity.
Connell, R. W., and J. W. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.”
Gender and Society 19 (6): 829–859.
De Valle, T. 1993. “Introduction.” In Gendered Anthropology, edited by T. de Valle, 1–33. London:
Routldge.
Douglas, M. 2013. “An Intervention Study to Develop a Male Circumcision Health Promotion
Programme at Libode Rural Communities in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.” (A thesis
submitted for the Doctor of Philosophy degree with Walter Sisulu University). Mthatha, South
Africa.
Drake, S. C. 2016. “A Meditation on the Soundscapes of Black Boyhood and Disruptive Imaginations.”
Souls 18 (2-4): 446–458.
Dudgeon, M. R., and M. C. Inhorn. 2003. “Gender, Masculinity, and Reproduction: Anthropological
Perspectives.” International Journal of Men’s Health 2 (1): 31–56.
Dumas, M., and J. D. Nelson. 2016. “(Re)Imagining Black Boyhood: Toward a Critical Framework for
Educational Research.” Harvard Educational Review 86 (1): 27–47.
Erasmus, Z. 1997. “’Oe! My Hare Gaan Huistoe’: Hair-Styling as Black Cultural Practice.” Agenda
(durban, South Africa) 13 (32): 11–16.
Gqola, P. D. 2007. “How the ‘Cult of Femininity’ and Violent Masculinities Support Endemic Gender
Based Violence in Contemporary South Africa.” African Identities 5 (1): 111–124.
Gqola, P. D. 2009. “”The Difficult Task of Normalising Freedom”: Spectacular Masculinities, Ndebele’s
Literary/Cultural Commentary and Post-Apartheid Life.” English in Africa 36 (1): 61–76.
Gqola, P. D. 2010. What is Slavery to me? Post Colonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Groth, M. 2007. “Has Anyone Seen the Boy?: The Fate of the Boy in Becoming a Man.” THYMOS:
Journal of Boyhood Studies 1 (1): 6–42.
Gutman, M. C. 1997. “Trafficking in Men: The Anthropology of Masculinity”.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 26: 385–409.
hooks, b. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press.
hooks, b. 2004. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square Press.
hooks, b., and K. Powell. 2015. “Black Masculinity: Threat or Threatened.” The New School URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = FoXNzyK70Bk (Accessed: 09 November, 2017).
Jewkes, J., R. Morrell, J. Hearn, L. Emma, D. Blackbeard, G. Lindegger, M. Quayle, Y. Sikweyiya, and L.
Gottzen. 2015. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Combining Theory and Practice in Gender
Interventions.” Culture, Health and Sexuality 17 (2): 112–127.
Kahn, J. S. 2009. An Introduction to Masculinities. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kaschula, R. 1997(1ST ed). Xhosa. New York: Rosen.
Kaufman, M. 2001. “The Construction of Masculinity and the Triad of Men’s Violence.” In Men’s Lives
(5th Ed), edited by M. S. Kimmel, and M. A. Messner, 584–598. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Kepe, T. 2010. “Secrets” That Kill: Crisis, Custodianship and Responsibility in Ritual Male Circumcision
in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa”.” Social Science & Medicine 70: 729–735.
Kimmel, M. S., and M. A. Messner. 2001. “Preface.” In Men’s Lives (5th Ed), edited by M. S. Kimmel, and
M. A. Messner, i–ix. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Langa, M. 2020. Becoming Men: Black Masculinities in a South African Township. Johannesburg: Wits
University Press.
Leclerc- Madlala, S. 2001. “Demonising Women in the era of AIDS: On the Relationship Between
Cultural Constructions of Both HIV/AIDS and Femininity.” Society in Transition 32 (1): 38–46.
Leclerc-Madlala, S. 2008. “Age-disparate and Intergenerational sex in Southern Africa: The Dynamics
of Hypervulnerability.” Aids (london, England) 22 (4): 17–25.
Leon, J. 2017. “For Coloured Boys Contemplating Suicide,” Medium, October 24, 2017. Available:
https://medium.com/@JoelakaMaG/for-colored-boys-contemplating-suicide-6528631828aa
(Accessed: 27 October 2017).
Luttrell, W. 2012. “Making Boys’ Care Worlds Visible.” THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies 6 (2): 186–
202.
Magadla, S., and Chitando, E. 2014. “The Self Become God: Ubuntu and the ‘Scandal of Manhood’, in
Praeg, L., and Magadla, S., 176–192. Ubuntu: Curating the Archive. UKZN Press: Scottsville.
Matebeni, Z. 2011. Exploring Black Lesbian Sexualities and Identities in Johannesburg. A thesis sub-
mitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Mavundla, T. R., F. G. Netswera, B. Bottoman, and F. Toth. 2009. “Rationalisation of Indigenous Male
Circumcision as a Sacred Religious Custom: Health Beliefs of Xhosa men in South Africa.” Journal
of Transcultural Nursing 20: 395–404.
Mayer, P. 1963. Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of Urbanisation in a South
African City. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Mayer, P., and I. Mayer. 1971. (2nd ed). Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of
Urbanisation in a South African City. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
McGuffey, C. S., and B. L. Rich. 2001. “Playing in the Gender Transgression Zone: Race, Class, and
Hegemonic Masculinity in Middle Childhood.” In Men’s Lives (5th Ed), edited by M. S. Kimmel,
and M. A. Messner, 608–627. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Mfecane, S. 2011. “Negotiating Therapeutic Citizenship and Notions of Masculinity in a South African
Village.” African Journal of AIDS Research 10 (2): 129–138.
Mfecane, S. 2016. ““Ndiyindoda” [I am a man]: Theorising Xhosa Masculinity.” Anthropology Southern
Africa 39 (3): 204–214.
Mhlahlo, A.P. 2009. “What is Manhood?: The Significance of Traditional Circumcision in the Xhosa
Initiation Ritual”, A Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Master of
Philosophy in Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch.
Miescher, S. F. 2007. “Becoming an Opanyin: Elders, Gender, and Masculinities in Ghana Since the
Nineteeth Century.” In Africa After Gender?, edited by C. M. Cole, T. Manuh, and S. F. Miescher.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Morrell, R. 1998. “Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies.” Journal of
Southern African Studies 24 (4): 605–630.
Morrison, T. 1993. “Toni Morrison—Nobel Lecture,” December 7, 1993. Available: http://www.
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html (accessed: 13
January 2017).
Motimele, M. 2022. “Unbecoming men: Towards a Discursive Emancipation of Black Boys.” Agenda
(durban, South Africa), 35 (4): 1–11.
56 G. QAMBELA
Motsemme, N. 2002. “Gendered Experiences of Blackness in Post-Apartheid.” Social Identities 8 (4):

