The history of Malawi

Malawi is a narrow, landlocked country stretched along the western shore of Lake Malawi, at the southern end of the East African Rift. Its name comes from the Maravi, a confederation of Chewa-speaking peoples who dominated the region from around 1500. In the nineteenth century the area was convulsed by Ngoni invaders from the south and by the East African slave trade, before Scottish missionaries and then the British Empire arrived, creating the protectorate of Nyasaland in 1891. Malawi became independent in 1964 and spent three decades under the one-party rule of Hastings Kamuzu Banda before returning to multiparty democracy in 1994.

The Rift Valley around Lake Malawi has yielded some of the oldest human fossils in southern Africa: a jawbone found near Uraha in the north in 1991, attributed to an early species of Homo, is around 2.4 million years old. Much later, the land was home to hunter-gatherers, ancestors of or related to the BaTwa or San peoples, whom Chewa tradition remembers as the Akafula, small hunters with bows. They left red geometric paintings in rock shelters, especially in the Chongoni hills south-west of Lilongwe, which are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In the early centuries of the common era, Bantu-speaking farmers moved into the region as part of the wider Bantu expansion, bringing iron working, pottery, and the cultivation of millet and sorghum. Further waves of Bantu-speaking settlers arrived in the second millennium, absorbing or displacing the hunter-gatherers, whose last communities had disappeared by the nineteenth century.

Around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, according to oral tradition, a group led by the Phiri clan migrated from the Luba lands of the southern Congo, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and settled at the south-western end of the lake. Its ruler, the Kalonga, established his headquarters at Mankhamba and sent kinsmen out to rule new territories. The result was not a single empire so much as a loose confederation of Chewa and related kingdoms. The Kalonga's realm lay near the lake; Undi ruled to the west, in what is now Zambia and western Mozambique; and Lundu ruled the lower Shire valley in the south. At its height in the seventeenth century, under the Kalonga Masula, the Maravi dominated a wide region between the lake, the Luangwa river and the Zambezi.

The Maravi were farmers and skilled iron workers, and the name is often linked to the glow of their smelting furnaces. Chewa society was matrilineal, and its masked dance society, the Nyau, or Gule Wamkulu, which survives today, was central to its religious and social life. Through the Zambezi valley the Maravi traded ivory and iron with the Portuguese Empire, whose posts at Tete and Sena lay in what is now Mozambique. In 1616 the Portuguese trader Gaspar Bocarro crossed the region and left the first written description of it. Maize, brought from the Americas by the Portuguese, gradually became the staple crop. The confederation began to break up in the eighteenth century as its sub-rulers grew independent.

North of the lake other states took shape, among them the Nkhamanga kingdom of the Tumbuka, while the Tonga lived along the north-western shore and the Ngonde at the lake's northern tip.

The nineteenth century brought upheaval from two directions. From the south came the Ngoni, offshoots of the Nguni peoples displaced during the rise of the Zulu Kingdom under Shaka. Led by Zwangendaba, one group crossed the Zambezi in 1835 and moved north as far as Lake Tanganyika before splitting after his death; branches settled in what are now northern and central Malawi, around Mzimba and in Dedza and Ntcheu. Organised in age regiments like Zulu armies, the Ngoni raided their neighbours for cattle, grain and captives, and absorbed many of them.

From the east came the Yao, traders from northern Mozambique, who moved into the southern highlands around Lake Malawi and Lake Chilwa from the mid-nineteenth century. They were the main suppliers of captives and ivory to Swahili and Arab merchants of the East African coast, and through those contacts many Yao chiefs adopted Islam and Swahili literacy. Swahili-Arab traders also established themselves on the lakeshore. The most powerful, Salim bin Abdallah, known as the Jumbe, settled at Nkhotakota around 1840 and ran a trading state that shipped thousands of captives a year across the lake towards Kilwa and Zanzibar, the great slave market of the Swahili coast. Enslaved people from the region were also sent to Portuguese plantations and, earlier, across the Atlantic to Brazil. The Chewa and Mang'anja, raided by Ngoni and Yao alike, suffered heavily.

The Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone reached the lake in September 1859, recording the name Nyasa, which simply means "lake" in Yao. His reports on the slave trade inspired missionary societies to follow. An Anglican mission in the Shire Highlands in 1861 failed, but the Free Church of Scotland founded the Livingstonia mission in 1875 and the Church of Scotland founded Blantyre in 1876, named after Livingstone's birthplace. Glasgow businessmen formed the African Lakes Company in 1878 to supply them and to fight the slave trade with commerce. Mission schools, especially in the north, produced an educated African class that later led the nationalist movement.

