Vhatavhatsindi in the sources
The Vhatavhatsindi are a Venda people of the Lake Fundudzi area. In E. Mudau’s account they defeated the Vhasenzi under Dyambeu and seized their sacred drum, before Tshishonga recovered it. The Commission’s Masingo account says Dimbanyika conquered the Vhangona and the Vhatavhatsinde.
What the sources say
In the tradition. Lufuno Mulaudzi’s thesis summarises Mudau: when Dyambeu tried to take Fundudzi without the drum, the Vhatavhatsindi fell on the Vhasenzi, spared Dyambeu and cast him into the lake, kept the drum, and in doing so inflicted the Vhasenzi’s first defeat in Venda; Tshishonga later defeated them and recovered the drum (ch. 3, pp. 56 to 58; see Dyambeu and Tshishonga).
Other mentions. The Commission’s record of the Masingo account says Dimbanyika found the Vhangona and the Vhatavhatsinde north of the Limpopo, conquered them and merged them into the Vhavenda. A leader of the Thengwe community told the Ralushai Commission that he represented the Vhatavhatsindi of Thengwe (see Nethengwe), and a Manenzhe leader told Mulaudzi in 2015 that the Manenzhe are closely related to the Vhatavhatsindi, which Mulaudzi says cannot be corroborated by written sources and which he doubts since the Manenzhe and Vhatavhatsindi are in his view neither Vhangona nor Masingo (ch. 10; see Manenzhe). The Know My Roots blog says the Vhatavhatsindi settled at Lwandali and Thengwe, that the Vhakwevho and Vhafamadi are sub-groups of them, and that Dimbanyika later subjugated the Vhatavhatsindi of Fundudzi (see Vhakwevho and Vhafamadi).
Cautions
The Vhatavhatsindi appear here only in other peoples’ accounts, and we found no account of their own. 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
- Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims: Determination on the Vhavenda kingship claim (the Masingo account, p. 611)
- 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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