647–673.
Motsemme, N. 2011. “Lived and embodied suffering and healing amongst mothers and daughters
in Chesterville, KwaZulu-Natal,” Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Literature in Philosophy in the subject of Sociology at the University of South Africa.
March, 2011.
Mtuze, P. T. 1976. Umdlanga. Goodwood, Cape Town: Via Afrika.
Mtuze, P. T. 2004. Introduction to Xhosa Culture. Alice: Lovedale Press.
Nayak, A., and M. J. Kehily. 2008. Gender, Youth and Culture: Young Masculinities and Femininities.
New York: Palgrave.
Ntombana, L. 2011. “An investigation into the role of Xhosa male initiation in moral regeneration”, A
Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Faculty of Arts at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Port Elizabeth: Nelson Mandela
University.
Ntozini, A., and H. Ngqangweni. 2016. “Gay Xhosa Men’s Experiences of Ulwaluko (Traditional Male
Initiation).” Culture, Health and Sexuality 18 (11): 1309–1318.
Owen, J. 2015. Congolese Social Networks: Living on the Margins in Muizenberg, Cape Town. London:
Lexington Books.
Povinelli, E. A. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Qambela, G. 2021. “’There is Nothing Beautiful I See’: Xhosa Masculinities Under Structural Violence,
Unemployment and Changing Political Economies of sex.” Journal of Contemporary African
Studies 39 (4): 589–603.
Ramphele, M. 2002. Steering by the Stars: Being Young in South Africa. Cape Town: Tafelberg.
Reynolds, P. 2005. “Forming Identities: Conceptions of Pain and Children’s Expressions of it in
Southern Africa.” In Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood: Social Becoming in an African Context,
edited by C. Christiansen, M. Utas, and E. H. Vigh, 81–101. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikaninstitutet.
Rice, K. 2014. “Ukuthwala in Rural South Africa: Abduction Marriage as a Site of Negotiation about
Gender, Rights and Generational Among the Xhosa.” Journal of South African Studies 40 (2):
381–399.
Shah, A. 2017. “Ethnography? Participant Observation, a Potentially Revolutionary Praxis.” HAU:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 45–59.
Shefer, T., and K. Ratele. 2011. ““Racist Sexualisation and Sexualised Racism in Narratives on
Apartheid.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 16: 27–48.
Silberschmidt, M. 2001. “Disempowerment of Men in Rural and Urban East Africa: Implications for
Male Identity and Sexual Behaviour.” World Development 29 (4): 657–671.
Sipungu, T. 2021. “Embodied Difference in Manhood: A Sociological Analysis of the Intersection of
Visible Physical Impairments and Manhood among Xhosa men in the Eastern Cape.” (Doctoral
Dissertation). Rhodes University; Faculty of Humanities, Sociology.
Siziba, T. 2021. “Review of “Becoming men: Black Masculinity in a South African Township” by.”
South African Review of Sociology 51 (2): 69–72.
Susser, I. 2009. AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Switzer, L. 1993. Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South
Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Uddin, N. 2011. “Decolonising Ethnography in the Field: An Anthropological Account.” International
Journal of Social Science Research Methodology 14 (6): 455–467.
Vincent, L. 2008. “‘Boys Will Be Boys’: Traditional Xhosa Male Circumcision, HIV and Sexual
Socialisation in Contemporary South Africa.” Culture, Health and Sexuality 10 (5): 431–446.
Vincent, L. 2008a. “Cutting Tradition: The Political Regulation of Traditional Circumcision Rites in
South Africa’s Liberal Democratic Order.” Journal of Southern African Studies 34 (1): 77–91.
Zegeye, A., and N. Motsemme. 2004. “Editorial: South Africa’s Past in the Present.” Current Sociology
52 (5): 749–753.
SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY
2020, VOL. 51, NO. 2, 1–15
https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2020.1803763
Decolonising Men and Masculinities Research in South Africa

Sakhumzi Mfecane
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The calls for knowledge decolonisation pervade most academic Decolonisation; masculinities;
disciplines in South Africa today. In this paper I argue for South Africa; indoda; Xhosa
epistemological decolonisation within men and masculinities
studies through “delinking” from western gender paradigms. The
paper draws on the Xhosa concept of manhood called indoda to
illustrate African-centred ways of decolonising and theorising
masculinities research which cater to the needs of indigenous
African communities. The evidence suggests that masculinities in
Xhosa culture centre on the rites of passage to manhood called
ulwaluko, which involve physical alteration of the penis through
circumcision. As ulwaluko inserts a fixed bodily mark of Xhosa
manhood identity it challenges theories which perceive
masculinities as mere “scripted performances” with no permanent
bodily impact, and those which argue that masculinities are
multiple and unstable. Although multiple masculinities coexist,
they are rooted in ulwaluko as primary evidence of manhood. The
paper concludes by showing the benefits of decolonised, African-
centred scholarship for intervention programmes aimed at
fighting gender oppression in South Africa.
Introduction
This paper draws on current decolonial scholarship to make a case for decolonised, Africa-
centred studies of men and masculinities in South Africa. Decolonised scholarship in the
African academy involves two related processes: institutional decolonisation and epis-
temological decolonisation. The former practice refers to broader transformation of
higher learning institutions—change in institutional culture, curricular content and teach-
ing practices—to mirror the thought systems, philosophies and pedagogies of African
indigenous populations (Mamdani 2016; Mbembe 2016; Musasa 2017; Hendricks 2018;
Magoqwana 2018). In contrast, epistemological decolonisation concerns inclusion of
African epistemologies, theories and popular understandings of reality in knowledge pro-
duction (Nyamnjoh 2012, 2019). In this paper I will focus on the latter.
Many scholars who argue for epistemological decolonisation in South Africa and
beyond claim that knowledge created in the Global North is mispresented as being of a
universal nature, with the knower perceived as neutral and detached from the subject
of investigation. Critics of this approach posit that all knowledge is situated and the
knower is always implicated in the known (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2009; Mamdani 2016;
CONTACT Sakhumzi Mfecane smfecane@uwc.ac.za

© 2020 South African Sociological Association
2 S. MFECANE
Mbembe 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Nyamnjoh 2019). Furthermore, knowledge created

in the Global North is often regarded as prescriptive, and this is accompanied by a ten-
dency to neglect other knowledge systems (Nyamnjoh 2017; Mignolo and Walsh 2018).
Scholars in the Global South are expected to cite the texts of authors from the Global
North to secure publication of their work in Northern academic journals (Alatas 2000;
Connell 2014a). The underlying assumption in the academy is that the Global South “pro-
duces data and politics, but doesn’t produce theory” (Connell 2014a, 521). Despite a great
deal of empirical research having been conducted in African settings, by both local and
international scholars, the outputs of such research are often treated by the North as if
they constitute mere “raw facts” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012).
Epistemological decolonisation seeks to create space in which, as the scholars of the
Global South and as social actors, we are galvanised to become producers of knowledge,
rather than merely passive knowledge consumers (Mignolo 2009; Nyamnjoh 2019). Adopt-
ing such a position does not mean that we abandon or ignore existing knowledge. Rather, it
means that just as in the South, knowledge created in the North is regarded as situated and
“other” world knowledges are permitted to coexist (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006; Quijano
2007; Walsh 2012; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). On this basis, Nyamnjoh (2019, 25) calls for “con-
vivial scholarship”, which he describes as scholarship “that neither dismisses contested and
contrary perspectives a priori nor throws out the baby with bathwater”. Other decolonial
scholars argue specifically for inclusion of the knowledge systems and lived experiences
of subaltern sectors of the population in the academy, enabling us to critique both hegemo-
nic Western perspectives and “national anticolonial nationalist strategies” (Grosfoguel 2002,
209; see also Hendricks 2018; Magoqwana 2018; Mignolo and Walsh 2018).
Decoloniality and masculinity studies

