I’ve mentioned before that I once lived for a year in the mountains of rural Africa. The area of Lesotho where I was based was pretty traditional culturally, though culture and economics both had to change to reflect that most of the men were in South Africa, working in the gold mines.
The “national weapons” of Lesotho are the double fighting sticks; on occasion I would see the boys at the local school performing dances with them. Since I was working with Outward Bound, I spent a fair bit of time up in the high mountains, where boys too young to go away to work would spend the summer looking after their village’s cattle. Obviously, there wasn’t too much to do up there, and they spent a lot of time smoking dope, playing on musical instruments improvised out of empty petrol of vegetable oil tins, and… fighting with sticks.
I hoped to bring back a pair of sticks as a souvenir, but never managed to get hold of some. Still, it was really interesting to have seen – but very, very, difficult to find out more information about it. I suppose there may have been obscure anthropological reports, but I’ve never seen any discussion of this African fighting tradition.
Well, that’s now changed: the guys who are researching the knife-fighting techniques of the Cape Town slums and prisons (calling it the Piper Style) have put up a really interesting piece about stick fighting. True, they’re talking about the Zulus and Xhosa rather than the Sotho, but then the Basotho nation was largely created from fragments of other tribes, and in any case the description fits well with my recollectionof what I saw in the mountains of Lesotho. Really interesting, check it out.
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