Mashamba in the sources
Mashamba is a Venda community, item (u) on the 1991 proclamation’s roll. Lufuno Mulaudzi interviewed an elder of the Mashamba royal family in February 2015, and the thesis gives his account of how his community came to hold its land.
What the sources say
The Mashamba thovhele sent a khotsimunene (an elder brother of the house) who was reputed to know the history of the kingship better than the thovhele, who was not that old. The elder told Mulaudzi that conflict over the kingship starts with the royal house itself, which does not listen to the makhadzi; that the Vhangona were the first settlers of Venda but were a very small community with no land of their own, and that they lost their hold when the Masingo conquered them, “and we the Mashamba community also conquered them at Selabwe”; and that he supported the Ramabulana and the Nhlapo Commission. He also said that a woman cannot become khosikhulu in Venda custom, an opinion about the present dispute between Masindi Mphephu and Toni Mphephu that we note only as his view (ch. 10, pp. 251 to 253).
The 1991 roll lists the Mashamba community separately. The Manenzhe thovhele’s list of communities he calls Ramabulana in origin does not include Mashamba (see Masakona and Khakhu).
Cautions
Everything on this page is one elder’s account in a 2015 interview, and Mulaudzi does not corroborate it. 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 10, pp. 251 to 253
- 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 8, p. 196
See also Masingo, Ramabulana and Tshivhase.
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