During the Scramble for Africa, Portugal claimed a belt of territory linking Angola and Mozambique. Britain forced it to drop the claim in 1890 and in 1891 proclaimed the British Central Africa Protectorate, part of the British Empire, under the commissioner Harry Johnston. His forces spent much of the 1890s defeating Yao chiefs such as Makanjila and Mponda, the Jumbe at Nkhotakota and some Ngoni, ending the slave trade but also African independence. In 1907 the protectorate was renamed Nyasaland.

Nyasaland was a poor colony, valued mainly as a source of labour. European settlers took much of the best land in the Shire Highlands for coffee, tobacco and tea plantations, and Africans living on their estates owed labour as rent under a system called thangata. A hut tax pushed men to seek wages, and by the mid-twentieth century hundreds of thousands worked in the mines and farms of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and of South Africa.

In January 1915 John Chilembwe, a Baptist pastor educated in the United States, led a rising in the Shire Highlands against the plantation system and the conscription of Africans as porters in the First World War, in which German East Africa was fought over on Nyasaland's borders. The rising was quickly crushed, Chilembwe was killed, and dozens of his followers were executed. He is now honoured as a national hero. Thousands of Nyasa men served with the King's African Rifles in the Second World War.

The Nyasaland African Congress was founded in 1944. In 1953 Britain merged Nyasaland with Northern and Southern Rhodesia in the Central African Federation, despite strong African opposition to rule by the white settler government in Salisbury, now Harare. In 1958 the Congress invited back Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, a physician who had spent four decades in the United States, Britain and the Gold Coast. Protests grew, and in March 1959 the governor declared a state of emergency, detaining Banda and hundreds of activists; dozens of Africans were killed by security forces. A British inquiry, the Devlin Commission, concluded that Nyasaland had become, temporarily, a police state. Banda was released in 1960, his Malawi Congress Party won the 1961 elections, and he became prime minister in 1963, the year the federation was dissolved.

Nyasaland became independent as Malawi on 6 July 1964, part of the wave of decolonisation in Africa. Within weeks Banda faced a revolt by his cabinet, whose younger ministers objected to his autocratic style and his ties with Portugal and South Africa. He dismissed them, and most fled into exile. In 1966 Malawi became a republic and a one-party state, and in 1971 Banda was named president for life.

His rule was among the most personal and repressive in Africa. The Malawi Young Pioneers and party militants enforced loyalty, opponents were jailed without trial or killed, and in 1983 four leading politicians were murdered in the Mwanza incident, staged as a car crash. Strict dress codes banned short skirts for women and long hair for men, the press was censored, and Jehovah's Witnesses were brutally persecuted. Banda favoured the Chewa-speaking centre and moved the capital from Zomba to Lilongwe in 1975. In the Cold War he was firmly pro-Western and was one of the few African leaders to maintain diplomatic relations with apartheid South Africa. Estate agriculture, especially tobacco, grew, while most rural Malawians stayed poor.

In March 1992 the Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter criticising the regime, which, together with strikes, protests and the suspension of Western aid, forced Banda to hold a referendum. In June 1993 voters chose multiparty democracy, and in May 1994 Bakili Muluzi of the United Democratic Front won the presidency. Banda was later tried for the Mwanza murders and acquitted, and died in 1997. Muluzi served two terms, after failing to change the constitution to allow a third. His chosen successor, Bingu wa Mutharika, elected in 2004, broke with him and founded the Democratic Progressive Party. Mutharika's fertiliser subsidies brought several good harvests, but his second term was marked by economic crisis and a deadly crackdown on protests in July 2011.

When Mutharika died in April 2012, Vice-President Joyce Banda, no relation to the former dictator, became Malawi's first woman president. She lost the 2014 election to Bingu's brother Peter Mutharika. His narrow re-election in 2019 was challenged in court, and in February 2020 the Constitutional Court annulled the result because of widespread irregularities, a rare ruling in Africa. Lazarus Chakwera of the Malawi Congress Party won the rerun that June.

Malawi has remained one of the world's poorest countries, dependent on rain-fed farming and highly exposed to drought and floods. In March 2023 Cyclone Freddy caused catastrophic flooding, with Malawi the hardest-hit country, especially around Blantyre. In June 2024 Vice-President Saulos Chilima and eight others were killed when their plane crashed in the Chikangawa forest. At the general election of 16 September 2025, Peter Mutharika defeated Chakwera with about 57 per cent of the vote and returned to the presidency.