Workers and Warriors Masculinity and the Struggle for Nation in South Africa

In this compact study, Thembisa Waetjen explores how gender structured the mobilization of Zulu nationalism in South Africa, where ethnic communitarian and liberal democratic conceptions of nation competed for dominance as anti-apartheid efforts gained force during the 1980s. As its title suggests, Workers and Warriors argues that political struggles fought out in lethal battles between men - struggles over the nature of political authority and citizenship, territorial sovereignty and cultural tradition, industrial relationships and street-level control - were necessarily bound up with struggles over the changing meaning of male gender identities, power, and practices in conditions of rapid social change.