Louise Meintjes's new work focuses on a fascinating subject of South African ethnomusicology. She explores how ngoma dance and song in rural KwaZulu-Natal are shaped by labour migrancy, holiday homecomings and the AIDS epidemic. Organised into eight chapters, her multi-disciplinary scholarship presents interlocking narratives with titles encapsulating the breadth of her research, from ‘Affect, Eloquence and the Politics of Reconciliation’ to ‘Silence, Ambiguity and Brotherhood’. Her examination revolves around the volatile politics – personal, communal and national – which bind and buffet teams of performers, many of them young men affiliated through kinship and territorial identities, as well as corporeal age-sets. Violence also envelops ngoma in Dust of the Zulu, as gender and generational struggles, long-running feuds and impulsive vendettas (ignited, for example, by rival courting) influence how dancers stage their art.

Few book-length studies engage what Meintjes calls the aesthetics of Zulu ‘warriordom’, which animate the choreographed movements and evocative lyrics of ngoma. Indeed, her path-breaking inquiry into these body-voice dimensions stands alone in ethnomusicology, albeit with one exception: Hugh Tracey's African Dances of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines (1952), an apartheid-era classic that speaks with a paternalistic accent. Pretoria's Secretary for Native Affairs W.W.M. Eiselen, Hendrik Verwoerd's expert of racial separatism, prefaced African Dances. In the foreword Eiselen thanked Tracey for not ‘making the Bantu adapt … to [the] European’ and helping readers see the ‘essential Bantu’ enact ‘time immemorial’ tribalism. Dust of the Zulu shatters this perniciously static view of art and culture while pursuing the goal that Meintjes and Tracey both appreciate. His guiding aim in 1952 was to demonstrate the ‘genius’ of ‘African … composers who remained true to their craft’.

Employing insights from social history and cultural anthropology, Meintjes's revealing analysis really relies on her ethnographic observations of Msinga district, a hardscrabble region in a former homeland stretching along the interior Thukela River. Her primary site of fieldwork is Keate's Drift where ngoma commemorates cycles of life, particularly marking the return of migrant men from urban centres where they search for work, and endure exploitation and privation. Meintjes's knowledge of idiomatic isiZulu and sincere relationships with ngoma impresarios like Siyazi enable her to dive through the surface of the ‘war-dance’ to reach deeper currents of custom. An ear to the ground, eyes on the individual and group, Meintjes captures striking flashes of ngoma beyond the thunder rumbling in the opening stomps and drum beats. Dust of the Zulu insists on tracing all the consequential expressions of body and voice, especially the cultural lightning illuminating the emotions of dancers. Meintjes explains how their bursts of creativity, some rehearsed and others improvised (e.g. ukugida), convey fierce anger, loss and stigma, praiseworthy prowess and declarations of love. These ngoma broadcasts, she argues, fervently appeal to audiences, urging ‘fans’ to build a homestead, ukwakh'muzi, and seek ancestral protection against misfortune delivered by an assassin's bullet or untimely death due to AIDS. Such galvanising passions are beautifully illustrated in the action photographs of T.J. Lemon.

Meintjes's first book, Sound of Africa (2003), projected the powerful resonances of Zulu music (masikanda). Crackling with energy and erudition, Dust of the Zulu now vivifies ngoma for the academy.