Dyambeu in the sources
Dyambeu is a Venda ruler whom the sources place differently. In E. Mudau’s account he is the great-grandson and successor of Hwami and was killed by the Vhatavhatsindi at Lake Fundudzi. S. M. Dzivhani, another of Van Warmelo’s informants, said Dyambeu, Dimbanyika and Vele-la-Mbeu were one person, which Lufuno Mulaudzi dismisses. The Commission and Wikipedia also treat the name as one of Dimbanyika’s.
What the sources say
Mudau’s Dyambeu. Dyambeu, Hwami’s great-grandson, managed for a while to frighten his opponents with the sacred drum, but boasted that he could subdue the Vhatavhatsindi at Fundudzi without once beating it. The drum, which was hung in a tree because it must not touch the ground, fell and cracked; the Vhatavhatsindi attacked, spared Dyambeu’s life, and cast him into the lake of their ancestors, where he died. They kept the drum. Mudau counts it the Vhasenzi’s first defeat in Venda. Dyambeu’s grandson Tshishonga (see Tshishonga) avenged him and recovered the drum (ch. 3, pp. 56 to 58). Mulaudzi notes that Mudau’s account puts the narrative’s roots in oral tradition and the ancestors’ intervention.
Who he was. Dzivhani held that Dyambeu came from the Kalanga land and that in Venda the name is Vele-la-Mbeu and Dimbanyika the same man; Van Warmelo’s other informants and later scholars such as Nemudzivhadi treat Dyambeu, Dimbanyika and Vele-la-Mbeu as three different people, and Mulaudzi sides with them. Nemudzivhadi’s list of the first four khosikhulu is Dimbanyika, Dyambeu, Thohoyandou and Tshisevhe, who he says ruled a centralised state from Dzata between 1688 and 1800 (ch. 3, pp. 53 to 59, 68). Wikipedia’s Venda Kingdom article, by contrast, gives Dambanyika as also called Vele Lambeu or Dyambeu. See Dimbanyika and Vele-la-Mbeu.
Cautions
The order of the early rulers is the most disputed matter in Venda early history. 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
- Wikipedia: Venda Kingdom
See also Masingo, Vhangona and Dimbanyika.
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