Muneyi Revisits Venda’s Unfinished Story On New Album

In 1988, at the height of violent clashes in South Africa, a medicine-murder scandal hit Venda, then a Bantustan under the apartheid government, and precipitated the fall of State President Patrick Mphephu's regime. Fifteen deaths were reported in total; Mphephu himself was implicated. People took to the streets; youths, up in arms, shouted ‘death to the ritual murderers!’

This is the world that Muneyi's new album inhabits: of turbulent endings and auspicious beginnings, of contested territory and incomplete revolutions. Titled Shumela Venda, it finds the artist attempting to make sense of an ongoing history entangled with the violent intervention of colonialism, the brutal repression of the apartheid regime, and the damning erasure that post-apartheid South Africa has visited on histories like Venda's.

"[T]he moment you choose to reflect on the dark times as a South African creator of art, there's this unspoken obligation to speak about the struggle in a certain way," says the artist. "For people who are not descendants of those who were forcibly moved to live on the outskirts of the city, we have different sentiments about the Bantustans. Pretoria's mandate toward the Bantustans and its strategy were different because those differences add to the greater narrative."

More than contestation, Shumela Venda is reclamation; the artist's way of introducing an alternative version of events.

"I wanted to showcase TshiVenda and VhaVenda in the same way other people showcase themselves, and to show that a language that's marginalized, seen as difficult, othered, and underrepresented can exist in the same world as, say, Nguni languages, and can be on the same line-up as everyone else," he says.

"Vhushani" features a news clip about the medicine-murder protests. Muneyi wrote it two years ago, and says it's the oldest song on the album. Curiously, it sits towards the tail-end of the tracklist.

"When I wrote that song, I was just thinking about the way of governing that has been introduced by the colonial structure — having a president, a prime minister, and having a cabinet. And I'm just asking, what if we went back to ruling ourselves the way we did, and deal with the problems that come with that ourselves, because it's something we know," the artist wonders.

"Vhusani is an initiation school, and everyone in Venda goes there. Women go, men go, and the collective term is vhusani."

There's also a danger to the idea of initiation schools, in that young people often face peer pressure to go in order to belong. Muneyi is also saying that it's okay not to rush the process — any process. "I finish off by saying let's go back to ruling ourselves the same way, because Ramaphosa is not working anyway. Ramaphosa represents the state, the way of doing things," he says.

Sonic Activism: Revisiting Venda’s Political Past

Venda is not present only in spirit; it is the entire enterprise. Muneyi commissioned the artist Nomonde Mtwetwa to redesign the Republic of Venda's coat of arms; made some of the accompanying press images with Tatenda Chidora on the banks of the Limpopo River; and, importantly, took sonic cues from Venda artists of old, like Thrilling Artists, whose song "Vhusiku Ndi Dada" he gives a makeover featuring Umzulu Phaqa. He also reaches for protest songs sung in TshiVenda, as he does on "Rotangiwa."

"When Venda people would protest against their own government back then, they were not protesting against the greater government, which is very fascinating because the centralization of power felt far," he says. For them, power did not lie with the governing structures in Pretoria; it was a very localized affair. "They were saying, 'tell Ramushwana to bring back the government, it's not his mother's.'"

Colonel Gabriel Ramushwana was the Venda Defense Force's Chief of Staff who led a bloodless coup against Frank Ravele, Mphephu's finance minister and cousin, who had taken over when Mphephu died in 1988. Residents took to the streets by the thousands to celebrate. He imposed a curfew, read out the cabinet's resignation statement, and announced that the South African military commander on assignment to Venda, Brigadier Steenkamp, had been compelled to resign. Ramushwana also invited the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organizations to talks, which went directly against the national government of the time.

"I'm just asking questions. Like, yo, Ramushwana is here, he's come with the Venda Defense Force, and he's taking over this government. Where are the people who messed up — where is Mphephu, where is Ravele, who are the former leaders of the Republic of Venda? The bigger chorus [then goes on to say], 'we are surrounded, we are surrounded by enemies,'" says Muneyi.

"I borrowed a melody and a verse from 'Vhusiku Ndi Dada.' It's a song about the current state of the world that we live in, particularly in South Africa. It speaks about the abuse of children, particularly. I wanted to start there as a form of being alert, and of showing where my heart is, and what the things I care about are. What do I care about as the leader of the new, imaginary Venda? What are the things that are important to me?" he wonders.

The artist, who was selected as this year's Standard Bank Young Artist for Music, says his biggest wish for this project is that people ask questions and that those with answers respond. He wants audiences at his shows to see the flag he raises, realize they have never seen it before, then search for "Republic of Venda" and find a different flag — the original Bantustan one. The title track should push them the same way: to wonder what Shumela Venda means and discover, on searching, that it was the slogan of the Republic of Venda.

"Instead of making myself a scholar, a place where people get the truth, I want this project to inspire people to go looking for the truth themselves," he emphasizes.