Venda Coffee Industry

Maria sent me this fine cover with the pretty stamps of Venda. Venda was a bantustan in northern South Africa, bordering Zimbabwe and is now part of Limpopo province. It was founded as a homeland by the Apartheid Regime for the Venda people, speakers of the Venda language.

In 1962, the South African Government created Venda as a homeland for the Venda-speaking people. The area set aside for the bantustan, or homeland, was in the north east of South Africa close to the Zimbabwe border. Its northeastern border was the Kruger National Park with Gazankulu, another homeland, towards the southeast. Its capital was Thohoyandou and it was the smallest of all the homelands.

The homelands were supposedly created to allow Black South Africans to govern themselves and to preserve their culture, but in reality they denied their residents any opportunity to participate in South African politics. They also lost their citizenship to the country and were contained on a fraction of the usable land in the republic.

In 1973 Venda was granted self-government and in 1979 it was granted independence. The United Nations (UN) Security Council condemned the homelands policy as a strategy of the South African government's to further apartheid and Venda was not recognised as an independent country by the rest of the world.

The economy largely depended on agriculture until coalmining began in the 1980s. Most of the men from the area were migrant workers and their wages made up about 40% of the small homeland's income.

Venda applied to become a part of South Africa in 1991. The homeland policy was dissolved in 1994 and all the homelands in the country were absorbed into South Africa.

Venda remains a unique area, with an intriguing culture and a diverse landscape. Most of the land around is communal, so one is free to explore without the fear of trespassing. 

South of the Soutpansberg, the high rainfall supports thick forests, tea, coffee and tropical fruit plantations. 

The four stamps on the cover show the various stages in the coffee industry. The stamps shown depict :-

16c - Picking berries

30c - Weighing bags of berries

40c - Sun drying of beans

50c - Roasting graded beans