I grew up watching Musangwe, a Venda traditional fist fighting sport for men. I never took part and was content being a spectator – no one was forced to participate. Some people took part out of peer pressure, others to earn respect, and some for the love of the sport.
Musangwe starts in December until the end of the holiday season in the first or second week of January. If you were a respected Musangwe fighter, your relatives and friends would not get bullied. They just needed to mention your name to fend off enemies. A Musangwe fight could also be stirred by an incident that occurred outside Musangwe, but wouldn’t continue after Musangwe. Fighting outside Musangwe could get you arrested, but at Musangwe you fight with no such worries.
It’s a legal traditional sport where participants consent and surrender when they’ve had enough, so people would also take an opportunity to settle personal scores. A fight lasts for the duration the participants can endure each other, and you don’t beat a man when he’s down or after he has surrendered.
A guy ahead in the fight could surrender first. To surrender, you just raise your hand and the fight is over. When you surrender after landing more big blows, your eager opponent won’t be amused as he would want to continue fighting. But once someone raises their hand, even 30 seconds into the fight, the fight is over and you can go claim victory with your bruises. It’s the risk you take when you participate.
There are no prizes hence not everyone intends to win. Someone could land one punch and call it a day. Yes, it’s a coward move but you know what? He landed it and you may never undermine him again because you would know he can land a vicious one. Such cowardly acts of landing one punch and surrendering are condemned and frowned upon, but not prohibited.
After Musangwe season, people would have a newfound respect for guys they previously undermined and would have also lost fear for guys they once feared based on their respective performances at Musangwe. During the fighting season, if you lose awfully to someone, those who previously feared you would also want to challenge you – right after your loss, as you’ve just been exposed as a bad fighter. If you declined the challenge, your challenger became a superior fighter to you even though you never fought him.
It’s also through our own voices our stories can be told truthfully, respectfully, and authentically.
You could also fear someone based on the type of fighters declining his challenge. The fact that some respected fighters are refusing to fight him means he is a vicious fighter. Women were barred from attending Musangwe to protect participants’ dignity. You don’t want to hear your wife say “I will call Lufuno” during a family argument after she had witnessed me pummelling you at Musangwe. Suddenly, you’re no longer man enough at home.
Barring women was also to avoid them interfering with fights involving their loved ones. When men interfere, it’s when they are prepared to fight for whomever they would be defending, which is allowed, but the opponent has no obligation to accept the challenge. He could decline to fight you. Even men who attended Musangwe didn’t talk about it with women, and women knew it was a man’s sport and didn’t ask who won or lost. A similar honour applied to what happened in the mountain initiation schools, it was never discussed with women – and also what happened at the women’s initiation schools was never discussed with men. It was part of our values and guarding each other’s dignity.
If a non-Venda person tells the Musangwe story, they will miss this cultural context and nuances, and could portray the tradition as barbaric, viewing it blindly from outside. But lack of cultural context doesn’t seem to stop people from telling stories they know little about. They insist on telling them because they have the platform to do so, eventually diluting and misrepresenting other people’s cultures.
Culture doesn’t preserve itself; it needs to be embraced with pride. Without proper documentation and embrace, your culture could eventually cease to exist, turning you into a foreigner in your own country.
At the core of cultural misrepresentation is lack of transformation in the communication industry. BANA (Black Agencies Network Association) was recently invited to make a submission to the Human Rights Commission on the discrimination in the advertising industry. We were happy to participate, and we hope our input will be taken seriously.
Whether intentional or not, lack of cultural insight into the people you are engaging or talking about always comes with a risk to offend them. Beyond offence, we also know that media plays a key role when it comes to influencing behaviour. Media is the voice of the country and if that voice doesn’t represent the country’s demographics, your identity is bound to be diluted.
BANA’s primary mandate is to champion transformation and inclusivity within the advertising and communications industry, and to establish an enabling and sustainable business environment for black communication professionals. It’s also through our own voices our stories can be told truthfully, respectfully, and authentically.
Lufuno Makungo is a founding member of Black Agencies Network Association. He is an account management consultant and founder of Ngano Media.
