Ethnic Ideology and the Livingstonia Mission

Perhaps the best organized force working towards specifying the terms of the new Tumbuka identity and expanding it into a living consciousness was the Livingstonia Mission itself. Two of its missionaries had special significance in the process. The first was Thomas Cullen Young, a Scot who worked in the area between 1904 and 1931. The second was Edward Bote Manda, a Lakeside Tonga who was both a teacher and an ordained minister at the Mission headquarters. These two men, supported by the Mission's prestige and working amongst people whose respect for the printed word was immense, took up Saulos Nyirenda's earlier work and, as active culture brokers, propagated a myth based upon the alleged historical glories of the Chikulamayembe chieftainship.

Soon after his arrival, Young began studying the customs of the local people. He was in an area free from Ngonde and Ngoni political interference, and he was witness to the beginnings of the new formulation of Tumbuka history. For his historical research he depended largely on Nyirenda's history and on oral evidence gathered in Chief Chikulamayembe's area. His data was thus substantially biased towards the new chief's 'official' version of the past.^[32] His principal thesis was the same as Nyirenda's: that in the pre-Ngoni period there had existed a large Tumbuka empire, founded by the first Chikulamayembe, Mlowoka, and sustained by his successors.^[33] This empire, it was argued, included not only all speakers of the Tumbuka language, but also the Lakeside Tonga and the Ngonde peoples as well as some Chewa-speakers, extending from the Dwangwa river in the south to the Songwe river in the north, from the Luangwa valley in the west to the Lakeshore in the east, an area of some 20,000 square miles. The actual historical reality was, however, quite different. The original Chikulamayembe chieftainship had been territoriall' small, and there had been no such thing before the coming of the Ngoni as a unified empire, state, or 'tribe' encompassing the Tumbuka.^[34]

This new version of a Golden Age of the Chikulamayembes provided a heady vision of the past to a people who had been scattered and oppressed by the Ngoni conquerors and who were discontented with the colonial reality. Young's books were widely available through the Mission's shops and, as English was central in the local school curriculum, they were widely read by the rising group of Tumbuka intellectuals, helping to shape their historical consciousness. Even more importantly, his history was utilized as the basis for pamphlets about local history that were published in Tumbuka for use in the area's many primary schools. In this way, then, the heroic accounts of Tumbuka history written by Saulos Nyirenda and Cullen Young passed into popular consciousness through the Mission's educational work.^[35]

Edward Manda was at work at the same time. Manda was not of Tumbuka origin, having been born a Lakeside Tonga in an area under Ngoni hegemony, his father a captive of the Ngoni. He began his studies at the Mission in 1885. In 1905 he became a teacher, and in 1918 was ordained to the ministry, afterwards remaining at the Mission headquarters.^[36] In theory, Manda might have become a kind of Saulos Nyirenda for the Lakeside Tonga, the culture broker for a distinctly Tonga ethnic consciousness. The parallels were striking. Like the Tumbuka, the Tonga were divided into a host of small chieftaincies. Like the Tumbuka, they had

known defeat and humiliation at the hands of the Ngoni. As with the Tumbuka, some of them had rebelled and migrated to form autonomous communities, and, like the Tumbuka, they had in Chief Mankhambira, who defeated an Ngoni attack in 1880, a figure around whom myths of past greatness could have accumulated. Finally, again like the Tumbuka, they had been among the Mission's earliest converts and possessed a substantial well-educated petty bourgeoisie who could serve as culture brokers.

Yet no comparable version of Tonga ethnic consciousness was formulated. Unlike the Tumbuka refugees for whom a chief had to be found to deal with the new British administration, the Tonga did not lack political institutions, and other Tonga chiefs, eager to retain their authority, were unwilling to submit to the claims of Mankhambira's successor to have jurisdiction over all Tonga-speakers. Furthermore, Lakeside Tonga was a language so similar to Tumbuka that it could not readily be used as a distinctive cultural symbol for an ideology of Tonga ethnic identity. Young Tonga intellectuals banded together in 1919 to form the West Nyasa Native Association, as their educated counterparts had done elsewhere in the Northern Province.^[37] The Association's members were hostile to colonial injustice and oppression, and they, like their counterparts in other areas of the Northern Province, co-opted local chiefs as members to gain support from ordinary villagers. Of the three northern associations, however, the West Nyasa Native Association was the most detached from local ethnic issues, the most affected by intellectual influences from South Africa and the United States, and the most firmly committed to a generalized denunciation of colonialism in an idiom of Justice and Civilization.

Edward Manda held similar views regarding colonial injustice. While living amongst the Tumbuka he had joined the first African political association in Nyasaland. This was the North Nyasa Native Association, formed in 1912 by Tumbuka men educated at the Livingstonia Mission with the encouragement of Robert Laws, the Mission's head.^[38] By 1925 Manda had become the Association's chairman. He had also become exceedingly unpopular with the British because of his unending protests. Although a firm believer in the Victorian virtues of Improvement and Uplift, he also felt that British cultural imperialism required the development of a rival 'traditional' mythology that would at the same time incorporate the values of the educated African petty bourgeoisie.^[39] For him, the Chikulamayembe chieftainship was an obvious point of departure and, with all the ardour of a convert, he set about to bolster its status and power.

In this work, he enjoyed two real advantages. First, he was geographically well situated. As one official noted, the chiefs court was far from district headquarters at Karonga and

there is a tendency for things to fall into the hands of the Mission natives, particularly the Rev. Edward Manda at Livingstonia, who is of necessity a liaison between Chikulamayembe and the D.C. as he is in telegraphic and postal communication with Karonga.^[40]

Second, his involvement occurred at an opportune time for the strengthening of specifically ethnic institutions, for his work intersected with structural changes in the local economy and reinforced the local role of chiefs.