Mushasha Commission in the sources
The Mushasha Commission of Inquiry into Venda Vhuhosi Affairs was appointed on 18 May 1990 by the Venda military ruler Brigadier Gabriel Ramushwana. It was chaired by Advocate Jackson Maela Mushasha and led to the Venda Traditional Leaders Administration Proclamation of 1991, which ended the status of the Venda khosikhulu.
What the sources say
Its members and mandate. Lufuno Mulaudzi’s 2020 thesis says the other members were Professor Victor Nkhumeleni Ralushai, then deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Venda, and Professor D. W. Hammond-Tooke of the University of the Witwatersrand, with a magistrate, M. P. Nengovhela, co-opted by the government of national unity to lead the evidence. It first sat on Monday 25 June 1990 at Sibasa and was set up under South Africa’s Commissions Act of 1947. Its terms of reference were to inquire into the validity of the division of the Mphephu and Sinthumule Territorial Councils and the creation of the Musekwa, Ravele, Mulambilu and Tshifhire vhuhosi, and of the installations of their rulers, under section 68A of the Venda Constitution Act of 1979 (ch. 8, pp. 178 to 180).
The evidence. The witnesses included a senior official of the Venda government, the headmen Musekwa and Mphephu and their rival claimants, a former President, F. N. Ravele, Toni Mphephu Ramabulana, and Thovhele J. T. Sinthumule (ch. 8). Mulaudzi reads it as showing that applications for the new vhuhosi were approved without a meeting of the Mphephu Territorial Council or consultation with the Khoro ya Mahosi, that President Ravele approved his own and two colleagues’ promotions against the advice of his director-general, and that, as he reads the evidence, the process was led by two men, Toni Mphephu, the late khosikhulu’s son, and Gota C. N. Mphephu (pp. 187 to 195). See Ravele, Musekwa and Sinthumule.
What it led to. Mulaudzi says the Commission’s findings reversed the irregular appointments, so that the thirty-two vhothovhele of 1990 became fewer, and that Ramushwana’s government used it to abolish the status of khosikhulu through Proclamation No. 29 of 1991. Two scholars he cites, Buthelezi and Skosana, argue Ramushwana wanted the Commission to portray the kingship as an apartheid imposition and to free himself from a Venda constitutional rule that the head of state be a khosikhulu’s subject. Mulaudzi asks whether the Commission was a solution or the cause of the destruction of the kingship and answers that it depends on how one reads the 1991 proclamation (ch. 8, pp. 195 to 197). The restoration came later through the Ralushai and Nhlapo commissions. See Ramushwana.
Overview article
See Venda kingship disputes, 1890s to 2020s for the wider history.
Cautions
We have not read the Mushasha report itself, which has three volumes; this page rests on Mulaudzi’s account of it, and the Commission’s own findings may be broader than he describes. 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. 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
See also Masingo, Ramabulana and Tshivhase.
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