Khakhu in the sources
Khakhu is a Venda community, item (l) on the 1991 proclamation’s roll. In Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis a Khakhu elder is one of the interviewees of May 2015, and another interviewee names Khakhu among the communities he describes as sprung from the Ramabulana house.
What the sources say
The Khakhu thovhele was too old and unwell to be interviewed, so the royal council sent an elder of the Khakhu Royal Council, Vhamusanda Johannes Nkhangweni Makhado, who agreed despite a bereavement. He argued that there had always been conflicts within the royal house, hence the Venda saying that kingship is beautiful when contested, and that the makhotsimunene and maine who left Dzata voluntarily forfeited their rights to the kingship, which stayed with the Ramabulana (ch. 10, pp. 267 to 268).
The Manenzhe thovhele told Mulaudzi that the Masingo elevated some makhotsimunene to vhothovhele in the areas they were given, and listed Masakona, Nthabalala, Tshivhase, Khakhu, Rambuda and Davhana as all Ramabulana in origin (ch. 10, p. 250; see Masakona). We have not found a document that supports this and the Tshivhase and Rambuda houses’ own accounts differ; see Tshivhase and Rambuda.
Cautions
This is oral testimony from 2015 and we found no document on Khakhu. 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. The interviews were carried out in 2015 and 2016 with the consent of the leaders concerned; they give those leaders’ opinions and what they told the author about their communities, and we have not checked them against other sources. We name office-holders only where the thesis names them as public witnesses or holders of an office. 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 10, pp. 250 and 267 to 268
- 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, p. 196
See also Masingo, Ramabulana and Tshivhase.
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