“The King of Zulus” and His Louisiana Minstrels: The Transnational Dimensions of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club in New Orleans, 1900–60

This paper examines Americans who performed as “Zulu” minstrels.  They recast an old racist tradition to serve a new progressive goal: celebrating strong black manhood in an era of segregation.  This minstrel identity was the product of middle-class African Americans who formed Louisiana’s Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club in 1909; it became the first “Negro organization” to parade in New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.  Zulu founders were inspired by a vaudeville act at a local theater which staged the play “Down in Shaka’s Jungle,” an ethnographic satire that drew on accounts of American missionaries in South Africa.

Before the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club launched its first float, white organizations like Rex officially paraded through the streets.  The Zulu Club earned the right to perform in Mardi Gras because it agreed to wear blackface and clown in palavers involving a fictional King Zulu.  Despite such stereotypes, blacks in New Orleans like Louis Armstrong admired the Zulu Club, perhaps because it showcased men dressed as feared warriors carrying banners illustrating the feats of Nubian Egypt and Ethiopian independence.  Armstrong titled one of his hit records, “King of the Zulus,” and in 1949 fulfilled a boyhood dream by being enthroned as Shaka of Mardi Gras, an image that graced TIME.

By the 1950s, the Zulu Club was facing scrutiny.  On the eve of decolonization in Africa, American civil rights activists were calling for boycotts of “blackface” Mardi Gras.  But the Zulu Club refused to end their parade, which led to the surreal scene of “Shaka” being protected from angry protestors by white police. Over the ensuing decades the Zulu Club would reflect a greater awareness of militant “black power” as its members followed developments in independent Africa, particularly apartheid crackdowns from the 1960s to 1980s.