Decolonisation in men and masculinity studies is often contested. I refer briefly here to
three related perspectives regarding decolonisation. The first point of view, advanced
by Connell (2016, 34), states that there is an “urgent need to decolonise the study of
men and masculinities”, because concepts of gender on which research and policy are
based “have almost, without exception, been developed in the Global North” (Connell
2012, 1679). Although many authors regard their conceptions of gender as pertaining
to Western culture (e.g. Herek 1986, 567; Kimmel 1994, 125; Connell 1995, 44; Schrock
and Schwalbe 2009, 280), Connell (2016, 304) claims that gender scholars in the Global
South frequently engage in uncritical use of such ideas as a framework for their research.
Global South scholars are urged to reposition themselves outside Northern gender
scholarship for two principal reasons (Connell 2014a, 2016). A primary motivation is that
Global North gender theories and concepts are tainted by the troubled history of
gender in the North; hence these ideas cannot be unthinkingly imported by the Global
South, given the long history of colonial settlement in the South (Connell 2016, 305).
During the colonial period indigenous gender systems were disrupted violently and
replaced by Western customs that encompassed patriarchal gender norms (Mama 1990;
Walker 1990; Morrell 1998).1 Scholars in the former colonies are hence urged to theorise
1
Space does not allow for a detailed discussion of pre-colonial gender regimes in Africa. For an extended discussion of this
topic, see Mfecane (2018).
about gender, taking cognisance of colonial history, to ensure that their scholarship is rel-
evant to their particular context (Connell 2016). A second argument is that a significant
body of work on gender produced by the Global South has been overlooked by the
academy (Connell 2014b). Connell (2014a, 521) claims that such work might contain a
“Southern theory” of gender, yet Southern gender scholarship “remains deep in the theor-
etical world of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, etc.” On its own, theorising from the South does
not amount to epistemic decolonisation.
A different position challenges the notion that Global South scholars engage in passive
use of Northern theories during their research engagement (Morrell and Clowes 2016). The
argument made here is that such theories are frequently modified to reflect local realities.
Morrell and Clowes (2016) argue that development of theory is not a one-way process,
because empirical research conducted in the Global South has informed theoretical
debates in the North, and similarly Northern concepts have been used to build Southern
theory. The perception that theories can be owned should be challenged: “It is not
obviously the case that because a theory was created by somebody living or working in
Northern contexts, that such a theory will forever be tainted by his context” (Morrell
and Clowes 2016, 10).
A more Africanist view is taken by Ratele (2017). He shares Connell’s concerns regarding
the dependence of African scholars on Northern scholarship, contending that this deprives
scholars of locally situated knowledge about boys and men. In his view, this form of aca-
demic dependence perpetuates racism and silences black voices within the academy.
When scholars approach black African men with theory in hand, they are unable to
truly hear African men’s narratives and they are also blinded to the harsh circumstances
to which African men are subjected on a daily basis. Northern theories and concepts
thus need modification to foreground issues of immediate concern to African men
(Ratele 2017). Ratele (2015) calls for an intersectional approach in the study of African
boys and men which foregrounds poverty, class, racism and social marginalisation.
There are other decolonial and African-centred perspectives of men and masculinity
studies, and they make various contributions to the debate (see, for example, Dube
2016; Coetzee and du Toit 2018). Despite their differences, ultimately all follow the pro-
feminist gender paradigm developed in the Global North. Such scholarship adopts the
common perspective of decoloniality as involving development of a “world-centred,
rather than [a] metropole-centred approach to the study of masculinities and men’s
gender practices” (Connell 2014b, 227). In practice this might mean foregrounding the
lived realities of men in diverse social contexts and highlighting the role played by colo-
nialists who conquered Southern territories by disrupting “indigenous gender regimes and
creating new ones” (Connell 2016, 306). Many scholars, particularly in South Africa, have
highlighted the disruptive impact of colonialism and apartheid on African indigenous
gender systems, with the subsequent creation of masculinities characterised by violence,
the absence of fathers and gender oppression (Morrell 1998; Ratele 2015; Coetzee and du
Toit 2018).2
In contrast, my own work seeks to “disobey” (Mignolo 2009, 173) the feminist gender
paradigm and, instead, to probe African-centred theorising about manhood and
2
For more detailed discussion of pre-colonial African gender regimes see Morrell (1998), Oyěwùmí (1997) and Mfecane
(2018).
4 S. MFECANE
masculinities (Mfecane 2016; 2018). I do so by examining African indigenous concepts of

manhood and related idioms, arguing that they embody local theories and perspectives
on gender. We should, therefore, include them in mainstream masculinity scholarship
as a means to decolonise and Africanise the field. There are various perspectives regarding
these concepts: some scholars perceive them to be oppressive, enabling toxic forms of
masculinity, and thus necessitating erasure from the public imagination (e.g. Leclerc-
Madlala 2005; Vincent 2008; Okyere-Manu and Konyana 2018). I utilise African indigenous
concepts as an analytical device, fostering new enquiries about the nature and source of
gender in African cosmology and also seeking to critically engage with the canons
(Mfecane 2018). It is hoped that this work can facilitate a “change of game” (Mignolo
2009, 162) in critical men and masculinity studies and reflect more accurately our realities
and lived experiences.
In the next section I focus on Xhosa notions of manhood, called indoda (Mfecane 2016).
I will show that if we see indoda “not as marginalised but as central to the analysis of mas-
culinities” (Connell 2014, 224), we will be able to “delink” Western gender paradigms and
epistemologies and, instead, to construct theories that not only advance our discipline, but
that also cater to the needs of African indigenous populations (Mignolo 2009, 177). These
people are particularly important, given that most research on men and masculinities in
South Africa has adopted a gender-transformative agenda, seeking to shift perceptions
and behaviour in the direction of non-violent, caring and equitable masculinities (Jama
Shai and Sikweyiya 2015; Gibbs, Jewkes, and Sikweyiya 2017). It is important to frame
research engagement in local terms and to make use of concepts which ordinary
people can relate to and can claim as their own (Mfecane 2018).
This account is based on my lived experience as a Xhosa-speaking man, and includes
observations and reflections on regular interactions within my circle of friends, family
members and community. I utilise an insider perspective to think about gender from
within (Adesina 2008), as well as to show that “African contemporary realities suggest
innovative analytical directions that are of global heuristic value” (Hendricks and
Spronks 2017, 29). I am not a mere “token of my culture” (Mignolo 2009, 160). I believe
that other gender scholars will find this narrative relevant as it challenges assumptions
about manhood. There is no doubt that my account also has inherent biases. Xhosa scho-
lars may differ in their experience of indoda based on their location, gender, social status,
class, educational status and other factors. This paper attempts to think about social reality
beyond the canon; and to “look for theory in the same place where we might merely look
for data: i.e. in everyday experiences, understandings and imaginations of the African con-
tinent” (Hendricks and Spronks 2017, 33).
Theorising about indoda

