Luvhimbi in the sources
Luvhimbi was, in the account of the Venda informant S. M. Dzivhani, the first Venda khosikhulu whom anyone remembered. He was a ruler of the Vhambedzi, who were neither Vhangona nor Masingo, and he was known for rainmaking.
What the sources say
Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis summarises Dzivhani’s contribution to Van Warmelo’s 1940 volume: Luvhimbi came from Malungudzi Hill in what is now Zimbabwe, crossed the Limpopo and settled at Ha-Luvhimbi in the east of the Soutpansberg; he was recognised as a khosikhulu for many Venda chiefly because of his rain-making powers, and girls and gifts were given to him as a prize. His dominance came to an end when Dimbanyika arrived and conquered him, but the conqueror spared him for his rain-making and made him the royal rainmaker, with responsibility for the rites of domba, vhusha and thondo, the girls’ initiation schools. Mulaudzi reads this as ending the line of the Mbedzi rulers and starting the long Masingo dynasty; Dzivhani says the Vhambedzi are commoners today and have lost their rain-making (ch. 3, pp. 52 to 53).
Mulaudzi observes that this version differs from later scholars, and that it makes the first Venda khosikhulu a member of neither of the two famous Venda communities. Wikipedia’s Venda Kingdom article lists “Mbedzi/Luvhimbi” among the pre-Singo rain-making and Soutpansberg dynasties the Singo subjected. See our Vhambedzi page.
Cautions
This is one informant’s account, which Mulaudzi himself finds at odds with other narrators. 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
- Know My Roots: Venda Clan Names (community blog; no author or citations given, so unverified)
See also Masingo, Vhangona and Dimbanyika.
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