Cultural and Political Change in Northern Malawi c.1350-1800

Abstract

This article attempts to portray the political and religious culture of the peoples who inhabited northern Malawi in the pre-1800 period. It demonstrates how the Ngulube groups established polities in the area and how they came to dominate the indigenous peoples. It also shows how different circumstances in individual localities influenced the mode of dominance by the Ngulube groups over the various autochthones. The article further shows how the prosperity of the Tumbuka country under the Mkandawire was destroyed by the droughts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and how this left a vacuum which was filled in the eighteenth century by the lowoka traders.