Xhosa society exhibits an Afro-centric view of persons as “communitarian by nature”
(Gyekye 1992, 105), as encapsulated in the Xhosa maxim that “umntu ngumntu ngabantu”
(a person is a person because of others) (Magadla and Chitando 2014, 180). In this philos-
ophy, manhood status is conferred by the community collectively rather than being
dependent only on the desires and actions of the individual. Xhosa social order mirrors
those of other African societies which state that to achieve personhood status, a person
must undergo certain “rituals of incorporation” into various stages of life: infantry,
childhood, adolescence, adulthood and ancestorhood (Menkiti 1979, 71). Examples of

such rituals include: the ceremonial naming of a newly born child (Karp 1980; Kaphaga-
wani 2004; Menkiti 2004) and ceremonies which mark the transition to childhood, adoles-
cence, puberty, adulthood, parenthood, elderly and ancestry (Delius and Glaser 2002;
Magwaza 2009). People who subscribe to the philosophy behind these practices often
think of themselves—and those in similar situations—as “incomplete” persons should
they be denied participation. Consequently they may become isolated, frustrated and
socially disruptive (Mfecane 2018).
In Xhosa culture, a man (indoda) is collectively defined as umntu owalukileyo (an
initiated person). An uninitiated male individual (umntu ongolukanga) is regarded as a
boy (inkwenkwe), regardless of his age. Xhosa initiation rites (ulwaluko/ukwaluka) involve
circumcision (i.e. partial removal of the foreskin) performed by traditional specialists
called ingcibi without the use of anaesthetic. This ritual is followed by a period of seclusion,
during which the newly initiated young man (ukhwetha) stays with fellow initiates in a
temporary shelter built by the community, together with their allocated guardian (ikhan-
katha). All initiates are undressed and covered in blankets, and their bodies are smeared
with white clay called ingceke. During this period initiates are visited by guardians and
other initiated adult men (amadoda), so that they can be taught about Xhosa culture
and the “mysteries of manhood” (Soga 1931, 252). After three to six weeks of seclusion,
during which initiates experience severe pain as their circumcision wounds heal (Mayekiso
2016), every initiate who has completed the process returns to the community as a man
(indoda). Usually a home-coming ceremony—called an umgidi—is organised to celebrate
initiates’ return from the “bush”, marked by singing, dancing and consumption of a
copious supply of beverages and food (including meat).3
This general understanding of the Xhosa man as umntu owalukileyo has profound
theoretical implications. Firstly, it suggests that manhood status in Xhosa culture is
partly traceable on the human body, because traditional circumcision alters the appear-
ance of the penis (Ngwane 2004; Mfecane 2016; Ntombana 2011). The absence of such
alterations in a male usually denotes that the individual is still in the stages of boyhood.
Such a perspective challenges the notion that bodies are unstable markers of gender
(e.g. Connell 1995). Secondly, this concept contributes a new theoretical insight concern-
ing the concept of “multiple masculinities” which remains highly debated in the academy.
Although multiple masculinities coexist, they are rooted in ulwaluko as primary evidence
of manhood. The next section substantiates these two claims, using examples and per-
sonal reflections.
Indoda as embodied
Indoda (i.e. men who enjoy the social status of manhood) reflect a socially constructed
reality. In Xhosa culture their status is imputed primarily from the public display of
revered markers of manhood while in the bush. These include, among others, ukunyame-
zela, ukuhlonipha, ukuthobela, imithetho and ukungabi nankani (i.e. strength, bravery,
respect, stoicism and the abilities to listen to and to accept advice) (Mayekiso 2016).
The healed penis does not only indicate that the individual has gone all the way
3
For detailed descriptions, see Ntombana, Mayekiso (2016).
6 S. MFECANE
through the ulwaluko ritual to its completion, but it is also a symbol of his moral virtue as a
man (Mdedetyane 2019). Indoda as umntu owalukileyo are given social respect and
honour, as well as a higher social rank than uninitiated Xhosa men or Xhosa men who
are medically circumcised, because they can provide public demonstration of having sur-
vived “hard work” and that they were able to withstand the painful journey to manhood
(Mayekiso 2016). This puts the body at the centre of Xhosa masculine identity.
The claim is frequently made that “gender is a social practice that constantly refers to
bodies and what bodies do” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 71). Here the body is seen
as “not fixed” (Connell 1995, 56). This makes gender an ongoing practical accomplishment
achieved through active display of socially revered symbols of manhood in respective cul-
tural settings (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009), including signs of having achieved a certain
degree of independence, sound health, sexual expression, a certain diet and paid employ-
ment (Courtenay 2000; Nye 2005; Herek 1986; Suggs 1996; Schwalbe 2014). Failure to
display the socially revered symbols of manhood publicly and on a daily basis “means
that gender is vulnerable”, i.e. the person might be discredited as not being a man or
he may be relegated to an inferior position in masculine hierarchies (Connell 1995, 56).
On this basis men are willing to suffer physical alteration of their bodies to prove their
worth as men, such as participation in physical sports (Connell 2001). However, men
with physical disabilities or who suffer from debilitating chronic illness may feel emascu-
lated as a result of their inability to display socially valued symbols of manhood, such as
sexual prowess, paid employment and the display of physical strength (Broom 2004;
Mfecane 2008). In Xhosa culture these symbols are less important, because the mark of
circumcision as a fundamental symbol of manhood is a fixed bodily feature. This
reduces the social imperative for men to repeatedly prove or accomplish their male
gender every day.
The best illustration of this point is in terms of the popular Xhosa idiom, indoda yindoda
ngesiko (isiko is what makes a man). Isiko usually means “custom” or “ritual”, but in this
context it refers to visible alteration of the penis by traditional circumcision. In Xhosa
culture the mark symbolises ukwaluka, and it is concrete evidence of one’s status as a
man (Ngwane 2004; Ntombana 2011). This is shown when Xhosa men (mostly new
initiates) are compelled by their peers to strip naked in order to demonstrate their auth-
entic attainment of the status of manhood, by permitting close inspection of their penises
(Vincent 2008; Ntombana 2011). This phenomenon contradicts the idea that “bodily types
are irrelevant” with regard to who is accredited as a man (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009,
281). Such ideas correspond with pro-feminist theories of gender as mere “performance”
with no stable physical markers. In this regard, Schwalbe (2014, 55) claims, “Though it is a
semiotic, a penis does not make a man. A manhood act makes a man.” This also creates a
space for women to be recognised as if they were men for displaying “convincing
manhood acts” (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009, 281).
Indeed, the Xhosa idiom referred to suggests that bodily types (namely tough, socially
constructed bodies) do matter in relation to who is to be seen as a man, but that they do
not operate in isolation from the actions of individuals (izenzo). A related idiom is: Indoda
yindoda ngezenzo zayo; hayi ngokwaluka qha (A man is a man through his actions and not
just through initiation). To demonstrate one’s worth as a man one has to display symbols
consistent with one’s manhood status (Suttner 2003). Izenzo on their own do not make a
man because of the primary imperative to undergo ulwaluko in order to be considered
socially to be a man—i.e. an indoda (Mfecane 2016). We can say the isiko serves as hard
and irrevocable proof of manhood status, whereas izenzo—manhood acts—are merely
complementary features. They enhance one’s social standing as a man, but on their
own they do not make one a man.
This view is supported by Suttner’s (2003, 74) assertion that “it seems necessary to dis-
tinguish in a limited, but not absolute, way between the concept of masculinity and that of
manhood … masculinity refers to [a] socially constructed idea of what is meant by being a
man, whereas the notion of manhood is more limited to and is primarily related to notions
of adulthood”. Suttner (2003) expands on this perspective by sharing a story about Xhosa-
speaking boys imprisoned on Robben Island during the apartheid period. After reaching a
certain age in prison, some of these boys underwent circumcision performed by a fellow
prisoner who was an ingcibi in order to formally obtain the social status of indoda (adult-
hood). This shows the significance in its own right of ukwaluka as a mark of manhood in
Xhosa culture. It disputes the claim by Maluleke (2018, 49) that “manhood is not centred
on the penis, its looks or its size”. Maluleke (2018) commits the error of conflating
manhood with masculinity; as a result, he denies the Xhosa cosmology of manhood
centred on the penis. Instead, he adopts a Western-centric notion of masculinity as
merely a “performance”. It is this view of masculinity as mere performance that I find limit-
ing in analysing Xhosa conceptions of manhood centred on ulwaluko, as the rite of
