This dissertation explores the political, military and cultural history of the Venda Confederacy, the last independent Black South African state. As the British empire and Afrikaner Republics jostled each other for control of southern Africa’s mineral bounty, the Venda Confederation of dynastic chiefdoms resisted foreign aggression until 1904. This study reconstructs the Venda Armory—a durable security architecture that Venda people synthesized from indigenous knowledge resources and exotic imported technologies. Drawing on archival documents, oral traditions, archaeological artifacts and Tshivenda language literature, it argues that Venda people harnessed the power of embodied rituals as tools of memory and the scaffolding of their political confederation.From the mid-1700s until the dawn of the colonial era, the Venda state dominated politics, commerce, and military affairs in the Limpopo River catchment, a mountainous region straddling the borders of present-day South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Within a decade of acquiring muzzle-loading hunting muskets in the 1850s, Venda people integrated firearms into their martial traditions, which emphasized asymmetric tactics and close-quarters mountain warfare. And, when European powers criminalized gun sales to Africans in the 1870s, Venda monarchs reorganized their extensive trade networks to supply arms to their regional allies and clients. Beyond these under-researched patterns of Venda-driven gun commerce, this study examines those facets of Venda martial culture that were woven into the fabric of everyday life. While women from the elite and commoner ranks served as strategists and combatants in war, only senior women of the aristocracy controlled the ritual practices that bound mutually autonomous chiefdoms together into a regional confederation.Known as makhadzi, these royal Venda women orchestrated the sacred rites of dynastic succession that legitimized newly installed chiefs. Thus, even after their most recalcitrant male rulers were exiled in 1898, Venda succumbed to colonial demands for taxes and mine laborers only after 1904, when British authorities finally stripped makhadzi of their customary prerogatives to select and inaugurate national leaders.The Venda Armory is the first full-length academic study of the cultural, political and technological underpinnings of the last independent Black polity in present-day South Africa. As an original work of revisionist history in a region often marginalized in South(ern) African historiographies, this project disrupts the standard periodization of Anglo-Afrikaner conquest. According to canonical scholarship, the defeat of the Zulu empire in 1879 marked the end of valiant indigenous resistance to colonial domination of South Africa. Yet, further to the north, Venda people retained their sovereignty for another quarter century. Lastly, by focusing on the roles of women as guardians of ancestral rituals, but also as warriors, the “Venda Armory” challenges the androcentric bias expressed in the studies of warfare during the precolonial era in which violence is conceptualized as a masculine domain.
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