Musekwa in the sources
The Musekwa are a Venda headman’s family in the Mphephu territory who appear at two moments of Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis: as senior councillors in 1895, and in 1989, when a Gota Musekwa was promoted to thovhele and then demoted again after the Mushasha Commission.
What the sources say
1895. Mavhasa Musekwa of Tshihanane, one of Makhado’s most senior headmen, questioned the wisdom of proclaiming Maemu while two older brothers were away and said Rasivhetshele should have waited for Mphephu; he later urged Sinthumule to be content with the land he was given. Several of the oral histories on which Nemudzivhadi’s 1977 dissertation rests were gathered from him in 1971 (ch. 5, pp. 101 and 108; ch. 8).
1989 and 1990. Gota H. N. (Nthambeleni Hendrick) Musekwa chaired the Mphephu Territorial Council from 1984 to 1989. His testimony to the Mushasha Commission showed, in Mulaudzi’s reading, that headmen were promoted outside the law: the Ramabulana proposed him, with Gota C. N. Mphephu and President F. N. Ravele, for promotion, and the three were installed as mahosi on 15 September 1989. The Mushasha Commission reversed the irregular appointments (see Ravele). Mulaudzi interviewed him in 2015 at Mamvuka, because he had been chairman of the Mphephu Traditional Council at a significant time in the history of the polity (ch. 8, pp. 181 to 188; ch. 10, p. 243).
Cautions
The thesis uses the name Musekwa for at least two men, a counsellor of the 1890s and a headman of the 1980s, and does not say how they are related. 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 5, pp. 101 to 108
- 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, pp. 181 to 195
- 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, p. 243
See also Masingo, Ramabulana and Tshivhase.
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