passage involves the alteration of a permanent bodily feature, resulting in a change of
identity.
Multiple masculinities
Pro-feminist gender theorists are in agreement that masculine identity is not determined
by innate biological attributes; instead it is achieved through everyday practices (Carrigan,
Connell, and Lee 1985; Connell 1995). Furthermore, masculinities are multiple: in everyday
life there are many ways in which we fashion ourselves as men (Connell 1987; Kimmel
1994; Morrell 2001; Connell 2012). This theoretical stance has stimulated a plethora of
research, theories and concepts analysing multiple forms of masculinity, their relation-
ships, their meanings and their influence on men’s lives (Demetriou 2001; Groes-Green
2012; Messerschmidt 2012). Scholarship emphasises that although in any given context
multiple masculinities coexist, they are seldom rated as equivalent. One form of masculi-
nity usually gains ascendency over others and becomes the ideal representation of socially
desired qualities of manhood (Connell 1995; Demetriou 2001; Morrell 2001). Other mascu-
linities are then either marginalised or expelled from the circle of legitimacy (Carrigan,
Connell, and Lee 1985, 592).
However, it remains unclear which practices constitute a man (Schwalbe 2014).
Hypothetically, any behaviour in which males engage should make them men, whether
it be “changing oil, [or] changing diapers” (Schwalbe 2014, 33). What matters is that the
actor construes what he “does” as constituting making him a man. Schwalbe (2014)
believes that this gender perspective has weakened the feminist struggle against patriar-
chy because no identifiable group of men can be viewed as oppressors. Instead, masculi-
nities are “multiplied” in the literature. Subsequently, masculinity scholarship—or the
“masculinity industry”, as it has been called—is reduced to the unending “description of
masculinities, often burdened by obscurantist jargon” (Schwalbe 2014, 30).
8 S. MFECANE
I suggest that in Xhosa culture this theoretical impasse is less pronounced. Here,
although multiple masculinities exist, they are rooted in ulwaluko as a “culturally exalted
form of masculinity” (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985, 592). As noted previously
(Mfecane 2016), ulwaluko does not discriminate in terms of sexuality, age, religion, class
or race. In principle, anyone who has completed ulwaluko obtains social recognition as
a man (indoda). Amadoda (men) must observe certain socially prescribed codes of
conduct and adopt various social roles, but in everyday life they can—and do—display
diverse forms of masculine identity based on religious belief, style, taste, fashion, edu-
cation, sexuality and class. The social response and ensued ranking in the Xhosa gender
hierarchies are determined largely by the “type of act”.
To give a personal example: my father is a Christian convert (known as umzalwana) who
lives in a “traditional” Xhosa community in the Eastern Cape which is not predominantly
Christian.4 As a teenager he underwent ulwaluko, after which he married and established a
household. He was employed as a migrant labourer until he was retrenched, at which
point in time he had to re-establish himself in the village as a Christian who belongs to
an African Pentecostal church. Church members embrace religious convictions which pro-
hibit formally baptised members from observing traditional Xhosa customs (amasiko/izici).
They are also forbidden from consumption of pork or alcohol, as well as barred from
wearing traditional Xhosa attire (e.g. iqhiya ebomvu, imibhaco and imbola). My father
has adhered strictly to these prescribed codes of conduct throughout his adult life. As a
result he became alienated from his peers who socialised by attending communal
rituals, drinking beer, working together and attending other social gatherings (McAllister
2006).
In my father’s village some men resent male compatriots who have converted to Chris-
tianity—known as abazalwane. Such men are referred to as “lost” (balahlekile) or even
labelled “stupid” for converting to an imported religion and seemingly turning away
from their Xhosa culture. As an unemployed man my father was vulnerable to public
expressions of resentment in the village as he had no alternative opportunity to earn
respect, such as through owning livestock or by demonstrating his attainment of
financial security. However, he maintained a reasonably sound social standing based on
his manhood status and the fact that he was married, he had children, and as a Christian
he presided over most funerals that were held in the community. His peers called him by
his clan name to show their respect for him as an adult man who had been initiated into
Xhosa culture. Furthermore, my father demonstrated personal regard for the tradition of
ulwaluko, to the extent that he ensured that all his five sons completed the ritual in accord-
ance with Xhosa tradition.
My father occasionally attended public events such as weddings and umgidi, where he
consumed food prepared for community members, which included his peers. I observed
that peers welcomed him warmly; in return he conformed to traditional codes of conduct
at ritual events and social gatherings (such as abiding by traditional seating arrangements)
(McAllister 2006; Mfecane 2018). We could argue that my father enjoyed the full benefits of
manhood in Xhosa culture despite his clearly expressed opposition to certain Xhosa
customs. However, it should be noted that his views were more nuanced than the outright
rejection of Xhosa culture by Tiyo Soga, a Xhosa man who lived in the early nineteenth
4
In the 1980s the village was the subject of an ethnographic study by McAllister of Xhosa drinking rituals.
century and converted to Christianity (Ndletyana 2008). Soga refused to undergo ulwaluko
because of his faith—in fact, he preached publicly and vociferously against all Xhosa
customs (Atwell 1997, 567). As a result, the Xhosa community showed their resentment
of Soga and used demeaning language in talking about him (for example, by calling
him a “boy”). Despite Soga having married and having secured a Western education, as
well as presiding over funerals and other community initiatives, he was never accorded
real respect (Williams 1978, 81; 1983, 2). Some of his Christian brethren earned respect
by consenting to initiation and observing some traditional Xhosa customs “while
holding on to the Gospel and refusing to choose between the two as irreconcilable oppo-
sites” (Jonas 1990, 286).
The evidence is that in Xhosa culture multiple masculinities—and associated ranking of
men in gender structures—are mediated by circumcision status (Mfecane 2016). Those
who complete the process of ulwaluko and who show ongoing respect for tradition are
granted more social space in which to express their individuality, and are at lower risk
of social exclusion and stigmatisation. However, the degree of social exclusion also
depends on the initiated individual’s public display of behaviour. For example, studies
of gay Xhosa men found that they felt alienated from manhood circles despite having
been initiated and having, therefore, qualified for the full benefits of manhood (Ntozini
and Ngqangweni 2016). Some Xhosa men are subject to public scrutiny, harassment
and physical confrontation following their display in public of perceived evidence of
being gay (Qambela 2016; Lynch and Clayton 2016; Siswana and Kiguwa 2018). Such
homophobia was dramatically portrayed in a popular feature film entitled Inxeba, which
told the story of two young Xhosa men who became romantically and sexually involved
whilst in the bush (Siswana and Kiguwa 2018). The community’s rejection attests to het-
erosexuality remaining an organising principle of indoda manhood, which essentially
renders non-conforming gay Xhosa men “criminals” (Leach 1977, 19). Indeed, one of the
lead actors in Inxeba, Nakhane Touré, was harassed and received ongoing death threats
from amaXhosa men for portraying an openly gay Xhosa man, to such an extent that
he was compelled to emigrate.
Following other gender theorists it appears reasonable to conclude that indoda is
essentially a homophobic gender system (Herek 1986; Kimmel 1994). However, such a con-
clusion needs to be qualified: gay Xhosa men are not “expelled” from the “circle of legiti-
macy”, as happens elsewhere (Connell 1995, 79). They are still regarded as primarily men
(Mfecane 2016). Nevertheless, in order to continue to enjoy the full benefits and status of
manhood they need to be discreet about their sexual identities during their stay in the
bush and afterwards (Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016). This is an additional requirement
not made of heterosexual indoda, who appear to be at liberty to defy established rules
with minor “social costs” (Amit and Dyck 2006, 9). Such men usually feel completely at
home in the circle of men (esidodeni). They may occasionally violate expected codes of
conduct, but this does not have serious consequences for their status as men. If a hetero-
sexual indoda violates established rules of manhood his peers usually penalise him by
compelling him to buy a bottle of brandy for them. This is called umdliwo: a symbolic
penalty and a friendly way to rein in the delinquent. For gay men the costs of non-confor-
mity are more material and undermine their dignity as human beings.
The situation of gay Xhosa men cannot be fully understood through imposition of
Western categories, in terms of which endless “multiplication” of masculinities persists
10 S. MFECANE
(Schwalbe 2014). As Schwalbe (2014) rightly observes, a pro-feminist conception of mas-

