Tumbuka

The Tumbuka were a Bantu people of the plateau between northern Lake Malawi and the Luangwa valley. Oral tradition traces them to the Luba kingdom farther west, from which they migrated in the early fifteenth century; they settled in small, loosely organised communities of finger-millet farmers and goat herders.

They spoke Chitumbuka, a Bantu language with many dialects. From the mid-eighteenth century ivory traders from Unyamwezi, financed by merchants of Kilwa and Zanzibar, crossed Lake Malawi in search of tusks.

One such trader, remembered as Mlowoka, settled in the Nkhamanga area around 1775, and his successors built the Chikulamayembe kingship, conventionally dated to about 1805, which drew the scattered Tumbuka clans into a single kingdom. By the 1830s pressure from coastal Swahili traders was weakening the new dynasty.