South African musician Muneyi, this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist for Music, returns to the unfinished history of the Venda Bantustan on his new album Shumela Venda, building a sonic world where a marginalized language and its contested past can speak on their own terms.
A Bantustan’s violent unraveling
In 1988, at the peak of violent unrest in South Africa, a medicine-murder scandal erupted in Venda, then a Bantustan under the apartheid government. Fifteen deaths were reported, and State President Patrick Mphephu was implicated, precipitating the fall of his regime. Protesters took to the streets, with youths shouting “death to the ritual murderers.”
That moment of turbulent endings and incomplete revolutions is the terrain Shumela Venda inhabits. Muneyi attempts to make sense of an ongoing history shaped by colonial intervention, apartheid repression, and the erasure that post-apartheid South Africa has visited on histories like Venda’s.
Reflecting on dark times
Fifty years after the Soweto Uprising, a Harlem screening of Sarafina! brought together South African performers, American cultural icons, and a new generation of students to reflect on a shared history of resistance and solidarity.
“The 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,” Muneyi says. “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.”
Reclaiming language and lineage
For Muneyi, Shumela Venda is a project of reclamation, an effort to introduce 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.
That reclamation extends to the album’s visual and sonic architecture. Muneyi commissioned artist Nomonde Mtwetwa to redesign the Republic of Venda’s coat of arms, and created press images with Tatenda Chidora on the banks of the Limpopo River. Sonically, he draws from Venda artists of earlier generations, including Thrilling Artists, whose song “Vhusiku Ndi Dada” he reworks with a feature from Umzulu Phaqa.
Songs of protest and self-rule
The track “Vhushani” incorporates a news clip about the medicine-murder protests. Written two years ago, it is the oldest song on the album and appears near the end. “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,” Muneyi says.
“Vhusani is an initiation school, and everyone in Venda goes there. Women go, men go, and the collective term is vhusani,” Muneyi explains. He also cautions against the peer pressure that can rush young people into the process, adding, “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.”
On “Rotangiwa,” Muneyi reaches for protest songs sung in TshiVenda. He notes that when Venda people protested against their own government, they were not protesting against the greater government in Pretoria; power felt localized. “They were saying, ‘tell Ramushwana to bring back the government, it’s not his mother’s.’”
Colonel Gabriel Ramushwana, the Venda Defense Force Chief of Staff, led a bloodless coup against Frank Ravele, Mphephu’s finance minister and cousin who had assumed power after Mphephu’s death in 1988. Thousands celebrated in the streets. Ramushwana imposed a curfew, read out the cabinet’s resignation, announced that South African military commander Brigadier Steenkamp had been compelled to resign, and invited the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organizations to talks, directly defying the national government.
“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,’” Muneyi says.
His reworking of “Vhusiku Ndi Dada” opens the album as a statement of alertness. “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?”
What the flag asks
Muneyi’s biggest wish for the 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, he hopes, will push them the same way, to wonder what Shumela Venda means.
