As the sun reached its highest point of the day, men started to trickle onto a green field where cows gather. Quickly, they formed a circle, which grew to include excited 9-year-old boys and wrinkly old men. All of them were clapping, pumping one another up, preparing to fight.
It was Saturday in the dusty village of Tshifudi. The Venda people had taken a break from their regular jobs as farmers, butchers, shopkeepers and teachers to come together and follow their nearly 200-year-old tradition: beating each other into submission.
This is musangwe, a brutal, bare-knuckle traditional fight club in which members of the Venda people gather to brawl. Although much has changed in South Africa over the past 50 years, here, in the rolling hills of the north, musangwe remains the same. Boys and men turn out each week to partake in these short bursts of violent beatings that test their opponents’ toughness and prove their own.
The rules are simple, and vicious: no gloves, no headgear, no time limits. Even if you are knocked out, you can get up and continue to fight. Only when one fighter submits can the fight come to an end. No gambling. Just fighting. Aside from an injury or two, fighters walk away with little more than respect and bragging rights.
“We’re not trying to hurt each other,” said the current president of musangwe, Tshilidzi Ndevana, who is known by his fighting name, Poison. “We’re brothers testing one another.”
A 56-year-old schoolteacher and father of five, Poison has broad shoulders and walks with clenched fists. His father took him to the fights starting when he was 10 years old. Now he urges his young students to go every weekend.
“If there is a problem in the community,” Poison said, “if people are fighting, we tell them: ‘Wait. Don’t quarrel. We will bring it to musangwe and sort it out there.’”
The fights started officially in 1829. Teenage boys from the Venda tribe would gather their bulls on a patch beside a river to drink water. Known for their toughness and pride, the Venda boys would challenge their bulls to fight. When that was not enough, they did away with the bulls entirely and used their fists. Even today, the fights are still held in the same spot by the river.
Some of the more dangerous traditions still stand. Safety concerns are largely ignored. The rise of AIDS and HIV did little to change the fighters’ practices aside from medical wraps on their hands and sometimes stopping a fight to close a wound. Injuries have included broken bones and lost eyes. Legend has it that one man died fighting musangwe in the early 1900s.
“The longest fight was in 1998 and lasted five days,” Poison said. “They just kept fighting for around two hours each day. Neither fighter wanted to give in. The spectators had to call the village elders to come in and convince them to make it a draw.”
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