Madzhie in the sources
Madzhie was a brother of Ravele Ramabulana and a khotsimunene, the king’s younger brother, in the Ramabulana house. Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis, from Van Warmelo’s informants, makes him with his sister Nyakhuhu the main backer of Makhado and, in the Boers’ view, the chief instigator of the war that drove them from Schoemansdal.
What the sources say
Madzhie is named as a son of Munzhedzi Mpofu, alleged to be from another house, and as the brother sent to meet Louis Tregardt in the 1830s, before the Batlokwa whispered that the man they wanted was Ravele’s elder brother, Ramavhoya (ch. 4, pp. 73 to 77; see Ramavhoya). In 1864 he and Nyakhuhu protested the installation of Davhana, and he promised Makhado, Funyufunyu and Stuurman that he would stand with them in dethroning him (pp. 82 to 86).
After Makhado took the throne, Madzhie advised him to go to war with the Europeans over their labour demands, though Makhado doubted his people could win. The Boers’ attack of June 1867 was aimed at Luatame, Vhulorwa and Madzhie, whom they saw as the chief instigator, but it failed for lack of ammunition, and the Boers evacuated Schoemansdal on 15 July 1867 (ch. 4, pp. 87 to 89). Mulaudzi sums up the roles: Makhado’s supporters in the family, Nyakhuhu and Madzhie, held the power to anoint a successor “nnduni ya vhuhosi”, in the royal house, where the views of the majority did not matter. The Commission’s record does not name Madzhie.
Madzhie in the war of 1867
Nemudzivhadi says Madzhie pressed Makhado to drive out the Whites and that Kruger’s commando, with Davhana and Albasini’s Tsonga, attacked Madzhie’s mountain in 1867 and retired to Schoemansdal leaving him undefeated. Wikipedia calls him Katze-Katze and says he razed the abandoned town; the Executive Council in 1869 held both Madzhie and Makhado responsible. See Evacuation of Schoemansdal, 1867.
Madzhie and the missionary Hofmeyr
The Dutch Reformed missionary Stephanus Hofmeyr called the chief he knew as Katlach, Mamato or Katlagter “always our friend” in an August 1865 letter, and Nemudzivhadi says Madzhie objected when the Boers ordered Hofmeyr into the Schoemansdal laager and promised him protection. See Stephanus Hofmeyr and Goedgedacht.
Overview article
See The Ramabulana succession, 1864 to 1895 for the wider context.
Cautions
Madzhie appears only through this chain of oral testimony and one historian’s reading of it. Mulaudzi is a historian writing in 2020 from earlier collections of oral testimony, mainly Van Warmelo’s (1940), Nemudzivhadi’s interviews of the early 1970s and Müller-Malan’s popular history of 1953, and he says himself that traditions are socially constructed and reshaped over time. His text as extracted has stray spaces and some unreadable characters, so we have checked names against more than one passage; page numbers are approximate. The Ramabulana house’s history is told differently by Van Warmelo’s informants, Nemudzivhadi, Müller-Malan and the Commission’s record, and the names and dates do not always agree; where they differ we say so and take no side.
Izithakazelo and totem
We are printing no Madzhie praises or totem because none has been confirmed. If you belong to the Ramabulana house and recite its praises, we would like to record them, with your permission and credited to you.
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 4, pp. 73 to 89; drawing on Van Warmelo (1940), Nemudzivhadi (1977) and Müller-Malan (1953)
- Mphaya Henry Nemudzivhadi, “The attempts by Makhado to revive the Venda kingdom, 1864-1895”, PhD thesis, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (1998); open access at the North-West University repository (a scanned copy; we read it by OCR, and page numbers cited are the thesis’s printed numbers)
- Stefanus Hofmeyr, Twintig jaren in Zoutpansberg: een verhaal van twintig jarigen arbeid onder de heidenen in de Transvaal (Cape Town: J. H. Rose, 1890), in Dutch; read in the Internet Archive scan (page numbers below are the book’s, as marked in the scan’s text)
See also Ramabulana, Makhado and Masingo.
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