Piper Knife: The Problems of Gate-Keeping a Crowdsourced System

A Free Bonus Article for 29 March 2026

Last week I found myself mounting a spirited defense of the Piper Knife System. I would characterize Piper as a knife cult — that is to say, a martial art or system built around the use of the knife specifically. I do not use the term “cult” pejoratively, but to define the nature of the system. Libre is a knife cult; Medusa is a knife cult; that Russian knife combat system whose name I can never remember, but which is not Systema, is a knife cult.

This week, I find myself reflecting on the attempt, by some exponents of Piper, to gate-keep what is essentially a crowdsourced martial art. That is to say that I find it largely absurd to try and control and contain something that originated with South African street criminals. While those who codified and cataloged those methods, eventually turning it into a system called Piper, nominally own the name Piper, they do not control and did not invent the methods contained within Piper. They discovered, organized, and promoted those methods. These methods are a known quantity, spoken about and shared online for years.

For example, this particular book on Piper, Deadly Battle Blade of the Cape Flats, has been floating around the Information Superhighway since Barack Obama was president.

I began compiling reference information on Piper at least as far back as 2016, according to the dates on my long-term storage hard drive. (It may even have been earlier, as this may be the date the information was backed up onto the drive.) Clearly, Piper was a known quantity a decade ago and years before that, though its popularity and visibility have increased in the intervening years.

This creates a very muddy environment where claims of intellectual property, ownership, and specifically the guarding of access to both are concerned. The closest analog is probably 52 Blocks or “Jailhouse Rock.”

Who Owns a Decentralized System?

Imagine if an individual student of 52 Blocks, which purports to be an aggregate of methods used by black inmates of American prisons (and which is said to have been handed down from teachers to students across decades) were to announce that he is now teaching 52 Blocks and anyone studying 52 Blocks owes him a certain deference. Further, he goes on to stipulate that anyone currently learning 52 Blocks from anyone who has learned from anyone else who learned from him cannot post about it on social media without his permission.

Such an individual would own his logo, his teaching curriculum as such, and could promote or deny promotion to students within his “lineage.” He would be powerless, however, to stop other exponents of 52 Blocks from doing or saying whatever they might be inclined to do. If they started competing teaching concerns, he would be powerless to stop them. If he disagreed with their curricula, he could only say so and specify with what he took issue.

He would, in other words, be largely powerless in the wider world of 52 Blocks, owing to the decentralized and largely apocryphal nature of the system’s origins.

South African Knife Fighting: No Masters

This, to me, characterizes the broader study of any decentralized, crowdsourced, lore-built martial art or martial method. There are no masters in such a system; there are only individual lineage owners. Hans-Erik Petermann says that Nigel February “took what was an assortment of criminal knife tricks, techniques, and strategies and made a martial art out of it.” Lloyd de Jongh, in turn, taught students who promulgated Piper in the West, most notably in the form of “Western Piper Methods” (the name, logo, and specific teaching syllabus for which is the intellectual property of de Jongh’s student, Dean Franco).

This is why I say that Piper has “no masters” — because, while there are teachers and there are teaching lineages, the component techniques are neither secret nor the creations of the teachers who have adopted them. You can imagine the difficulty one might have in gatekeeping the crowdsourced “knife tricks, techniques, and strategies” of a given demographic… and then demanding that credit be given you when someone takes interest and finds value in the same body of material.

Credit Where It’s Damned If You Due [Sic]

If you, like me, study a great deal of material and have done so over a long period of time, cross-contamination is not a bug, but a feature. Separating specific systems so you can isolate and train only one of them becomes one of your primary concerns. In relating what you have learned, what you prefer, in what you find value, and even what you dislike, you now have a different problem: Do you credit your influences or leave them unspoken?

Credit your influences, invoke the intellectual property of the individual teachers and their lineages, and you run the risk of two problems. Either you will be seen as asserting rank or authority you do not have, in presuming to speak for a system you do not own and do not represent, or your mistakes will be seen as bringing shame or embarrassment to the system cited.

If instead, to prevent these problems, you avoid the appeal to authority that is citing your influences, teachers, and sources, you’ll be accused of stealing. Those who believe their techniques are secret and their methods are sacred will believe you’re giving away the goods… even though those goods have been available for the gathering for years.

You are, quite literally, damned if you do and damned if you don’t. There’s no particular reason you have to try to walk that tightrope… but somebody’s going to be mad. There’s nothing you can do about it… and no particular reason it should worry you.

If, reading this, you take exception to anything I’ve said, you may feel free to discuss it with me. I’m not in the habit of censoring myself to shield other people’s feelings and, truth be told, not a single human being has ever worried about whether their expression of opinion was going to offend me.

Moving Forward as a Rogue South African Knife Fighter

In the end, I will focus on the project I have been chipping away at for years now. My book on Piper was originally going to be about the impressions gleaned from Internet sources. It would probably have been best described as a book about how to look like you think you studied Piper. It will now benefit from the studies I’ve conducted in the interim, making it more of a reflection on one student’s notes about this crowdsourced body of South African methods. It will be neither the definitive work on the topic, nor the final word; I imagine there are people who will wrongly believe that I think it’s both.

What all this should teach us, however, is that (apart from being on-brand for the politics of knife cults), you can’t try to control the content of a crowd-sourced system. It’s sand on a beach. It’s needles in a haystack made of needles. People are going to walk through it, roll around in it, and track it everywhere.

You can’t stop them. I mean, you can try, but you are doomed to fail. It’s quaint but foolish to think you and your tribe alone hold “secrets” that have been available online for years. It’s laudable to protect your intellectual property… but foolhardy to believe this extends to material you did not create. (Those who did “create” it didn’t; they discovered it and cataloged it, though they did organize and systemetize it.)

The Piper genie is out of the bottle. Martial artists have been “stealing” from each other for as long as there have been martial arts, but just as cultures don’t own things, martial arts don’t own techniques. When a system has made its mark, when it has had its influence, that influence cannot be pulled back, sucked like venom from a wound.

It’s circulating through the body now. It’s going to be felt. You may feel as protective and as paternal over your lineage and your curriculum as you feel you must… but at the point you are actively “othering,” vilifying, and excommunicating from your student community those whose orthodoxy is insufficient to suit you… well, that’s the point at which those grains of sand have already slipped through your fingers.