The task that I set myself, was to see if I could construct, for under $ 20, a reasonable SHTF melee weapon in a city CBD, with no gun shops, knife shops or hardware shops. Forget about baseball bats; the two sports stores had pathetic bats costing over $100.

I went into the Chinese junk shop store. There I found cheap kitchen knives, with Japanese stainless steel blades, for $ 5. There were thin pipe broom handles for $ 2 each. A single one was frail, but three put together became strong. PVC electrical tape was going for $ 1 a roll, so I spent the rest of the money on that.

In the privacy of my slum, I attached the Japanese knife, which had a sexy slender shape for penetration, to the three broom handles jointed together, the knife handle slotted perfectly into the grove made by the three handles. Then, while watching a D-grade martial arts movie, I began taping everything up. Once I got into the swing of things, it became like a form of Zen meditation, or some shit like that. The tape not only firmly secured the knife, but also made the surface of the spear stronger, and gave it all a good “rubber” grip, so that a quick sliding thrust could be made, as one would with say a snooker cue. Fast, and hard to block or deflect.

There it was, an iklwa, made from a politically correct shit hole. The iklwa, was the weapon of choices of monarch Shaka Ka Senzangakhona (1787-1828), who as part of his military reforms, abandoned the primary use of the long throwing assegai spear, which did not result in enough corpses. He used instead a shorter thrusting spear, the iklwa, which had a 12 inch blade on a two foot shaft. The weapon was supposedly named after the sound which it made when it was withdrawn from a victim’s body, after a thrust. The long throwing spear was still used at the beginning of battles, but men aimed to bridge the gap and fight close with their cowhide shields, and iklwa. The technique was even effective against rifles, where, as done by Amerindians, they waited until reload time to close the gap and attack. It is obviously a good weapon for urban home defense.

Another day, another weapon, the way god meant it to be.

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