Malawi
Capital: Lilongwe · Southern Africa
The lake country of the Maravi Empire, where the Chewa's Gule Wamkulu masked society dances between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Ethnic communities
- ChewaMaravi heirs; Nyau secret society and Gule Wamkulu (UNESCO)
- YaoLake-shore traders with Swahili links
- TumbukaNorthern highlands; vimbuza healing dance (UNESCO)
- NgoniZulu-descended 19th-century arrivals
More communities of Malawi
- Lomwe · Southeastern tea-country farmers
- Ngoni (Maseko & M'mbelwa) · Zulu-descended kingdoms of the highlands
- Sena · Lower Shire valley farmers
- Tonga (Lakeshore) · Fishing communities of malipenga dance
- Ngonde (Nyakyusa) · Karonga's banana-grove chiefdoms
- Lambya & Sukwa · Northern border farming peoples
- Mang'anja · Shire valley's Maravi first-line
- Nyanja lakeshore folk · The lake's canoe-and-net villages
- Chikunda · Zambezi hunter-trader descendants
- Asian-Malawian families · Trading community of the towns
- Mission-town heritage · Livingstonia and Blantyre's educated lineages
Languages
Major languages: Chichewa, Chitumbuka, Chiyao, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Maravi Empire
- • Ngoni kingdoms (M'mbelwa, Maseko)
Heritage sites
- • Chongoni Rock Art Area
- • Lake Malawi National Park
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Malawi
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberationc. 1871–1915
John Chilembwe
Anticolonial uprising
Baptist minister who led the 1915 rising against forced labour and settler estates. Killed within weeks; Malawi marks Chilembwe Day every January.
- Music & the artsc. 1942–2012
Legson Kayira
Literature
Walked around 2,500 kilometres from Nyasaland towards Cairo in search of an education, reached an American university and wrote the memoir I Will Try.
- Sportb. 1996
Tabitha Chawinga
Football
Prolific striker who has won golden boots in China, Sweden and France, and one of the highest scoring African players in the women's game.
- Science, business & activismb. 1987
William Kamkwamba
Engineering
Built a working windmill from scrapyard parts at 14, during a famine that had forced him out of school, to bring electricity and irrigation to his village.
Deep-dive community profiles
Chewa
The Maravi heirs who gave Malawi its name — a matrilineal farming civilization whose Nyau secret society dances the Gule Wamkulu, 'the Great Dance', where masked spirits of the dead, beasts and moral caricatures instruct the living.
Open deep profile →Lomwe
Malawi's second-largest people — matrilineal cultivators who crossed from Mozambique in their tens of thousands to escape Portuguese forced labour, worked the tea estates of Mulanje, and were long dismissed as anguru until they organised.
Open deep profile →Mang'anja
The people of the Shire valley, cotton growers and iron smelters whose Lundu and Kaphwiti chieftaincies predate the Maravi expansion, whose land Livingstone crossed, and whose valley is now the most flood-prone and drought-struck ground in Malawi.
Open deep profile →Ngoni
The northern branch of the Zulu diaspora — regiments that marched two thousand kilometres out of the Mfecane, absorbed the peoples they conquered, and planted Nguni kingship, praise poetry and the ingoma dance across four countries.
Open deep profile →Nyakyusa (Ngonde)
The banana-and-cattle people of the fertile northern Lake Malawi rift — famed for their unique age-villages where age-mates built and lived together, their sacred chiefs and 'breath of men' philosophy, and the volcanic gardens of the Rungwe highlands.
Open deep profile →Nyiha and Lambya
The iron-smelting people of the northern highlands — farmers of the Songwe river country whose furnaces supplied hoes across three modern countries, and whose highland is now Malawi's coffee and Tanzania's maize frontier.
Open deep profile →Sena
The people of the lower Zambezi — cultivators of the flood plain who lived under the prazo estates of Portuguese-African warlords, supplied the labour for the Zambezi bridge and the sugar estates, and now farm between a dam upstream and cyclones from the sea.
Open deep profile →Tonga of Nkhata Bay
Lakeshore fishers and traders of northern Malawi who took to mission schooling earlier and harder than almost anyone in central Africa, supplied the clerks of three colonies, and produced a disproportionate share of the men who argued the country into independence.
Open deep profile →Tumbuka
The people of the northern Malawi highlands — heirs of the old Chikulamayembe trading state, whose vimbuza healing-dance (a UNESCO heritage) exorcises illness through drum-driven trance, and whose language became a lingua franca of the north.
Open deep profile →Yao (Wayao)
The long-distance traders of the Lake Malawi–Ruvuma country — matrilineal caravan-merchants who linked the interior to the Swahili coast, embraced Islam early, and carry the masked Midimu and initiation traditions across three nations.
Open deep profile →