culinity leads to an impasse in addressing gender oppression directly since Western per-
spectives do not clarify who the real oppressors are. In contrast, an indoda discourse of
manhood can be said to provide clear guidance regarding which group of men—rather
than which practices—are likely to be oppressive, and the basis of this judgement, as
well clarity regarding who suffers the most in the current gender system. Here “bodily
type” as a socially constructed reality cannot be denied.
Concluding thoughts
There is a Xhosa saying that “usana olungakhaliyo lufela emqolo”, meaning “a child who
doesn’t cry dies in silence” (or dies on the mother’s back). A crying child alerts the
mother to her immediate needs: food, water and physical comfort. This metaphor aptly
captures the main concern of this paper: indigenous knowledge systems are at risk of
dying in silence because we have not created space in the academy to accommodate
them (Grosfoguel 2002; Hendricks 2018; Magoqwana 2018; Mignolo and Walsh 2018).
Western knowledge is seen as the pinnacle of truth and African scholars who wish to
publish their work in leading academic journals are required to cite theories produced
in the Global North (Alatas 2003; Connell 2014, 2016). This “epistemicide” (the killing of
endogenous epistemologies) (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018) occurs in most academic disciplines
globally; but recent work by many Global South seeks to contest it through deliberate
inclusion of the indigenous knowledge systems in teaching and research (e.g. Magadla
and Chitando 2014; Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Walsh 2012; Magoqwana 2018; Nyamnjoh
2019). This paper contributes to this decolonial struggle.
Although this paper focuses on Xhosa concept of manhood (indoda), I believe the issues
discussed have relevance beyond the context of amaXhosa. I have argued that Xhosa
notions of masculinity contain elements that do not entirely accord with the extant the-
ories of gender from the Global North; therefore, we should not simply impose such a
theoretical framework on the data about Xhosa men’s lives, but rather attempt a situated
theorisation of Xhosa masculinities. Xhosa manhood discourse entails a strict differen-
tiation between a person designated as a “man” (indoda) and a “boy” (inkwenkwe); the
former referring to someone who has completed the process of ukwaluka. It is not just
ulwaluko that accords someone a social status of being a man, but also his actions
(izenzo). However, on their own, actions do not make a man without visible—or known
—evidence of altered penis by traditional circumcision.
This imperative to have a “circumcision scar” (isiko) as a primary “proof” of manhood
status contrasts with Eurocentric assumptions about gender as comprising scripted per-
formances with no permanent bodily impact (Kaufman 2001; Schrock and Schwalbe
2009). This view of gender implies that anything that men do can qualify them as men
as there are no clear criteria or observable bodily features of manhood. Masculinities
are consequently multiplied in literature and this leads to a theoretical dilemma of
which practices essentially constitute making someone a man (Schwalbe 2014). In
Xhosa society, multiple manhood identities are grounded in ulwaluko as a core feature,
which makes possible identification of practices seen as making a man, together with prac-
tices seen as not typical of a man. The maxim umntu ongolukanga akayondaoda (an unin-
itiated person is not a man) goes beyond the absence of certain visual bodily signs: it is
essentially a statement about who is accepted into and who is expelled from manhood
circles (Mfecane 2016; Mdedetyane 2019).
This discussion has relevance for interventions and research involving men in South
Africa and beyond. As Connell (2016, 313) notes: “Programmes concerned with reduction
of violence or the prevention of AIDS are now widespread. But to be realistic, they remain
few and mostly follow concepts developed in the global North.” Connell goes further in
saying: “The problem with Eurocentrism of gender discourse is that it projects into
gender analysis everywhere the image that the society of the Global North holds of
itself” (Connell 2016, 305). Elsewhere I have argued that, to be effective, programmes
working with African men must utilise concepts and theories originating locally
“because such an approach takes into account our everyday realities” (Mfecane 2018,
48). Ratele (2017, 70) further asserts that “we need to look at our subjects in their
proper and full context. Not doing this contributes to the failure to liberate men,
perhaps because we quite often do not really see them” (Ratele 2017, 87).
These ideas—and more which are not cited here—attest to the urgent need to deco-
lonise and Africanise masculinity studies and programmes to make them relevant and rela-
table to ordinary African subjects. Only then can programmes contribute effectively to the
fight against gender-based violence and other social ills plaguing black African commu-
nities (Mfecane 2018). Knowledge decolonisation within gender studies is not just a
futile academic posturing—or “performance”—as some cynics are inclined to say. I
believe that decolonised, African-centred knowledges are needed to liberate ordinary Afri-
cans from colonial legacies that continue silence and ignore their “cries” for recognition,
dignity and respect. This paper offers an example of such knowledge, but as Lushaba
(2018) said, “we need a critical mass of black scholars”5 to be able to bring any meaningful
changes in the knowledge production industry. That is a challenge for the emerging gen-
eration of black African gender scholars.Notes on contributor
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
References
Adesina, J. 2008. “Archie Mafeje and the pursuit of endogeny: Against alterity and extroversion”.
African Development 33(4): 133–152.
Alatas, S. F. 2000. “Intellectual imperialism: Definition, traits, and problems”. Southern Asian Journal of
Social Sciences 28(2): 23–45.
Alatas, S. F. 2003. “Academic dependency and the global division of labour in the social sciences”.
Current Sociology 51(6): 599–613.
Amit, V., and N. Dyck. 2006. Claiming Individuality: The Cultural Politics of Distinction. London & Ann
Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.
Atwell, D. 1997. “Intimate enmity in the journal of Tiyo Soga”. Critical Inquiry 23(3): 557–577.
Broom, A. 2004. “Prostate cancer and masculinity in Australian society: A case of stolen identity?”
International Journal of Men’s Health 3(2): 73–91.
Carrigan, T., R. Connell, and L. Lee. 1985. “Toward a new sociology of masculinity”. Theory and Society
14(5): 551–604.
5
Lushaba spoke at the opening of a “Working Group on African Masculinities” (17–18 August 2018).
12 S. MFECANE
Coetzee, A., and L. du Toit. 2018. “Facing the sexual demon of colonial power: Decolonising sexual
violence in South Africa”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(2): 214–227.
Comaroff, J., and J. Comaroff. 2012. “Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward
Africa”. Anthropological Forum 22(2): 113–131.
Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Palo Alto, CA: University
of California Press.
Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Connell, R.W. 2001. “Masculinities and Globalisation.” In Men’s Lives, edited by M.S. Kimmel and M.A.
Messner. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Connell, R. 2012. “Gender, health and theory: Conceptualizing the issue, in local and world perspec-
tive”. Social Science and Medicine 74(11): 1675–1683.
Connell, R. W. 2014a. “Margin becoming centre: For a world-centred rethinking of masculinities”.
Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 9(4): 217–231.
Connell, R. W. 2014b. “Rethinking gender from the South”. Feminist Studies 40(3): 518–539.
Connell, R. 2016. “Masculinities in global perspective: Hegemony, contestation and changing struc-
tures of power”. Theory and Society 45(4): 303–318.
Connell, R. W., and J. W. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept”.
Gender and Society 19: 829–859.
Courtenay, W. H. 2000. “Constructions of masculinity and their influence on men’s well-being: A
theory of gender and health”. Social Science and Medicine 50: 1385–1401.
Delius, P., and C. Glaser. 2002. “Sexual socialisation in South Africa: A historical perspective”. African
Studies 61(1): 27–54.
Demetriou, D. Z. 2001. “Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity: A critique”. Theory and Society
30(3): 337–361.
Dube, S. 2016. “Race silence: The oversignification of black men in ‘the crisis of/in masculinities’ in
post-apartheid South Africa”. Acta Academica 48(1): 72–90.
Gibbs, A., R. Jewkes, and Y. Sikweyiya. 2017. “‘I tried to resist and avoid bad friends’: The role of social
context in shaping the transformation of masculinities in gender transformation and livelihood
strengthening interventions in South Africa”. Men and Masculinities 10(20): 1–20. doi:10.1177/
1097184X17696173.
Groes-Green, C. 2012. “Philogynous masculinities: Contextualizing alternative manhood in
Mozambique”. Men and Masculinities 15(2): 91–111.
Grosfoguel, R. 2002. “Colonial difference, geopolitics of knowledge, and global coloniality in the
modern/colonial capitalist world-system”. Review 25(3): 203–224.
Gyekye, K. 1992. “Person and community in Akan thought”. In A Companion to African Philosophy,
edited by K Wiredu, 101–122. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Hendricks, C. 2018. “Decolonising universities in South Africa: Rigged spaces?” International Journal of
African Renaissance Studies: Multi-, and Transdisciplinarity 13(1): 16–38.
Hendricks, T., and R. Spronks. 2017. “Rethinking sexuality from Africa”. Codesria Bulletin 1(2): 28–33.
Herek, G. M. 1986. “On heterosexual masculinity: Some psychical consequences of the social con-
struction of gender and sexuality”. American Behavioural Scientist 29(5): 563–577.
Jama Shai, N., and Y. Sikweyiya. 2015. “Programmes for change: Addressing sexual and intimate
partner violence in South Africa”. South African Crime Quarterly Journal 51: 31–41.
Jonas, P. J. 1990. “Jan Tshatshu and the Eastern Cape mission – A contextual analysis”. Missionaries 18
(2): 277–292.
Kaphagawani, D. N. 2004. “Some African conceptions of a person: A critical survey”. In A Companion
to African Philosophy, edited by K. Wiredu, 332–342. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Karp, I. 1980. “Beer drinking and social experience in an African society: An essay in formal sociology”.
In Explorations of African Systems of Thought, edited by I. Karp and C. S. Bird, 83–100. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kimmel, M. S. 1994. “Masculinity as homophobia: Fear, shame, and silence in constructions of gender
identity”. In Theorising Masculinities, edited by H. Brod and M. Kaufman, 119–141. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Leach, E. 1977. Custom, Law, and Terrorist Violence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Leclerc-Madlala, S. 2005. Masculinity and AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal: A treatise. Accessed May 16, 2006.
http://name.umdl.umich.edu/4761530.0010.015.
Lushana 2018. “Keynote Speech”. Working Group on African Masculinities Workshop: University of
the Western Cape, 15–19 August.
Lynch, I., and M. Clayton. 2016. “‘We go to the bush to prove that we are also men’: Traditional cir-
cumcision and masculinity in the accounts of men who have sex with men in township commu-
nities in South Africa”. Culture, Health & Sexuality. doi:10.1080/13691058.2016.1215527.
Magadla, S., and E. Chitando. 2014. “The self become god: The ubuntu and the ‘scandal of manhood’”.
In Ubuntu: Curating the Archive, edited by L. Praeg and S. Magadla, 176–192. Pietermaritzburg:
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Magoqwana, B. 2018. ““Putting food back on the table”: Decolonising towards a sustainable univer-
sity that feeds us in South Africa”. International Journal of African Renaissance Studies – Multi-, and
Transdisciplinary 13(2): 112–128.
Magwaza, T. 2009. “‘So that I will be a marriageable girl’: Umemulo in contemporary Zulu society”. In
Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present, edited by J. Laband and J. Sithole, 153–167.
Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Maluleke, T. 2018. “Of wounded killers and ‘failed men’: Broadening the quest for liberating African
masculinities”. Journal of Gender and Religion in Africa 24(1): 33–78.
Mama, A. 1990. “Shrews and villains: conceptualising colonial and contemporary violence against
women in Africa”. In Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by M. J.
Alexander and C. T. Mohanty, 46–62. New York/London: Routledge.
Mamdani, M. 2016. “Between the public intellectual and the scholar: Decolonization and some post-
independence initiatives in African higher education”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17(1): 68–83.
Mayekiso, A. 2016. “Ukuba Yindoda Yelixesha (to be a man in these times): Fatherhood, marginality
and forms of life among young men in Gugulethu”. PhD Thesis. University of Cape Town, Cape
Town.
Mbembe, A. J. 2016. “Decolonizing the university: New directions”. Arts and Humanities in Higher
Education 15(1): 29–45.
McAllister, M. 2006. Beer Drinking Rituals: Power, Practice and Performances in South African Rural
Periphery. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Mdedetyane, L. 2019. Medical male circumcision and Xhosa masculinities: Tradition and transform-
ation. A mini-thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Magister
Artium in Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of
the Western Cape.
Menkiti, I. 1979. “Person and community in African traditional thought”. In African Philosophy, edited
by R. Wright, 134. Washington, DC: University Press of America.
Menkiti, I. A. 2004. “On the normative conception of a person”. In A Companion to African Philosophy,
edited by K. Wiredu, 324–331. Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing.
Messerschmidt, J. W. 2012. “Engendering gendered knowledge: Assessing the academic appropria-
tion of hegemonic masculinity”. Men and Masculinities 15(1): 56–76.
Mfecane, S. 2008. “Living with HIV as a man: Implications for masculinity”. Psychology in Society 36:
45–59.
Mfecane, S. 2016. “Ndiyindoda! (I am a man). Theorising Xhosa masculinity”. Anthropology Southern
Africa 39(3): 204–214.
Mfecane, S. 2018. “Towards African-centred theories of masculinity”. Social Dynamics: A Journal of
African Studies 1–15. doi:10.1080/02533952.2018.1481683.
Mignolo, W. 2009. “Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom”. Theory,
Culture & Society 26(8): 159–181.
Mignolo, W., and M. Tlostanova. 2006. “Theorising from the borders: Shifting to geo- and body poli-
tics of knowledge”. European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 205–221.
Mignolo, W., and C. Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham & London: Duke
University Press.
Morrell, R. 1998. “Of boys and men: Masculinity and gender in Southern African studies”. Journal of
Southern African Studies 24(4): 605–630.
14 S. MFECANE
Morrell, R. 2001. Changing Men in Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal

