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5— Tribalism in the Political History of Malawi1
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The Seeds of Tumbuka Ethnic Identity

The reasons behind these successes lay in the Mission's profound attractions for different Tumbuka groups.[15] The Ngonde people at the northern end of Lake Malawi had suffered little from Ngoni incursions and had been saved by British intervention from serious disruption by late nineteenth-century slave raiders. They were thus able to maintain a coherent culture and economy, and visitors frequently described them as content to live their 'idyllic lives' uninterested in any change.[16] The Tumbuka-speaking Henga who lived in Ngonde territory were, however, despised and resented by the Ngonde both as refugees and as former allies of Swahili slavers. Their formal religion was largely dead, and they were both ready to experiment with a new one and eager for the sort of mission education that would enable them to become successful traders, clerks and teachers.[17] The Henga responded enthusiastically to the new educational opportunities, and in 1911 a Mission report distinguished clearly between the two local African groups:

The Henga are a keen, vigorous, progressive people, the great majority of the church members are from among them; their schools are well attended, the pupils alert, and the boys and girls in about equal numbers.


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The [Ng]onde, on the other hand, are slow to move, extremely conservative, and suspicious of the new movements going on all around them.[18]

Through their embrace of an education which had a substantial English language component, the Henga were well on their way to developing an educated petty bourgeoisie with values shaped by Victorian missionary teaching and example.

For the Tumbuka under Ngoni domination the situation was somewhat more complex. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Ngoni leadership invited missionaries to live amongst them out of economic and political considerations.[19] At the same time, however, the Ngoni feared the corrosive impact of Christian teachings upon their military ethic. Rather than educate their own children, therefore, the Ngoni permitted the children of their Tumbuka slaves and serfs to attend the Mission's schools.[20] The subordinate Tumbuka were thus the earliest converts to Christianity in large numbers. For the Tumbuka, an added attraction of the Mission was that, from 1894 on, its main station at Kondowe was situated between the Ngonde to the north and the Ngoni to the south, in the very heart of empty territory then gradually being reoccupied by returning Tumbuka refugees. They thus saw the Mission as politically neutral.

The Mission's educational work was remarkable. In 1893 there were ten schools with 630 pupils. By 1901 there were 55 schools which had an average attendance of 2800 pupils. By 1904 one station alone maintained some 134 schools with over 9000 students.[21] As evidence of the Mission's educational impact, when Nyasaland's governor visited it in 1911, he was told that in 1910 the area's people had purchased 1200 lbs of writing paper and 30,000 envelopes from its shops.[22]

As the Tumbuka embraced western education, their language gained respectability. Because they had been the first to grasp the new educational opportunities, their language could no longer be seen as the language of slaves and serfs only. Rather, it was the language of a rapidly expanding group of educated people. Moreover, because it was the language of most of the Ngoni ruling elite's wives and concubines, it was the language which even Ngoni young people learned as they grew up. In this way it displaced Ngoni and the variety of other languages spoken by the original immigrants. The area became linguistically more homogeneous and by 1900 it was clear that Ngoni was a language of the past. By 1909 Tumbuka had also displaced other languages in the Mission's Ngonde area, becoming the medium of instruction in its primary schools.[23] It became clear to the Mission, therefore, that Tumbuka, not Nyanja, would best serve as its language for instruction and preaching, and the Bible and other religious writings were translated into it.[24] The sole exception to this policy of using Tumbuka in Mission work was amongst the Lakeside Tonga, where, to avoid alienating its earliest converts, the Mission continued to use the local language.

A further component was required, however, to give a political thrust to the shift in Tumbuka's local standing and to release the process of myth-making that would culminate in the forging of a new, specifically ethnic, ideology. The defeat of the old Tumbuka chiefly elite by the Ngoni opened the way for the creation of a new form of leadership, and the British provided the opportunity for its establishment. Throughout Nyasaland the British administration, which gradually established its authority in the country after 1890, sought African political leaders to assist it in tax-collecting and general administration. The Tumbuka already under the authority of Ngonde or Ngoni chiefs posed no problem to the British. But for those Tumbuka refugees who had settled north of the Ngoni, in areas without chiefs, it was necessary to establish a new structure of chiefly authority.


