Rukwa

The Rukwa are Bantu communities of southwestern Tanzania and northern Malawi whose related languages make up Guthrie's Zone M, among them Fipa, Nyakyusa, Safwa, Wanda, Pimbwe and Bungu. On the Ufipa Plateau overlooking Lake Tanganyika, the Fipa built a stratified society of iron-smelting clans: the Milansi dynasty of smiths exchanged iron for cloth before an immigrant Twa clan became the ruling aristocracy.

By the early nineteenth century the chiefdom of Nkansi had a court with a prime minister, a queen mother holding her own estate and elected village headmen. At Ivuna, southeast of Lake Rukwa, Iron Age pottery marks salt workings that traded their produce from before 1200 into the fifteenth century.

East of the plateau, in the wet mountains at the northern end of Lake Malawi, lived the Nyakyusa. Their dialects spread across the border into the Karonga district of Malawi.