Not-Quite-Venda

Only two weeks into this new term, we had a lovely 5-day weekend due to two national holidays: Freedom Day (April 27, to celebrate the first democratic elections held in SA in 1994) and Workers Day on May 1. Since I didn’t go anywhere during the long school holiday, and due to the fact that I was going stir-crazy in my village, I decided to go on a mini-holiday and visit Emily, a fellow-PCV, who lives in the northern part of SA near the border to Zimbabwe and near to Venda. The Venda region of South Africa is the traditional home of the Venda people. The area is very conservative and traditional and really is a neat place to visit. My area further south is definitely more westernized- most of the people wear western clothing and live in new fashionable houses rather than the traditional homes. But in Venda, it is different. Married women often dress traditionally (including a necklace that has two large white cones attached to the back of the neck) and still bow to the men to show respect. Most of the villages I saw consisted mostly of rondavels (a circular hut with a thatched roof) as well. Instead of a large home, most families that I saw seemed to have a courtyard surrounded by 3 or 4 one-room rondavels that the families slept and lived in. Venda gets the reputation of being traditional, but unfortunately it also gets the reputation of having more witches and witchcraft. Perhaps because traditional beliefs are so strong, but the belief in witches remains stronger in Venda than in other places as well. Occasionally stories are told of witches in Venda kidnapping people and chopping them up to use their body parts as muthi- for casting spells on members of the victims family. For the spells against people to work, witches need the body parts- normally the lips, tongue, or genitals- of an immediate family member (brothers are very popular to use). Unfortunately, I am not making this up. Although rare, it still happens. Of course, Venda is not the only place in SA where witchcraft is still practiced, but it seems to get the bad reputation anyway. Despite all of its reputations, I enjoyed going to Venda. Visiting the region, seeing more rondavels than newer homes and more people dressed in traditional clothing than not was an interesting experience to me.

So, I have talked about Venda, but where does the “Not-Quite-Venda” come in? This is a nick-name that we have for Emily’s site stemming from training. During training, Emily and a few others were placed in the Venda learning group because they would be living in the Vehmbe district, where Venda is. So, for several weeks they learned Tsi-Venda and Venda traditions and culture. That was, at least until Emily went to her site visit and discovered that she lives on the outskirts of Venda, in a Shangaan village where no-one speaks Tsi-Venda or practices Venda culture. When we returned to our training sites and were sharing horror stories of our site visits, Emily told us that she was not ever going to use anything she learned in the Venda language group because she was not living in Venda. So, in order to laugh about it we gave her site the name “Not-Quite-Venda.” She’s so close to Venda, and yet she is so far away. Shame.