Youth organisations and the construction of masculine identities in the Ciskei and Transkei, 1945–1960

Abstract

Organisations of Xhosa-speaking youth -predominantly boys and young men -in the 1950s and 1960s were critical spaces for the construction of masculine identities in rural Ciskei and Transkei. In the context of post-Second World War industrialisation, collapsing reserve agriculture and apartheid rule, these organisations were critical sites for filtering influences and fashioning values and lifestyles. While boys and young men constantly reconstructed a distinction between boyhood and manhood around the axis of circumcision, they reinvented notions of masculinity in the shadow of decreasing prospects of establishing themselves as men with rural homesteads and herds of cattle. Moreover, in the absence of migrant fathers, youth organisations operated with considerable autonomy in rural localities. Concomitantly, the terrain on which boys and young men constructed their identities was shaped more by inter-group rivalry, aggressive behaviour and control over girls than by generational conflict.

Undisclosed Paternal Identity in Narratives of Distress Among Young People in Eastern Cape, South Africa

“…Donga had just come out of ukwaluka and was ikrwala [a new man]. 'Ukwaluka' is a rite of passage for amaXhosa boys that comprise a series of rituals in African traditional religion upon which status change to manhood is acknowledged (Mager 1998;Mavundla et al 2009;Mekoa 2003). The ritual involves sending boys, usually at age 18, to a 4-week initiation school, after which they should forsake boyish behavior and assume adult behavior.…”

Harnessing the Ancestors: Mutuality, Uncertainty and Ritual Practice in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

“…To conclude, gender relations and family life in rural Peddie District are not imploding across the board, but they are undeniably fraught. This is not new: social relations, including marriage, have been unsettled since at least the 1950s, in response to broader changes in the economy and political landscape of the country and countryside (Mager 1998; Morrell 2001). One of the significant ways in which women currently seek to deal with profound changes in the status of men is to be far more selective in the relationships they build and seek to sustain with the significant men in their lives.…”

Masculinity, Matrimony and Generation: Reconfiguring Patriarchy in Drum 1951–1983

“…'[T]o be masculine was to assert male control over females in violent ways, to extract feminine obedience literally through the wielding of sticks'. 41 In the context of economic hardship, migrancy, urbanisation, the spread of Christianity, consumerism and the money economy alongside the decay in traditional patterns of authority, increasingly marginalised rural patriarchs had even joined forces with white men in an effort to reassert male controls over rural women. 42 However, although colonialism, industrialisation, migrancy and urbanisation might have undermined the material basis of rural economies, the history of these societies remained, as Morrell notes, 'woven into a myriad of gendered rituals which served to legitimate the sexual division of labour and male power.…”