The history of Malawi covers the area of present-day Malawi. The region was once part of the Maravi Empire (Maravi was a kingdom which straddled the current borders of Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, in the 16th century). In colonial times, the territory was ruled by the British, under whose control it was known first as British Central Africa and later Nyasaland. It became part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The country achieved full independence, as Malawi, in 1964. After independence, Malawi was ruled as a one-party state under Hastings Banda until 1994.
Prehistory
In 1991, a hominid jawbone was discovered near Uraha village that was between 2.3 and 2.5 million years old. Early humans inhabited the vicinity of Lake Malawi 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Human remains at a site dated about 8000 BCE showed physical characteristics similar to peoples living today in the Horn of Africa. At another site, dated 1500 BCE, the remains possess features resembling San people. They might be responsible for the rock paintings found south of Lilongwe in Chencherere and Mphunzi. According to Chewa myth, the first people in the area were a race of dwarf archers which they called Akafula or Akaombwe. Bantu-speaking people entered the region during the first four centuries of the "Common Era", bringing with them the use of iron and slash-and-burn agriculture. Later waves of Bantu settlement, between the 13th and 15th centuries, displaced or assimilated the earlier Bantu and pre-Bantu populations.The History of Southern Africa, edited by Amy McKenna (Britannica Educational Publishing, 2011), p. 101.
Maravi Empire
The name Malawi is thought to derive from the word Maravi. The people of the Maravi Empire were iron workers. Maravi is thought to mean "Flames" and may have come from the sight of many kilns lighting up the night sky. A dynasty known as the Maravi Empire was founded by the Amaravi people in the late 15th century. The Amaravi, who eventually became known as the Chewa (a word possibly derived from a term meaning "foreigner"), migrated to Malawi from the region of the modern-day Republic of Congo to escape unrest and disease. The Chewa attacked the Akafula, whom no longer exist.
Eventually encompassing most of modern Malawi, as well as parts of modern-day Mozambique and Zambia, the Maravi Empire began on the southwestern shores of Lake Malawi. The head of the empire during its expansion was the Kalonga (also spelt Karonga). The Kalonga ruled from his headquarters in Mankhamba. Under the leadership of the Kalonga, sub-chiefs were appointed to occupy and subdue new areas. The empire began to decline during the early 18th century when fighting among the sub-chiefs and the burgeoning slave trade weakened the authority of the Maravi Empire.
Trade and invasions
Portuguese influence Initially, the Maravi Empire's economy was largely dependent on agriculture, especially the production of millet and sorghum. It was during the Maravi Empire, sometime during the 16th century, that Europeans first came into contact with the people of Malawi. Under the Maravi Empire, the Chewa had access to the coast of modern-day Mozambique. Through this coastal area, the Chewa traded ivory, iron, and slaves with the Portuguese and Arabs. Trade was enhanced by the common language of Chewa (Nyanja) which was spoken throughout the Maravi Empire.
In 1616, the Portuguese trader Gaspar Bocarro journeyed through what is now Malawi, producing the first European account of the country and its people.Excerpts from António Bocarro's "Livro do Estado da Índia" in George McCall Theal (ed.), Records of South-Eastern Africa, vol. 3 (Cape Town, 1899), pp. 254–435.R. A. Hamilton, "The Route of Gaspar Bocarro from Tete to Kilwa in 1616", The Nyasaland Journal, 7:2 (1954), pp. 7-14. The Portuguese were also responsible for the introduction of maize to the region. Maize would eventually replace sorghum as the staple of the Malawian diet. Malawian tribes traded slaves with the Portuguese. These slaves were sent mainly to work on Portuguese plantations in Mozambique or to Brazil.
Ngoni The decline of the Maravi Empire was due to the entry of two powerful groups into the Malawi region. In the 19th century, the Angoni or Ngoni people and their chief Zwangendaba arrived from the Natal region of modern-day South Africa. The Angoni were part of a great migration, known as the mfecane, of people fleeing from the head of the Zulu Empire, Shaka Zulu. The Ngoni people settled mostly in what is modern-day central Malawi; particularly Ntcheu and parts of Dedza district. However, some groups proceeded north; entering Tanzania and settling around Lake Victoria. But splinter groups broke off and headed back south; settling in modern-day northern Malawi, particularly Mzimba district, where they mixed with another migrant group coming from across Lake Malawi called the Bawoloka. Clearly, the mfecane had a significant impact on Southern Africa. The Angoni adopted Shaka's military tactics to subdue the lesser tribes, including the Maravi, they found along their way. Staging from rocky areas, the Ngoni impis would raid the Chewa (also called Achewa) and plunder food, oxen and women. Young men were drawn in as new fighting forces while older men were reduced to domestic slaves and/or sold off to Arab slave traders operating from the Lake Malawi region.
