An Ethnographic Mélange in the North
Signs of specifically ethnic thinking first appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century in Malawi's Northern Province, an isolated area far removed from the country's centres of production, trade, and industry, and characterized by great cultural fragmentation. In the far north of the province, there was a narrow band of culturally related peoples, stretching out from east to west: Ngonde, Sukwa, Ndali, Lambya, and Nyiha. Three other, substantially larger population groups were located south of this northernmost ribbon. First, there were the Tumbuka-speaking autochthones of the area, scattered widely and loosely organized under largely autonomous village headmen. Second, there were people who dwelt in a set of small chiefdoms along the shore of Lake Malawi and who spoke Lakeside Tonga, a language similar to Tumbuka in both grammar and lexicon. Finally, centred on the Kasitu river valley, there were the Ngoni under Chief Mbelwa, an amalgam of peoples of diverse cultural origins ruled by a small aristocracy.
These Ngoni derived from refugees who had fled from the wars sparked off by the creation of the Zulu empire in Natal during the 1820s. Their first leader was Zwangendaba.[6] Around 1855, under Zwangendaba's successor, Mbelwa, the group arrived amongst the Tumbuka, whom they conquered easily. The most prominent of the Tumbuka chiefs, Chikulamayembe VIII, was slain and his people captured.[7] The Ngoni invaders then settled, established large villages, and devastated the surrounding areas so as to create a defensive buffer zone of wilderness that only wild animals inhabited.[8] Large numbers of defeated Lakeside Tonga and Tumbuka were incorporated in the new villages, and the Ngoni made concerted attempts to suppress the captives' own culture. The old Tumbuka religious cult of the spirit Chikang'ombe died out, and earlobes were perforated in Ngoni fashion to serve as 'a sign of baptism from the Ngoni. . . . We could not
then desert them'.[9] Ngoni-pattrned patrilineality and an acceptance of bridewealth payable in cattle (lobola ) gradually replaced local Tumbuka matrilineal inheritance and uxorilocal brideservice practices, eroding many of the distinguishing characteristics of Tumbuka culture.
Despite these policies, the captives nonetheless retained a sense of self-awareness because of their subordination to the Ngoni ruling elite as bafo, 'slaves' or 'serfs'.[10] In the late 1870s, moreover, several groups of Tonga and Tumbuka captives escaped successfully from Ngoni rule. One of these groups, known as the Henga, settled amongst the culturally distinct Ngonde people at the northern end of Lake Malawi, where they dwell to this day, an island of Tumbuka language and culture in a sea of Ngonde people.[11] These rebellions eventually yielded an heroic tradition useful in the formulation of later ethnic consciousness.
In 1878, then, when the missionaries of the Scottish Presbyterian Livingstonia Mission established their first posts in northern Malawi, they encountered a Babel of linguistic confusion, the heritage of decades of movement by thousands of refugees and captives. In addition to the local languages of the region—Nyiha, Ndali, Lambya, Sukwa, Ngonde, Tumbuka, and Ngoni—the missionaries had to deal with Bisa, Bemba, Swahili, Senga, Nsenga, Sukuma, Fipa, and Nyanja, languages spoken by those whom the Ngoni had incorporated on their long anabasis through southern and eastern Africa.
For reasons of strategy and logistics, the first mission station was situated amongst the Lakeside Tonga, but, after a short time, it became apparent that Tonga, the local language of the first converts, was not feasible as a medium for further expansion of the Mission. The missionaries then decided to employ two languages: English, the language of 'high culture', and Nyanja, the language spoken on the southwest shore of Lake Malawi.[12] Nyanja was chosen for both preaching and teaching, partly because it was a lingua franca throughout large areas of East Central Africa and partly because there was already a substantial body of religious publications in Nyanja.[13] Nyanja was also the sole local language in the Protectorate's civil service examinations, and the missionaries hoped that it would become the lingua franca throughout the entire area of their work.[14] The very success of the Mission, however, soon made the use of Nyanja impossible.