The beauty of Venda is that it offers a living cultural experience, incorporating age-old rituals into 21st century life. An example of this fusion is the "domba" or python dance. Teenage Venda girls perform this rite of passage to womanhood, just as their great grandmothers once did.
Topless and bead-clad, what differentiates them from their great grandmothers, are their sunglasses, mobile phones and career ambitions.
Speak to the girls and they'll share their desires to be marketing executives or lawyers, in control of their own lives. Yet they inhabit a social system where polygamy is widely practised and where women are only beginning to flex their rights.
It is this living African culture, with all the complexities of past and present that tourists get to experience in Venda with Kuvona Cultural Tours. Started in 1997 by Venda local, Paul Girardin, in partnership with the Venda communities, Kuvona arranges the tour and contributes a percentage of their revenue to local hospitals and schools.
Our tour starts outside the capital city of Thohoyandou, with a visit to Venda's world- renowned wood sculptors. Conjuring dreamscape birds, beasts and human beings from blocks of wood, Venda's sculptors - notably Jackson Hlungwane and John Baloyi - are now international names.
From here we drive into the mountains to see Venda's legendary potholes. Fed by a waterfall, the potholes are many fathoms deep and scuba divers have found plenty of human bones down below.
"Over the centuries, people accused of witchcraft have been drowned here," our Venda guide, Fhulu Mmbengwa, explains. "Tensions and mistrust between traditional leaders and political leaders have triggered much witch-sniffing of men and women who are considered a threat."
Driving still deeper into the mountains we enter the ancestral fortress of King Kennedy Tshivase - one of the Venda monarchs. With moss-strewn ruins terracing the hillside, giant Natal mahoganies arching over the village square, women churning porridge in iron pots to the beat of Venda's traditional giant-size drums, the mood is mystical, Mediaeval.
Our party has the good fortune to be invited to dine with King Tshivase in an open-air courtyard within the royal palace. The palace is a large, modern home built against the foot of the mountain. Kennedy's forefathers had built higher up the mountain - threats from surrounding clans were greater then - and the stone ruins of many hundreds of years are accessible on foot.
Mmbengwa explains that Venda now consists of three main kingdoms, ruled by three royal families, one of which is the Tshivase clan. The politics and rivalries between Venda's royal families, like most royal families, are extremely convoluted and there are many widely differing versions about the region's history.
One account is that up until the early eighteenth century, the region we call Venda was a peaceful, united, kingdom ruled by the boy king Thohoyandou. But Thohoyandou mysteriously vanished one day, taking with him the giant-size magic drum that kept his people united. Without the king and the drum, a succession struggle followed, eventually resulting in Venda being divided up between several leaders.
Lunch is served by Venda women in traditional costume and the dishes include maize bread, morogo (a spinach dish) and mopani worms. The German tourists flinch at the worms but boldly nibble at this regional delicacy, which they describe as 'an acquired taste'.
After lunch Mmbengwa asks the tour party if there are any questions they want to put to the king. One of the German tourists, Kristine Schreckenberg, raises her hand and asks why polygamy is still practised in Venda when it undermines women.
Tshivase's spokesman answers: "Polygamy does not undermine women. What it does is dispense with petty jealousies between women and encourages far more community interaction than the western system.
"Western couples are too insular and alienated from their surrounding community. Therefore when something goes wrong, the whole marriage collapses."
No agreement is reached but everyone in the tour party agrees this kind of interaction enriches their cultural experience.
Next on the itinerary is Venda's legendary holy forest and the sacred lake of Fundudzi. Legend has it that the lake is full of water spirits that invade anyone who drinks of it. Apparently this is not a good thing.
The holy forest - a grove of indigenous trees - is out of bounds to everyone except traditional healers and leaders, as Mmbengwa explains: "When a member of the chief's family dies, their bones get buried in the chief's homestead for six years, after which time they are dug up and buried in the holy forest, over which the traditional healers preside."
Our journey ends with a traditional dance evening. In preparation for the dance, a group of Venda women dress us in local costume and we merry the night away to an orchestra of giant-size Venda drums.
Contacts for Venda:
Kuvona Cultural Tours: 082 414 3631or (015) 556 3512 e-mail: kuvona@mweb.co.za