Press.
Morrell, R., and L. Clowes. 2016. The emergence of gender scholarship in South Africa – Reflections on
Southern theory. CSSR Working Paper No. 381. Centre for Social Science Research.
Musasa, P. 2017. “Who is setting Africa’s intellectual agenda?” Codesria Bulletin 1(2): 5–7.
Ndletyana, M. 2008. African Intellectuals in the 19th and Early 20th Century South Africa. Cape Town:
HSRC Press.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. 2018. “Revisiting trajectories of epistemological decolonisation in Africa”.
Codesria Bulletin 1: 11–17.
Ngwane, Z. 2004. “‘Real men awaken their fathers’ homesteads, the educated leave them in ruins’:
The politics of domestic reproduction in post-apartheid South Africa”. In Producing African
Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal age, edited by B. Weiss. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
Ntombana, L. 2011. “Should Xhosa male initiation be abolished?” International Journal of Cultural
Studies 14(6): 631–640.
Ntozini, A., and H. Ngqangweni. 2016. “Gay Xhosa men’s experiences of ulwaluko (traditional male
initiation)”. Culture, Health & Sexuality. doi:10.1080/13691058.2016.1182213.
Nyamnjoh, F. 2012. “‘Potted plants in greenhouses’: A critical reflection on the resilience of colonial
education in Africa”. Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(2): 129–154.
Nyamnjoh, F. 2017. Drinking from a cosmic gourd. How Amos Tutoula can change our minds.
Accessed November 23, 2017. http://www.readafricanbooks.com/opinions/how-amos-tutuola-
can-change-our-minds.
Nyamnjoh, F. 2019. Decolonising the university in Africa. Printed from the Oxford Research
Encyclopedia, Politics (oxfordre.com/politics). doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.717.
Nye, R. 2005. “Locating masculinity: Some recent work on men”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society 30(3): 1937–1962.
Okyere-Manu, B. D., and E. Konyana. 2018. “Who is umuntu in Umuntu ngumuntu Ngabantu?
Interrogating moral issues facing Ndau women in polygamous marriages”. South African Journal
of Philosophy 37(2): 207–216.
Oyěwùmí, O. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Quijano, A. 2007. “Coloniality and modernity/rationality”. Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 168–178.
Qambela, G. 2016. “When they found out I was a man they became even more violent:
Autoethnography and the rape of men. Graduate Journal of Social Science November 12(3): 179–
205.
Ratele, K. 2015. “Working through resistance in engaging boys and men towards gender equality and
progressive masculinities”. Culture, Health & Sexuality 17(s2): 144–158.
Ratele, K. 2017. Liberating Masculinities. Cape Town: HSRC Press.
Schrock, D., and M. Schwalbe. 2009. “Men, masculinity, and manhood acts”. Annual Review of
Sociology 35: 277–295.
Schwalbe, M. 2014. Manhood Acts: Gender and Practices of Domination. London: Paradigm Publishers.
Siswana, A., & Kiguwa, P. 2018. Social media representations of masculinity and culture in Inxeba (The
Wound). Agenda. doi:10.1080/10130950.2018.148529.
Soga, J. H. 1931. The AmaXhosa: Life and Customs. Alice, Eastern Cape: Lovedale Press.
Suggs, D. 1996. “Mosadi Tshwene: The construction of gender and the consumption of Alcohol in
Botswana”. American Ethnologist 23(3): 597–610.
Suttner, R. 2003. “Masculinities in the African national congress-led liberation movement: The under-
ground period”. Kleio 71–105.
Vincent, L. 2008. “‘Boys will be boys’: Traditional Xhosa male circumcision, HIV and sexual socialisa-
tion in contemporary South Africa”. Culture, Health & Sexuality 10(5): 431–446.
Walker, S. 1990. “Gender and the development of migrant labour system c.1850–1930”. In Women
and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, edited by C. Walker, 273–292. Cape Town & London:
David Philip.
Walsh, C. 2012. “‘Other’ Knowledges. ‘Other’ Critiques: Reflections on the Politics and Practices of
Philosophy and Decoloniality in the ‘Other’ America.” Transmodernity (Spring).
Williams, D. 1978. Umfundisi: A Biography of Tiyo Soga 1829–1871. Alice: Lovedale Press.
Williams, D. 1983. The Journal and Selected Writings of Tiyo Soga. A.A Balkema/Cape Town: Rhodes
University Press

