In Dust of the Zulu Louise Meintjes traces the political and aesthetic significance of ngoma, a competitive form of dance and music that emerged out of the legacies of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Contextualizing ngoma within South Africa's history of violence, migrant labor, the HIV epidemic, and the world music market, Meintjes follows a community ngoma team and its professional subgroup during the twenty years after apartheid's end. She intricately ties aesthetics to politics, embodiment to the voice, and masculine anger to eloquence and virtuosity, relating the visceral experience of ngoma performances as they embody the expanse of South African history. Meintjes also shows how ngoma helps build community, cultivate responsible manhood, and provide its participants with a means to reconcile South Africa's past with its postapartheid future. Dust of the Zulu includes over one hundred photographs of ngoma performances, the majority taken by award-winning photojournalist TJ Lemon.

"Studies of African performance remain far too few; this one sets a very high bar. Essential." - Choice

"Crackling with energy and erudition, Dust of the Zulu now vivifies ngoma for the academy." - Journal of Modern African Studies

"Louis Meintjes's Dust of the Zulu leaps out at the reader with the same energy and passion as the Ngoma dancers themselves. It is uncanny how deftly Meintjes captures the vibrancy and rhythm of the performers and performances in her writing, and T.J. Lemon’s photos are the perfect complement to the descriptions of harmonized bodies and voices." - African Studies Quarterly

"Meintjes’s fluid ethnographic writing melds analytical precision with a depth of cultural insight gained through long immersion. The book’s dialectical force is sustained by the richness and intimacy of Meintjes’s collaborations. Zulu voices saturate the book’s textures. . . . The prose itself is beautifully wrought. . . . Replete with revelations that are by turns tremendously moving, frightening, disconcerting, and inspiring." - Anthropos

"We travel with Meintjes as she recounts individual narratives of Zulu men maintaining dignity amidst wavering stability in wage-labor, health, and the inconsistent machinations of the international music industry. The humanity, fragility, and mutual constitution of strength through aesthetics is expertly handled in this new classic in the genre of performative ethnography." - International Journal of African Historical Studies

"Louise Meintjes’s book provides a captivating introduction to the vibrant and dramatic spirit of this Southern African art form. . . . Dust of the Zulu contributes to the ever-growing literature on indigenous African theatre and performance; its strength is the author’s captivating descriptions of the dance and the drama of the competitions." - Theatre Research International

""Dust of the Zulu is a significant contribution to the scholarship of South African music and Zulu ngoma more specifically. The book will be very useful for students and scholars in the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural studies, and African studies. It demonstrates the author’s deep and wide knowledge of Zulu ngoma and her mastery of the art of ethnography writing and is strongly recommended for anyone interested in learning this art. Indeed, whereas Meintjes praises Clegg for successfully translating ngoma into terms that are intelligible within the global popular-music circles, she and the photographer T. J. Lemon should be praised for magnificently translating ngoma in terms that are legible within music and cultural scholarly circles."" - Notes

"Visceral and immediate. . . . [Meintjes] makes us hear an alternative to mainstream ethnography by leaving it unspoken. She’s dancing in the scholar’s world." - Ethnomusicology