Introduction

For the peoples living in what is now the modern state of Malawi, the forty years prior to the establishment of colonial rule in 1891 was a period of exceptionally violent and rapid change. During those decades, groups of refugees from Southern Africa, collectively known as Ngoni, stormed northwards and again south, seizing people, cattle and agricultural resources and eventually creating three major and two minor conquest states in the region. Yao-speaking peoples from the east of Lake Malawi, wielding guns and trading in slaves, conquered much of the Upper Shire Valley and Shire Highlands; in the Lower Shire Valley, other groups of invaders, Kololo and Portuguese-speaking adventurers, carved out further petty kingdoms. These political upheavals interacted with the dramatic expansion of the slave and ivory trades; this in turn resulted in important shifts in the distribution of population. Many cultivators abandoned the dispersed settlements on fertile ground within easy reach of water where they had previously lived to take refuge instead in stockaded villages, often perched in inaccessible mountainous or island locations. In a number of communities, the concentration of military power led to the increasing subordination of vulnerable groups in society – notably women. Where drought coincided with violent disorder, as most notably in the Shire Highlands and Valley in 1862–63, famine of calamitous proportions resulted, sparing neither young nor old, man nor woman. It is necessary to be wary of the more dramatic versions of the ‘disaster school’ of central African history.