The Nkuna are one of the leading Tsonga chiefly houses, historically centred in the Tzaneen and Ritavi area of Limpopo province, and are sometimes grouped with other Tsonga clans such as the Mabunda and Xilaveko under the label “Nhlave”. We have not found that grouping in any source we have read, including Junod, so please treat it as unconfirmed (see the note under “Totem and related clans”).
Origins
An earlier version of this page placed the Nkuna’s earlier history in the Ngome country of northern KwaZulu, with a route through the Lydenburg district of Mpumalanga to the Lowveld, and said they adopted a shared “Nhlave” dialect and praise material there. We have not been able to source any of those details, so treat them as unconfirmed; what we can source is Junod’s own account below, in which the ancestor Nkuna leaves Zululand and some old men say they know where he began. Neither the route nor the period is confirmed from an independent written source, and – as with most Tsonga clan histories – the fullest account is held in Tsonga-language oral tradition and specialist academic work such as M. Mathebula’s 800 Years of Tsonga History, rather than in material readily available online.
The Nkuna traditional authority is based around Nwamitwa, near Tzaneen. In 2008, Her Royal Highness Phylia Nwamitwa Shilubana became the first woman to formally ascend as chief of the Valoyi people in this area, in a succession that had earlier been contested in the courts; the Constitutional Court ultimately ruled in her favour, in a case still cited in discussions of gender and customary succession law in South Africa. We have not been able to independently confirm the precise relationship between the Nkuna clan name and the Valoyi/Nwamitwa chieftaincy from the sources available to us, so we note the connection cautiously rather than stating it as settled fact.
Totem and related clans
Unconfirmed grouping. An earlier version of this page said the Nkuna belong to a “Nhlave cluster” with the Mabunda, Maswanganyi, Nkwinika and Novela, sharing a dialect and praise material, so that their praises often open with the call “Nhlave!”. We have not been able to confirm any part of that. Junod, who knew the Nkuna best, does not use the label, and the Nkuna praise he records begins instead with the ox and the buffalo (see below); we found no entry for Novela in Junod at all (see our Novela page). Junod does place the Nkuna next to the Hlabi clans, which include Mapsanganyi and Nkwinika, and the sources we have read say nothing on whether the Mabunda or Maswanganyi share a dialect or praise material with them.
Geography
Nkuna communities are concentrated in the Tzaneen and Ritavi districts of Limpopo, within the broader Lowveld region historically settled by Tsonga clans, among them the Nkuna.
Izithakazelo / swithawulo
We have not yet sourced a confirmed written record of the Nkuna clan praises. If you can help us document them accurately, please get in touch using the details below.
In Junod's 1912 ethnography
Junod worked among the Nkuna at the Swiss mission station of Shiluvane near Leydsdorp, and they are one of the best-documented clans in his book. He counts the Nkuna as a small unit named after an old chief whose descendants still reign (about p. 14), and describes the Nkuna “under Muhlaba” near Leydsdorp as a clan of about 6,000 people (about p. 18).
Origins and genealogy. Junod says the common ancestor Nkuna left Zululand “some centuries ago” to settle in the plain of the lower Limpopo; elsewhere he puts him four or five hundred years back. Nkuna’s son was Shitlhelana and his grandson Rinono. The sons of Rinono are known, one founding the present royal family, and the descendants of the others form the “doors” of the clan, each under a petty chief: Mhuntanyana, Mashongana, Mbhalati, Kulala, Mushwana and others (about p. 330). His chief list reads Nkuna, Shitlhelane, Rinono, Kulalen, Nwarinyekana, Muhlari, Ribye-ra-ku-tika, Shiluvane, Muhlaba (about p. 25). He notes that the Nkuna, Khosa and Hlabi all claimed a western or south-western origin, and that some old Nkuna men said they knew where Nkuna had started from in Zululand and still had relatives there (about p. 23).
The move to the Transvaal. The clan migrated from near the Olifants-Limpopo confluence to the Leydsdorp country in about 1835, during the wars of Soshangane (about pp. 17, 28, 330). Junod thinks their disturbed history and many migrations kept other peoples from joining them, so that they are “of purer descent than most” Thonga clans. At Shiluvane they lived beside the Khaha Pedi for more than seventy years in alliance but, he observed, without intermarriage, and the Nkuna were already paying lobolo in oxen in 1835 (about pp. 241, 258).
People he names. Shiluvane was chief; his elder son Mankhelu was prince-regent until the young chief Muhlaba came of age, and was also general of the army and a noted rain-maker, one of Junod’s main informants, who died in 1908 (in his preface). Muhlaba took the name Dabuka at his coronation, having been called Shikuna before, a name borrowed from one of the Ngoni chiefs (about pp. 344 to 345). Junod saw Muhlaba allied with the Pedi chief Maaghe in a war in the Zoutpansberg and judged the Thonga soldiers the better fighters (about p. 33). The clan’s regalia included a large copper bracelet called ritlatla, said to have been bought in Lourenco Marques for elephant tusks, which passed from the elder branch to Shiluvane’s younger branch (about pp. 359 to 360).
Praise-name and totem. This is the part that bears most on the questions our page above leaves open. Junod records the Nkuna praise-name as “Those of the ox! Those of the buffalo, the buffalo with the large belly which rolls in the mud, the one with a black spot on the forehead” (about p. 335), and says Nkuna men liked to be saluted “Nkuna! Homu (ox)! Nyari (buffalo)!” (about p. 337). He judges this to be an adopted, Pedi-style totem and not an old Thonga one: Mankhelu argued that the Nkuna shared the buffalo totem of Pedi tribes and so had a common origin in Zululand, which Junod found unsupported, and the Pedi-Khaha chief Maaghe told him that calling the Nkuna “buffalo” was modern and borrowed from the Pedi. Junod adds that the Nkuna keep no taboo about the ox, but that it is taboo for a Nkuna to kill a small antelope called shidyanaman, which he thought might be a relic of an older totemic idea, though Mankhelu did not call it a totem (about pp. 336 to 339). This is one missionary’s reading of the evidence, and Nkuna elders may tell it differently.
Junod places the Nkuna next to the Hlabi clans of his lower-Olifants group, whose names include Mapsanganyi and Nkwinika, which appear on our Maswanganyi and Nkwinika pages. Junod does not use the label “Nhlave” for any group, and we do not claim that the clans he places together form such a cluster. He does not discuss the Nwamitwa or Valoyi succession.
This section summarises Henri A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, vol. 1, The Social Life (Neuchatel, 1912), read in the Internet Archive scan. Junod was a Swiss missionary writing in 1912 from a missionary’s viewpoint, in his own spelling, and he says himself that his genealogies are probably too short and may mix brothers with sons. Page numbers are approximate, taken from the page markers in machine-scanned text, and we have not checked them against the printed book. Where we match his spelling to a name used today, that is our inference.
Sources and further reading
- News24, “Shangaan’s first woman chief” (2008), on the Nwamitwa/Valoyi succession
- Encyclopedia.com, overview of Tsonga clan (xivongo) structure
- M. Mathebula, 800 Years of Tsonga History – cited in North-West University academic work as the standard reference for Tsonga clan history
Spot something that doesn’t match what you know, or can you help with the swithawulo? Please get in touch via our contact page or WhatsApp 065 138 8213.