Iklwa!
 

i've been keeping my eye opens for a nice iklwa for a few years now, never found one i liked and could afford at the time. until today, this one sprung out of ebay as i was doing a half-hearted ebay search after checking my watch lists. i somehow managed to win it in the last few seconds of rapid fire bidding war.

per the vendor:

Beautiful and classic example of a nineteenth-century Zulu stabbing spear, iklwa, with typical short, broad blade and thick haft. Blade is 14.5 ins long, 2 ins wide, nice age patina, some irregularity of the edges due to sharpening. Overall length is 38ins. There are two nice bands of brass wire binding, one fixing the blade to the haft. Nicely balanced piece which clearly meant business!

This piece was collected in Nongoma in central Zululand (northern KwaZulu-Natal) a few years ago.

it'll join my iwesa (22in.) that i got earlier this week. i blame the recent TV showing of Shaka Zulu. ;)

as i've been lucky today, decide to risk what i had in my pocket on an apparemtly unloved club on ebay. got it for less than the postage. no other bidders.

club is marked 'spilati' on a small white sticker. i found a reference to an area in kruger national park of that name in a travel forum by someone who had been there on 'safari' a few years back. not found by google maps or google earth, wiki, etc. found another ref to 'spitali wood', again can't find what they were talking about.

anybody have any ideas? it doesn't look native to me, is it a boer locally made club from the bad old days of apartheit? looks like the two-tone assegai wood from the dogwood family, which is very hard and dense. have no idea how big or small it is till it arrives. could be 3 in. or 3 ft. long ;) hopefully somewhat in between and more to the longer end of that range. looks like it was turned on a primitive hand powered lathe from the rough tool marks.

i even looked up the website of 'crate amplifiers' mentioned on the round object (speaker?) it sets on to get a size ref. no round things listed there.

i love a good mystery.

p.s. - the iwisa arrived shortly after posting the 1st post. nice heavy (439 grams, a half ounce under a pound) hunk of almost black wood, and it's not shoe polish :). i think it's ebony or an ironwood of some sort. good polish, but you can fel the undulations of the toolmarks and the almost but not quite roundness of the ball head that this was not turned on a lathe, but hand carved.

I like the iklwa. Makes me wonder if the woven brass indicates a person of prestige..........

awful lot harder & time consuming than the dried cow's tail-skin binding found on many. plus the reasonably larger blade. and the care it appears to have received over the years. makes me think much the same.

Nice find!

I'm surprised that there are any more old pieces still there.

it wasn't ;) the vendor is in the UK, tho it must have been a while ago he collected it and brought it back here. like most places, the good old pieces were snapped up by collectors like us, and are very hard to find in their original source areas. we, effectively, cut our own throats. ;)

while it used to be common practice, the modern western armies no longer allow battle trophies to be acquired - it's a court martial offence in the US. still happens tho, further depleting original sources with provenance.

even here, it's hard to find good pieces, but you get lucky occasionally. someone selling grandpa's collection who has no interest in it and just wants to get rid of the (to him) junk. had a new neighbour who, when i first visited them, saw he had a beautiful well patinated zulu knobkerrie mounted over the living room/kitchen door.he found it in his granny's attic when she passed and liked it, but had no idea what it was until i told him. probably could have got it off him for a few pounds, but that wouldn't have been neighbourly. i fear a lot of good stuff was just discarded during house clearances, lost during ww2 bombing, and turned in to the police for destruction during police weapons amnesties.

just got a message on the 'spilati' club - it's 19 in.(48 cm.) long.

the iklwa arrived. beautiful, tight. no major damage other than age, nice patina on the sharp blade, some light pitting, blade is of a shallow diamond x-section. tip is rounded and sharp.

wire wrap is solid and undamaged. it is a combination of braided bands of brass and steel wire, the steel now black with age. you can see where the ends of the wire were inserted into tiny holes in the wood at the starting end of the braids, braided towards the point and the bitter ends hidden under the last few turns as they reached the far end.

some evidence there may have been two more bands spaced along the haft, two pale band areas about an inch or so wide in the darker wood patina. the wood is a heavy 'assegai wood', a dogwood variant and similar to ironwood.

i'll take some pictures later & add them here.