Vhandalamo in the sources
The Vhandalamo are described in Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis as the group, belonging to the house of the royal makhadzi, who held the sacred objects of the Vhasenzi and had the sole responsibility of installing the king at Dzata after Dimbanyika. They were later punished by Munzhedzi Mpofu.
What the sources say
In E. Mudau’s account Dimbanyika was popular because he was on good terms with Mwali’s people, the Vhandalamo, and after his death the Vhandalamo, who possessed the magic objects as members of the makhadzi house, installed his youngest son Thohoyandou as khosikhulu, over the objections of his elder brothers and of the chief priest Gole-la-Denga. Mudau says Thohoyandou was supported by the Vhandalamo and most of the Venda, and that his brothers had the support only of Gole-la-Denga and Magoro (ch. 3, pp. 61 to 66; see Thohoyandou and Gole).
In Van Warmelo’s informants’ account of the aftermath, Munzhedzi and his elders suspected the Vhandalamo of Khavhambe of having known of the plot in Nzhelele against him and kept silent, and punished them severely; Van Warmelo believed he went out to kill all the Vhandalamo, including infants (ch. 4, p. 72; see Munzhedzi Mpofu). Wikipedia’s Venda Kingdom article names the Ndalamo as a matrilateral ally of the Singo, linked through intermarriage, which may be the same people under a shorter name, and the Luonde site lists the Vhandalamo among the Vhasenzi groups with the Masingo and the Vhalaudzi (see our Vhalaudzi page).
Cautions
The Vhandalamo are known only through these informants and the thesis, and the fate attributed to them is a tradition, not a documented event. 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
- Mulaudzi (2020), chapter 4, p. 72
- Wikipedia: Venda Kingdom
- Luonde: Brief History (community site; no author or bibliography given)
See also Masingo, Vhangona and Dimbanyika.
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