Raphulu in the sources
The Raphulu are, in M. M. Motenda’s account to Van Warmelo, a people regarded as the owners of the Venda land whom Thohoyandou defeated in war. A community blog also names Raphulu among the prominent chiefs of the Vhadau, a Vhangona clan.
What the sources say
Lufuno Mulaudzi’s thesis summarises Motenda: Thohoyandou declared war on the Raphulu, “strongly regarded as the owners of the Venda land”; in the war a drum was beaten and Thohoyandou’s men began screaming, which made the Raphulu warriors faint; all the Raphulu warriors were killed, their people captured, and they became indebted to Thohoyandou and his people. Mulaudzi says this dispels the notion that the Vhangona and Vhambedzi were the only “real owners” of the land (ch. 3, p. 64). E. Mudau adds that Munzhedzi conquered the Tshivhula and Raphulu people (p. 65).
The Know My Roots blog lists Raphulu, Tshidziwelele, Mudau and Dewasi as prominent chiefs of the Vhadau, who lived from Mount Sunguzwi in the west to Mount Tshitumbe in the east; see our Vhadau, Vhangona and Nephawe pages. We found no source that connects the Raphulu of Motenda’s war with the Vhadau chiefs of the blog.
Cautions
Motenda’s story of the drum and the fainting warriors is told as tradition and Mulaudzi does not vouch for it. This is early oral history, collected by a government ethnologist from a handful of Venda informants in the 1930s, read critically by a historian in 2020. The informants contradict one another on names, order and relationships, and Mulaudzi says so and weighs them; he also gives his own judgements. The extracted text of his thesis has stray spaces and unreadable characters, so page numbers are approximate. We are not printing details of sacred objects or sites. Venda early history is told differently by each narrator, and where they 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 3, “Early history and the contestation of the Venda vhuhosivhuhulu until the early 1800s”, citing the contributions of E. Mudau, S. M. Dzivhani, O. S. Radzilani, M. M. Motenda and J. M. Mugivhi to N. J. van Warmelo, The Copper Miners of Musina and the Early History of the Zoutpansberg (1940), and the work of M. H. Nemudzivhadi
- Know My Roots: Venda Clan Names (community blog; no author or citations given, so unverified)
See also Masingo, Vhangona and Dimbanyika.
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