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What’s NEW! Click here for a brief voice clip by Lloyd | |||||||||
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Links to Scott Sonnon’s Edward Wong’s Urban Survival System | ||
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About Piper ... some history and backgroundThe name ‘Piper System’ and the unique method of blade combat that uses the name are the creations of Nigel February. Nigel, his students and his designated representatives are the only Piper System exponents. The Piper System is a study of Cape Town and South African knife combatives assembled and organised into a structure, much like a Martial Art, over a period of years. Lloyd De Jongh added extensive additional research and created a learning format for the material in conjunction with Erik Petermann and Jason Williams. Piper was created to save lives... our own. We were afraid of the skills that our violent criminal element possessed - which we had extreme difficulty coping with utilising the numerous Western and Asian approaches to Martial Arts we had collectively learned. This fear was widely prevalent, and we found that many were very interested in learning what we knew. Many individuals have since added useful contributions to the pool of knowledge. Before collecting all the various gang and street methods into the organised system called Piper, it was just called Cape Town knife fighting. Different areas and different gangs had various styles and only a few techniques - but nothing as complete as Piper existed. A typical knifer had a couple of techniques and no conception that there was a discernible underlying method involved. This wasn’t a Martial Art with a syllabus. Gangs therefore had a group of individuals each with one or two of their own and some general, borrowed techniques - their method having a particular regional style and an overall African ‘flavour’. Piper was about painstakingly collecting all of those individual techniques and styles of movement into categories that we Martial Artists could relate to, then compiling a complete system for the edged, blunt, improvised weapons and the empty hand method called Form Style. The blade is a primary weapon, empty hand methods can be considered an adjunct. N.B. Before we continue, in the interests of clearing up some common misunderstandings, we want to make it clear that:
The Zulu and the birth of PiperThe Zulu influence with regard to combat spread to other tribes in the south. Shaka's methods were evolutionary & dynamic, but he was a power-hungry, fanatical tyrant who instilled fear in his followers and ruled with an iron fist. Quite naturally, some of the Impi escaped and sought refuge amongst the tribes further south. After Shaka’s murder, things started to turn for the Zulu. Even the Zulu capital changed location. From this we learn 2 things: 1. migration 2. interchange of ideas. The infamous and feared prison Numbers gangs were created by Nongaloza Mathebula, in 1912. He was called the fighting general of the 28s prison gang. It is believed that this man founded the original gang lore, which would later spill onto our streets (For an academic paper on what is still closely guarded knowledge, see Jonny Steinberg’s paper, Nongaloza’s Children). It is at this point in history that the Piper timeline begins, not before that. By now the Xhosa, Basotho, Cape Malay, Khoi and San offshoots, Tswana and Indian ethnic groups all more or less knew the way the Zulus moved in combat (it should be noted that there is no difference between Zulu, Xhosa, Shangaan, Ndebele and Swazi stick fighting), and had combined them with their own fighting principles. Historically, it is Shaka, not the Zulus, who redefined Southern African tribal warfare - as much as the founders of the Piper System made the study of the culture of prison/street knifings more accessible to those affected by crime.
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