For Zulu males of any age, defence is for wimps

WHEN I was a schoolboy fistfights were semi-formal affairs at Stirling High School, the aggrieved parties facing each other in one of the old wynds near Holy Rude church, egged on by their supporters. Lookouts were posted to warn of approaching teachers. My first opponent was an older lad who affected a Teddy Boy jacket.

The next fight, more of an angstsaturated scuffle, took place in an empty classroom in the new high school, without witnesses, against a tall boy from Lancashire who died some months later after losing control of his motor cycle.

At university, my main sporting love was boxing. We trained twice weekly in the autumn and winter terms with a full-size ring, punch bags and gym equipment, and were lucky to have Andy Grant as honorary coach. He was smallish, rotund, rosy-cheeked, with Brilliantined hair and a salty sense of humour. Always alert, he never stayed still for long, moving round you on the balls of his feet. This was due to years in the ring as a professional trainer but could be disconcerting if he forgot himself and shadow boxed during conversations – this could lead to misunderstandings in crowded shops and banks.

One of Andy’s stable was John “Cowboy” McCormack, so called because of his bow legs, who would spar gently with us and pass on advice. A handsome, stocky man, his main claim to fame was being declared British middleweight champion while rolling around in pain on the canvas ring of the Empire Pool, Wembley, after the defending champion had delivered a vicious hook to Cowboy’s lower regions when he thought the referee was unsighted.

When Andy felt we students were getting uppity, he would order us to catch an evening bus to Holyrood School, which in those days was in a tough slum area on the southside of the city. There he would lean on the ropes with a knowing look on his face as a succession of 16-year-olds from the youth club took us apart. My personal bete noire had a suede scalp, a moustache, body punches like locomotive pistons, and crossed himself every time I crumpled to the floor, a ritual he obviously assumed absolved him from any earthly consequences.

Some years later, we started a boxing club in the small hamlet of Pomeroy, not far from Isandlwana where the Zulu impis massacred Chelmsford’s British troops in 1879.

It was popular, with up to 30 young men and boys happily beating the daylights out of suspended sacks full of river sand – and each other. They learned the painful process of building abdominal muscles to withstand the kick of a donkey and why skipping ropes make you agile.

One night I was demonstrating to a schoolboy how to defend himself against crosses and uppercuts. I feigned a cross, then the uppercut, forgetting that for Zulu males of any age, defence is for wimps. When I regained consciousness, everyone had fled and the local priest, Irish and my co-helper, was looking down at me without sympathy. At this point, Sibongile Manyatsi, the St John’s demonstrator, returned from outside and hurled a bucket of ice-cold water over both of us.

My brother-in-law, Gabriel, a lawyer, was observed disciplining an unsober nephew at a family gathering last year. He would have benefited from Andy Grant’s coaching, his wild swings missing completely, but Newton’s laws of motion compensated, the young man being flattened by an off-balance mass of 90 kilos which was unable to stop accelerating.

Dr David Vost studied medicine at Glasgow University and is currently working at a hospital in Swaziland. He and his family live on a small farm in northern Uganda near the Albert Nile. davidvostsz@gmail.com