Hwami in the sources
Hwami, also called Mutumbuka-Vhathu, “creator of men”, is the first Vhasenzi (Masingo) ruler to reach the Soutpansberg in the account of the Venda informant E. Mudau, collected by N. J. van Warmelo in 1940. Mudau makes him the first khosikhulu to rule all the people of Venda and the great-grandfather of Dyambeu.
What the sources say
Mudau’s account. Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis summarises Mudau: Hwami came with a small group of Vhasenzi and Vhalemba, fleeing a misfortune that had struck them in Matongoni, and later in the Kalanga land, on their way south to the Limpopo; they were protected, in his telling, by their sacred drum and the spirits of their ancestors, which frightened the people of the land. The Vhangona, the owners of the land, were afraid because of what they had heard happened to the Kalanga of Tshivhi. The people of Kwinda submitted at once, and Hwami settled on Tshiendeulu in the Makwinda land. He then moved to the land of Tshivhula, the khosikhulu of the Vhangona, because the Kwinda no longer feared the drum, whereas Tshivhula’s people did. Mudau says Hwami lived to a great age, saw four spiritual priests die, and died after seeing his great-grandchildren, with no son to succeed him; he was followed by his great-grandson Dyambeu (ch. 3, pp. 53 to 56).
Mulaudzi’s reading. He reads Mudau as showing that the Vhasenzi were not “original” Venda but outsiders who invaded and conquered the Vhangona and so created a new identity, and he doubts the sources’ sequence: no other scholar names Tshivhula as a Vhangona khosikhulu. Van Warmelo, from his informants, compiled a list of the Venda rulers from Hwami to George Mbulaheni Ramabulana in the twentieth century. The Commission’s Masingo account begins with the crossing of the Limpopo under Dimbanyika and does not mention Hwami. See our Masingo page.
Cautions
Hwami is known only from Mudau’s contribution to Van Warmelo and Mulaudzi’s summary of it; no date is given for any of the events. 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
See also Masingo, Vhangona and Dimbanyika.
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