Lloyd De Jongh is an instructor for a system called Piper, which he explained was a synthesis of Zulu stick-fighting, Malaysian martial arts and English boxing brewed in South African prisons.
I was attending as guest at a four-day seminar on the single day of Saturday, June 8th, 2019 in State College Pennsylvania. The seminar was conducted in a state of the art facility, which is, I think, named Central Pennsylvania MMA. Lloyd was instructing under Marc “Crafty Dog” Denny of The Dog Brothers.
What I gleaned from the Dog Brothers method was an advanced evolutionary approach to self-defense grown from traditional arts, deconstructed in limited rules submission combat and then adapted via combat psychology to bad odds survival encounters. Marc presented a highly functional and individually adaptable system and even gave me a 20-minute private during the lunch break, as did Lloyd.
I told them both, “I am not a martial artist but a boxing coach from Baltimore.”
They both cringed at the name of the city and Lloyd said, “Then you are a survivor.”
I did not mention my experiential weaponry involvement, just my concern for self-defense and my boxing experience. What I came there for was to look into the criminal origins of the Piper system, as I am interested in street survival in Africa, since the African situation is swiftly being recreated in America.
I noticed that Lloyd’s interpretation essentially uses weak-side, southpaw, old peek-a-boo style boxing footwork and that some of the hand work was reminiscent of the old-style, cross-arm guard used by Archie Moore and George Foreman in his comeback. I was thrilled to see such a nuanced exploitation of the falling step and a superior appreciation for tactile mobility. Lloyd would be an excellent specialist coach for an amateur boxer looking to adapt to the clinching of pro boxing and of course, self-defense situations. His preference for the slapping and checking hand echoes a lot of old time defensive boxing, from Moore to Rosenbloom to the old measuring hands of the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
The other aspect of Lloyd’s art that blew we two Baltimoreans away was his use of the submissive panhandling approach as a comic, emotionally oblique and spatially inappropriate street person. Lloyd picked out a Muay Thai fighter in great condition and asked him to be the defender in the scenario and got all the way up in this guy’s space—his head on the man’s chest!—and the martial artist was still standing there waiting for the cue to defend and Lloyd said, “That’s right, stand there like a polite white person.”
Lloyd explained that the African method of predation involves locking the lizard brain into the predatory goal—a “long term,” minute-out goal—while using the short-term brain function to clown and draw near to his target under passive guise. The attendees—most of them big brained, suburban martial artists and athletic fighters—had a hard time wrapping their large brains around that reptilian-mime overture to a chimp-out deployed by Lloyd.
I asked Lloyd if he had considered his method’s application to survival situations on a moving platform, such as busses and trains. I have defended and attacked on buses and thought it was a fit.
He glowed, “Yes, when I was in Holland I instructed a train conductor. The mass transit personnel were being attacked by gangs of Moroccan kids. We worked on bump-checks and he was able to use this method to breakup an attack.”
I then told him briefly about my last year in Baltimore being hunted on the streets by youths and men and that the evolution from social violence in Baltimore had gone from 3 of 3 annual attacks on my person in 1982 being hierarchal social aggression in which men verbally threatened me as a prelude to attack, to 2017 when 16 of 20 attackers required no emotional escalation or justification and engaged in no dominance-hostility escalation or flat demanding confrontation but simply defaulted to hunting me like prey.
Lloyd responded, “You are describing a behavioral arc from European to African, from social to antisocial—a descent into pure predation and the way of the criminal. You were right to leave such a place. I must be honest about my people—my culture—Africans are just more violent than other people. This is why I had to leave South Africa. I live in Europe now. The rapid devolution is troubling and I blame white people. White people should never have excused and accepted this behavior. People do not want to hear it. But if you do not oppose force you may expect to be subjected to more force.”
Lloyd and I spent some additional time discussing boxing and after we had been called away by separate folks he called to me and we shook hands one last time, saying, “James, thank you, Sir for your input and kind words.”
Good luck, Lloyd.
Being a Bad Man in a Worse World
Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival
He should have been forced to stay in South Africa.
Lloyd has been censored on facebook for relating the facts of his life and might show up here in a dialogue piece with that hoodrat that should have stayed in Baltimore.
"Lloyd explained that the African method of predation involves locking the lizard brain into the predatory goal—a “long term,” minute-out goal—while using the short-term brain function to clown and draw near to his target under passive guise. The attendees—most of them big brained, suburban martial artists and athletic fighters—had a hard time wrapping their large brains around that reptilian-mime overture to a chimp-out deployed by Lloyd."
It seems like the best way to combat this is to expose it by yelling, "Stay back!" and reaching towards your back pocket like you have some sort of tool, whether or not you do. Predators usually give up after they've been exposed as such, especially if they might get hurt. I don't think this behavior is unique to Africans. Criminals generally try to get you to "pass an interview" by seeing how compliant you are to their requests and invasion of your space. You must fail their interview. If a guy came up to me using this submissive, comical approach after I yelled at him to stay back, I could legally assume he was assaulting me and snap him down onto his face with his shirt or head.
This guy Lloyd is not a pure African by the looks of him and his last name. He's part Dutch.
I need to see if Dog Brothers have a NorCal seminar.
the seminar was among the best I've been to and Lloyd described his ancestry as Dutch, Malaysian and African, a man of three continents.