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

Organisations of Xhosa-speaking youth - predominantly boys and young men - in the 1950s and 1960s were critical spaces for the construction of masculi ne identities in rural Ciskei and Transkei. In the context of post-Second W orld War industrialisation, collapsing reserve agriculture and apartheid ru le, these organisations were critical sites for filtering influences and fa shioning values and lifestyles. While boys and young men constantly reconst ructed a distinction between boyhood and manhood around the axis of circumc ision, they reinvented notions of masculinity in the shadow of decreasing p rospects 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, th e terrain on which boys and young men constructed their identities was shap en more by inter-group rivalry, aggressive behaviour and control over girls than by generational conflict.