Venda people

I, everything romance, right? But I did not want the book to be just about a girl meets boy and they live happily after.

So I wanted to build like a deep story, um, rooted in culture, and I wanted to take everybody to Venda, where I come from, you know, just to teach a bit about our culture, how we live our lives.

So I just wanted a book that would be more deeper than just a love story between two people.

What's interesting about, uh, Rendani is that she doesn't just sit around waiting for love to, to rock up.

We see the challenges that we go through.

Um, yeah, more of representation as well.

And you know it was so funny for me, uh, I only realized when I came to Pretoria that, um, Venda people are, like, a tiny minority in South Africa.

[laughs] And I, it was a shock to me.

This almost certainly is where that guy should live.

On the basis of the way Venda and Shona used to do it, royals should surround the hill.

They perform a protective circle around the leader.

That's what we're seeing here.

So we've got royals on the slopes of the hill, royals on that, and then the commoners out here in between.

Even in Venda and Shona today, they use a phrase expressing this whole thing.

To climb the mountain, you must go zigzag.

He is seen as the mountain.

So we started a series a couple of weeks ago looking at South African royal families, especially those we don't really know much history about.

So we have looked at the Ndebele kingdom, we've looked at the Bapedi royal family, we've looked at the Bavenda royal family, and today we are focusing on the Amakosa kingdom.

And of course, Amakosa were a collection of related chiefdoms and political communities together.

with complex relationships between royal houses, chiefs and clans.