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Two groups of local Africans were eager to influence the British in this process. First, in Nkhamanga, the area of the long defunct Chikulamayembe chiefdom, there was a broad desire to resuscitate that chieftainship. According to custom the revived office should have gone to a member of the lineage of the last of the chiefs, Majuma Gondwe. Village leaders, however, felt that they needed an educated chief to voice their complaints and wishes, for, as one put it, 'For an uneducated man to speak with Europeans was an impossible dream.' When the revival of the chieftainship was raised, therefore, they did not seek it for the heir of the Majuma line, but for Chilongozi Gondwe, an offspring of a collateral lineage.[25] This was an apt choice. Chilongozi Gondwe came from among the Henga people dwelling among the Ngonde and had attended the Livingstonia Mission's school. He had entered the colonial civil service as a policeman at Deep Bay, near the Mission headquarters at Kondowe.[26] Although Chilongozi was neither a 'common man' nor from the area of the chieftaincy itself, the people supported him because, as he was educated, 'they felt that he would understand Europeans better'.[27]

The second group seeking to influence the British was composed of articulate, educated Tumbuka teachers, clerics and clerks. They also supported the idea of a revived Chikulamayembe chieftainship held by Chilongozi Gondwe, one of their number. Aware through their studies at school of the potency of European nationalism and through their own personal experience of the strengths of the local Ngoni state, they recognized that political unity would also be useful to the Tumbuka in their dealings with the colonial administration. It seemed to them that the cultural symbols surrounding the revived chieftainship could be used to give ideological form to this political unity.[28] They also lobbied the British on Chilongozi Gondwe's behalf.

In 1907 the British bowed to such pressure and recognized Chilongozi as 'Chief Chikulamayembe IX'. A coronation ceremony was put together for the occasion and an embryonic ethnic ideology based on historical symbols was created, offering Tumbuka-speakers who had formerly identified themselves primarily by their membership in lineages and clans the potential of reformulating their identity into that of belonging to a wholly new ideological construct, the 'tribe'. The new chief and his educated supporters set about building an historical image for their new Tumbuka 'tribe'. A series of articles devoted to Tumbuka history appeared in the Mission's local newspaper, Makani, and elaborate celebrations were held annually to commemorate the anniversary of Chilongozi's appointment.[29] Saulos Nyirenda, a telegraph clerk educated at the Mission who was later to be considered the Tumbuka's 'Father of History', produced a lengthy political history in 1909. Related by marriage to the chief, he wrote with but one purpose: to glorify the history of the Chikulamayembe chieftainship and to denigrate the Ngoni for having 'spoiled our country'.[30] Another Mission graduate, Andrew Nkhonjera, apparently with the aim of convincing the British of the supreme importance of the Chikulamayembe chieftaincy in the history of all Tumbuka-speakers, produced a similar history.[31]

It was one thing for intellectuals to craft an ideological core of Tumbuka identity centring around the revived chieftainship. It was quite another to have the new identity widely accepted by Tumbuka-speakers and become a genuine ethnic consciousness. That it did can be explained, we suggest, by relating it to two important factors that affected the local situation after World War I. The first of these was the active intervention of the Livingstonia Mission in education and local politics, activities that encouraged people to think ethnically. The second was the profound change in the political economy of the Northern Province which prompted men to rely upon the chiefly elite to maintain order in the village while


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they were far away, working as labour migrants in Southern Rhodesia or South Africa. This reliance bolstered chiefly authority and opened the way for a general acceptance of an identity and consciousness defined in terms of 'tribe'.


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5— Tribalism in the Political History of Malawi1
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