Question 1

What does “Zulu” mean?

Accepted Answer

The Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club of New Orleans — a Black benevolent society founded in 1909 whose Mardi Gras parade, painted faces, and hand-decorated coconut have carried Black Carnival for more than a century.

Question 2

Where does “Zulu” come from?

Accepted Answer

Zulu is New Orleans and nowhere else. Its origin is documented rather than legendary: in 1908 a marching group of Black laboring men known as the Tramps, organized around John L. Metoyer, saw the traveling vaudeville company the Smart Set perform a skit called There Never Was and Never Will Be a King Like Me at the Pythian Temple. The following Carnival, in 1909, the group paraded under a new name, and by the mid-1910s had adopted grass skirts, an African stage theme, and floats built from boxes, palmetto leaves, and Spanish moss. The club incorporated on 20 September 1916. The coconut entered the tradition because riders could not afford glass beads — the Zulu historian emeritus Clarence Becknell has said so plainly — and it survives today because Louisiana legislators wrote it into law. The blackface question deserves to be stated rather than smoothed. The paint came off the vaudeville stage, where Black and white performers alike blacked up, and Zulu members have long held that it functioned as a mask in a city where Black men were barred from masking. Black New Orleanians have argued both sides of this for sixty years: in the early 1960s activists published a statement in The Louisiana Weekly repudiating the parade as a caricature, a boycott followed, and membership collapsed to roughly fifteen men before civil rights figures were brought into the club and the rift closed. Two misattributions should be corrected. Zulu has no connection to Afrika Bambaataa's Universal Zulu Nation, a Bronx organization founded in the 1970s that reuses the name. And Zulu is not a white krewe's invention or a white krewe's parody; it was organized by Black men, is governed by Black men, and its throws, its royalty, and its money have stayed in Black New Orleans hands since 1909.