ANTH1007A 2023 Reader

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

ANTH1007A 2023 Reader

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

ANTH1007A 2023 Reader

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ANTH1005A (2023)

Dr. Hylton White

R6sum6: La violente irruption de la jeunesse africaine dans les spheres publiques

Mamadou Diouf is a professor of history and African American and African

Studies. His most recent book is Histoire du Sin`gal (2001).

This content downloaded from

Today, young people are emerging as one of the central concerns of

This content downloaded from

African Youth and the Postcolonial State

With the achievement of independence, African political cultures made

This content downloaded from

characterized traditional African values, and to put young people at th

The Closure of the Nationalist Moment: The New Politics of

This content downloaded from

This geography--often understood (by moralists and pe

This content downloaded from

of a young people's market in (mostly American) consumer products. On

This content downloaded from

In the Senegalese situation, for instance, the 1980s were characterized

This content downloaded from

ation of autonomous organizations with strong ethnic and religious con

This content downloaded from

Youthful Bodies: The Location of Pleasure and Violence, and

This content downloaded from

and new meanings of pleasure, life, and death.

As actors and resources in the political, economic, and social registers,

This content downloaded from

Hastings, A. 1997. The Creation of Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Honwana, A. 1999. Negotiating Post-War Identities: Child Soldiers in Mozambique

This content downloaded from

1. For an apocalyptic reading of this situation, see Kaplan (1994).

4. Hastings (1997) refers to such new constructions as "literary imaginations."

This content downloaded from

An historical ethnography of generational conflicts in a rural community in the

In the course of my fieldwork in South Africa in 1996/97 I visited

associating schooling with lack of proper manhood. The young men,

precolonial social institutions that were compromised or eradicated by

lated structure of social reproduction depended both its semantic sta-

The Social World

their own chiefs who acted as subordinates of the paramount chief

As in other rural communities in South Africa most able-bodied men

Public Spaces and the Construction of Social Subjectivity

a) The Chiefly Court

Historically, the chiefly court exercised some political control at

By local standards, therefore, the chiefly court was an effective source

ANC and SANCO claiming responsibility over the area of governance

b) The School Meeting

and which also approved important schemes like erection of additional

For various reasons the school meetings, as a public space, seem to

reconfiguration of native bodies (drills and uniforms) and a modification

lowing section looks further at the social dislocations brought about by

Initiation and the Socialization of Educated Suf?jectivities

Historically a subject of major theological disputations by mission-

b) `Educated ... Good; Educated and Man... Better'

Although teachers have traditionally come from outside the com-

This behavior was criticized as being 'educated', 'showy', and

markedly different. In the present case school and initiation played