Malawi

From the Maravi Confederacy on the shores of Lake Nyasa and the Chongoni rock-painters to the slave caravans, Scottish missions, the Chilembwe rising, and independence under Kamuzu Banda.

Malawi takes both its name and its heart from Lake Malawi (Lake Nyasa), the great body of water along which the Maravi (Malawi) Confederacy of the Chewa-speaking peoples rose around the late fifteenth century. Bantu-speaking farmers had settled the Malawi plateau over the preceding centuries, and the women of the Chewa left a living tradition of rock painting at Chongoni, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the nineteenth century the Yao, Tumbuka and the Ngoni — refugees of the southern African Mfecane — reshaped the region, and a brutal Swahili-Arab and Yao slave trade scarred the lake. The explorer David Livingstone reached Lake Nyasa in 1859, and the Scottish Presbyterian missions he inspired at Livingstonia and Blantyre campaigned against the trade and trained an African elite. Britain proclaimed the British Central Africa Protectorate in 1891, renamed Nyasaland in 1907. John Chilembwe's short-lived 1915 rising against colonial rule and forced labour made him an early nationalist martyr, and African opposition to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–1963) fuelled the independence movement led by Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Malawi became independent of the United Kingdom on 6 July 1964; Banda ruled as autocratic life-president until a 1993 referendum and the 1994 multiparty elections opened a democratic era of contested, sometimes turbulent, but repeatedly peaceful transfers of power.