Ramushwana in the sources
Brigadier Mutheiwana Gabriel Ramushwana was the military ruler of Venda after a coup in 1990. He appointed the Mushasha Commission and, through the 1991 proclamation, abolished the status of the Venda khosikhulu, a decision that Venda leaders still argue about.
What the sources say
His motives. Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis says that after the abuses of the Ravele presidency the Mushasha Commission was a corrective, but that Ramushwana and his government of national unity also had other motives, among them the problem of two centres of power in Venda. Two scholars he cites argue that Ramushwana wanted the Commission to portray the kingship as an apartheid imposition so as to loosen a requirement in the Venda constitution that bound the head of state to the khosikhulu (one interviewee put it as a rule that the President be a thovhele) (ch. 8, pp. 195 to 196). His government then issued the Proclamation of 1991, which let the chairman recognise or depose vhothovhele and divide or merge communities.
What Venda leaders say. In the interviews Mulaudzi carried out in 2015 and 2016, a Tshivhase leader and the Manenzhe thovhele said Ramushwana took the right decision, the Tshivhase leader because he was not a thovhele ruling other vhothovhele and the Manenzhe thovhele because it restored parity among the mahosi; the Mutele thovhele-pfareli and a leader of the Madzivhandila community said it was wrong; and a Madzivhandila leader added that he was influenced by the politics of the time (ch. 10, pp. 248 to 276). Ramushwana was present, with Walter Sisulu, at Kennedy Tshivhase’s installation at Mukumbani in 1993 according to Fokwang’s 2003 thesis, noted on our Kennedy Tshivhase page.
Overview article
See Venda kingship disputes, 1890s to 2020s for the wider history.
Cautions
The date of the coup is not given in the passages we read, and we have not read a biography of Ramushwana. Mulaudzi is a historian writing in 2020 from commission reports, newspapers and interviews he carried out himself, and he states his own opinions in the text; the extracted text of the thesis has stray spaces and some unreadable characters, so page numbers are approximate. Venda kingship history is told differently by each house and by each historian, and where the sources differ we say so and take no side.
Sources and further reading
- Lufuno J. P. Mulaudzi, “Historicising the politics of vhuhosivhuhulu: the Venda polity and state formation in South Africa, c.1800s-2020”, DPhil thesis, University of Pretoria (2020), chapter 8, pp. 195 to 198
- Lufuno J. P. Mulaudzi, “Historicising the politics of vhuhosivhuhulu: the Venda polity and state formation in South Africa, c.1800s-2020”, DPhil thesis, University of Pretoria (2020), chapter 10, interviews
See also Masingo, Ramabulana and Tshivhase.
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