Yao The second group to take power around this time was the Yao. The Yao were richer and more independent than the Makuwa. They came to Malawi from northern Mozambique either to escape from conflict with the Makuwa, who had become their enemies, or to profit from the slave and ivory trades with the Arabs from Zanzibar, the Portuguese, and the French. In any case, upon migrating to Malawi in the 1800s, they soon began buying slaves from the Chewa and Ngoni. The Yao are recorded to have also attacked them in order to capture prisoners whom they later sold as slaves.
By the time, David Livingstone encountered them on his travels, recording their practice of slavery, they traded with the Rwozi of Zimbabwe, with the Bisa on the Luangwa river in modern-day Zambia, and even the Congo and the eastern coast. Their extensive expeditions required educated merchants and tradespeople, who were naturally proficient in using the Arabic alphabet. Craftsmen built dhows for lake travel, farmers set out irrigation for the growing of rice, and prominent members of society founded madrassahs and boarding schools. The Yao were the first, and for a long while, the only group to use firearms, which they bought from Europeans and Arabs, in conflicts with other tribes, including the Makololo who had migrated from Southern Africa after being displaced by the Zulu people.
By the 1860s, the Yao had converted to Islam. The conversion is normally attributed to connections made during their trading expeditions, especially those to the Kilwa Sultanate and Zanzibar. The conversion had begun before the 1840s, as can be told from the accounts of Salim bin Abdallah, who is better known as the Jumbe of Nkhotakota. Although the Yao were not animist before Islam, they believed in a God accessible through the intercedence of ancestral spirits. As a benefit of their conversion, the Yao employed Swahili and Arab sheikhs from the coast who promoted literacy and founded mosques; Chief Mponda in Mangochi had founded almost twelve madrassas before the Christian missionaries arrived in 1875. Their writings were in Kiswahili which became a lingua franca of Malawi from 1870 to the 1960s.
Arabs and their Swahili allies Using their strong partnership with the Yao, the Arab traders set up several trading posts along the shore of Lake Malawi. The Yao expeditions to the east attracted the attention of the Swahili-Arabs. It was from the Yao, the Swahili and Arabs knew the existence and the geography of Lake Malawi. Jumbe (Salim Abdallah) followed the Yao trade route from the eastern side of Lake Malawi up to Nkhotakota. When Jumbe arrived in Nkhotakota in 1840, he found a number of Yao and Bisa well established. Some of those Yao he found in Nkhotakota were already Islamised and he opted to employ them rather than employing non-Muslim Chewa. During the height of his power, Jumbe transported between 5,000 and 20,000 slaves through Nkhotakota annually. From Nkhotakota, the slaves were transported in caravans of no less than 500 slaves to the small island of Kilwa Kisiwani off the coast of modern-day Tanzania. The founding of these various posts effectively shifted the slave trade in Malawi from the Portuguese in Mozambique to the Arabs of Zanzibar.
Although the Yao and the Angoni continually clashed with each other, neither was able to win a decisive victory. However, the Ngoni of Dedza opted to work the Yao of Mpondas. The remaining members of the Maravi Empire, however, were nearly wiped out in attacks from both sides. Some Achewa chiefs saved themselves by creating alliances with the Swahili people who were allied with the Arab slave traders.
Lomwe of Malawi The Lomwe of Malawi are a recent introduction having arrived as late as the 1890s. The Lomwe came from a hill in Mozambique called uLomwe, north of the Zambezi River and south east of Lake Chilwa in Malawi. Theirs was also a story of hunger largely instigated by the Portuguese settlers moving into the neighbourhoods of uLomwe.Z. Claude Chidzero – 'The Lomwe Diaspora and Settlement on Tea Estates in Thyolo, Southern Malawi', Degree Research paper, History Department, University of Malawi, Zomba, 1981 To escape from ill-treatment, the Lomwe headed north and entered Nyasaland by way of the southern tip of lake Chilwa, settling in the Phalombe and Mulanje areas.
In Mulanje they found the Yao and Mang'anja already settled. The Yao chiefs such as Chikumbu, Mtilamanja, Matipwili, Juma, Chiuta welcomed the Lomwe as their cousins from Mozambique. A large number of Lomwe were given land by the Yao and Mang'anja. Later on the Lomwe got employment on tea estates that various British companies were establishing on the foothills of Mount Mulanje. They gradually spread into Thyolo and Chiradzulu. The Lomwe readily mixed with the local Mang'anja tribes, and there are no reported cases of tribal conflict.
Early European contact The Portuguese were reportedly the first Europeans to enter Malawi; in 1859, acting off a tip received from a Portuguese source, David Livingstone discovered Lake Malawi. The Yao allegedly told him that the mass of water he saw was called Nyasa. Livingstone, who did not know Chiyao, possibly thought that Nyasa was the proper name of the lake. However, the term Nyasa in Chiyao meant the lake in English. His next journey, with Bishop Charles Mackenzie from the UMCA in 1861, saw hostility erupt between the Muslim Yao and the non-Muslim Mang'anja, whom the bishop preferred to preach to; those of the Yao who practised Islam and slavery were naturally hostile to the Christian missionaries. The skirmishes eventually subsided after Mackenzie's death from malaria.