Raluthaga Madzivhandila in the sources
Raluthaga Madzivhandila was the ruler of Tshakhuma in the time of Ramabulana and Makhado, in the 1860s to the 1880s. Nemudzivhadi’s 1998 thesis names him as the father of Dombo, the mother of Makhado’s son Sinthumule, as a ruler who invited a missionary to Tshakhuma in 1874, and as the husband of a woman who fought at the Battle of Mangwele.
What the sources say
Tribute and marriage. When Makhado came to Tshakhuma to test loyalty, Raluthaga paid the tribute he demanded and added his daughter Dombo as a prospective wife; she bore Makhado’s second son, Sinthumule, at Luatame in 1870 (Nemudzivhadi, pp. 44 to 45, 118). Because of the marriage, Nemudzivhadi calls Madzivhandila “Makhado’s great supporter” (p. 113). Nemudzivhadi’s source for Madzivhandila’s submission is a Makhado grandson; he rejects another account, from E. Mudau’s recorded information, in which a Ramabulana came to Tshakhuma and a war followed between the Vhasenzi and the Vhadau in which Ramabulana had the help of the Buys group, because he considers it unlikely that Tshakhuma’s Vhadau, as Makhado’s subjects, would have resisted him (pp. 44 to 45).
Tshitavhadulu. When Mzila, a son of the Gaza ruler Manukosi, fled into Venda after losing a succession struggle against Mawewe, he settled at Tshitavhadulu, near Tshakhuma. Nemudzivhadi says Raluthaga Madzivhandila sanctioned the settlement “as it was in his area of jurisdiction”; Mzila’s stay was short, because events in Mozambique forced his return, where he defeated Mawewe (pp. 76 to 77).
The mission. In May 1874 Raluthaga approached the Berlin missionary Beuster and asked that a missionary be sent to Tshakhuma. Nemudzivhadi stresses that Makhado had to permit this, since Madzivhandila could not have done it unilaterally, and had earlier directed other missionaries to Tshivhase. Rev. E. Schwellnus was sent and founded the station. Madzivhandila allowed the missionaries to preach to his people but, with Tshivhase, did not himself convert (pp. 131 to 132, 138).
His household at Mangwele. In the October 1869 Swazi attack the people of Tshakhuma went to their fortress at Mount Mangwele. Nemudzivhadi, following the missionary Schwellnus’s account, says a woman described as Mudzunga, Tshivhase’s daughter and Raluthaga Madzivhandila’s wife, fought beside the men, supplying ammunition after a son, Masindi, was fatally wounded, and leading the warriors in reciting the Tshivhase royal praise (pp. 113 to 114; see Battle of Mangwele (1869)).
Other marriage ties. Van Warmelo’s account, as summarised by Nemudzivhadi, makes Mmbodi, mother of Phophi of Lwamondo, a daughter of Raluthaga; Nemudzivhadi also says the gota Matatani had married a daughter of his (pp. 178 to 179).
Overview article
See The Berlin Mission in Venda, 1872 to 1908 for the Berlin Society more widely.
Cautions
All of this comes from one historian drawing on interviews and papers from decades after the events. No birth or death dates are given for Raluthaga, and the thesis’s account of the woman at Mangwele reads “Tshivhase’s daughter, and Raluthaga Madzivhandila’s wife” in a way that could also mean two women; we give it as written and take no side. Nemudzivhadi’s page references are to the printed thesis; the scan we read has noisy text. Nemudzivhadi is a Venda historian whose subject is Makhado’s reign; he built on oral interviews done between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s and on colonial archive papers, and he often says where his informants and the written sources disagree, as do we.
Sources and further reading
- Mphaya Henry Nemudzivhadi, “The attempts by Makhado to revive the Venda kingdom, 1864-1895”, PhD thesis, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (1998); open access at the North-West University repository (a scanned copy; we read it by OCR, so page numbers below are the thesis’s printed numbers)
- Wikipedia: Venda people (tagged as needing more citations; its clan list has no inline citations)
See also Madzivhandila, Tshakhuma, Makhado, Sinthumule and Vhadau.
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