Kutama in the sources
Kutama is one of the independent Venda chiefdoms. Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis says Mphephu gave his two brothers Sinthumule and Kutama their own locations to rule independently of him, so that Kutama is one of the seven vhuhosi into which he counts Venda divided by the 1920s.
What the sources say
The Kutama community is item (d) on the roll of the 1991 Proclamation. The thesis tells the story of the succession in the 1950s to 1980s as an example of the disputes of the homeland period: after the death of Johannes Kutama, thovhele of the Kutama, in 1959, Lesiba Kutama became thovhele-pfareli (acting thovhele); the heir, Johannes’s son Peter, was a minor. Peter grew up to be a well-known critic of his cousin President Mphephu, and was detained for more than three months in 1978 as a member of the opposition VIP and dismissed from government service. Mphephu supported Lesiba’s continuing in office as loyal to him. After Mphephu’s death in 1988, Venda expected Peter Kutama to be reinstated (ch. 7, pp. 170 to 173).
The Kutama appear as interviewees in the thesis’s last chapter, in 2016, when the current thovhele advised the author to wait until the court case between Masindi Mphephu and Toni Mphephu had been settled (ch. 10, pp. 243 to 244). See Ravele, Sinthumule and Mphephu I.
Overview article
See Venda kingship disputes, 1890s to 2020s for the wider history.
Cautions
The thesis does not give the origin or history of the Kutama chiefdom beyond the passing references above, and we have not found another source. 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 7, pp. 170 to 173
- 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 5, p. 122
See also Masingo, Ramabulana and Tshivhase.
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