The Venda of the Northern Transvaal
In the latter part of the 1950's, there were about 275,000 Venda in the Republic
of South Africa, and most of them lived in the Reserves or on European-owned farms
in and around the Zoutpansberg Mountains of the Northern Transvaal, in the districts
of Louis Trichardt and Sibasa. Accurate figures were not available, but probably
less than ten per cent had made permanent homes in the towns, though there were of
course many who left Vendaland for several months every year, to work in the cities
and towns of the Transvaal.
The culture of the Venda distinguished them clearly from other Bantu-speaking people
in the Republic, and their language is classed on its own, though it has some affinities
with Sotho and Karanga. They were originally shifting cultivators and hunters, but
later adopted a more settled economy; they also took to keeping cattle as well as
goats. They used to live in large villages, which were often sited on mountain slopes
and difficult to reach, and every village was ruled by a chief or headman and his
council. In the first part of the 20th century, the Venda began to move away from
the villages of their rulers, taking up homesteads scattered all over the hills and
mountains. With the expansion of development schemes in the country, they began to
re-group in villages.
The Venda were a patrilineal, virilocal people, many of whom still practised polygyny
and worshipped their families' ancestors. Members of the different patriclans could,
and did, live in any of the tribal territories, because the tribe was purely a political
and territorial unit, consisting of people who chose to owe allegiance to a particular
dynasty. It was quite common to find a ruler attracting round him members of his
own patriclan after his accession. There was no paramount chief: each tribe was ruled
by an independent chief, who had under him headmen and petty headmen, responsible
for the government of districts within the tribal territory. Most of the chiefs belonged
to lineages of the same clan, which crossed the Limpopo River and subdued those whom
they found living in the Zoutpansberg in the latter half of the 18th century. Thus
there was an important social division in Venda society between commoners (vhasiwana)
and the children of chiefs and their descendants (vhakololo). In the Sibasa
district there were twelve Venda chiefs: some were the descendants of brothers, who
were the sons of a ruling chief but broke away and established independent chiefdoms
elsewhere; and others had been appointed recently by the government. There were a
number of differences in the customs of the various patriclans, especially in religious
ritual, but there were no distinct differences between the tribes.
Although the Venda allowed the first Berlin Lutheran missionary to settle amongst
them in 1872, it was not until 1899 that they finally submitted to the authority
of the Transvaal Republic. They were thus the last of the Bantu-speaking peoples
of South Africa to be seriously affected by contact with Europeans. Owing to the
enterprise of the missions, churches, schools, and hospitals had been founded in
the Sibasa district, and the government had begun to subsidize other services, such
as a wholesale association for Venda shopkeepers, and had launched forestry and agricultural
schemes. In spite of these developments, European influence remained relatively superficial.
There are at least three main reasons for this. In the first place, the mountainous
environment, which in the past had helped the Venda to avoid conquest by Pedi and
Zulu aggressors, made much of their country remote and in accessible. Secondly, the
Sibasa district was not as yet a seriously depressed area, so that there was no urgent
need for men to work away from home, as there was in other Reserves: the country
was still fertile and well-watered, though the cutting of too many trees and some
ruthless soil cultivation had made it less naturally productive than it seems to
have been at the turn of the century. Thirdly, the Venda had been somewhat preoccupied
in settling political controversies, in which the presence of Europeans had been
a factor since Louis Trichardt was induced in 1836 to interfere in a dispute between
two factions led by the sons of a deceased chief (Van
Warmelo 1932:19-20). As a result, they tended to participate in and assimilate
European cultures less than the Shangana Tsonga, who came to live both to the south
of them and amongst them in small numbers in the mid 19th century. The Shangana Tsonga
were immigrants and refugees without a political organization involving headmen and
chiefs, so that it was easier for them to accept European influence and take an active
part in novel institutions such as the police force and government service. Most
of the political feuds of the Venda took place between rival ruling families and
clans, and the majority of commoners had to be content to look on, while they waited
to see which side to back. Music played an important part in the political process,
because much of it was sponsored by rulers, but performed by commoners (Blacking
1962).
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