Chikulamayembe dynasty

The Tumbuka before the Balowoka

The Tumbuka people probably entered the area between the Luangwa valley and northern Lake Malawi in the 15th century. At the start of the 18th century, they formed a number of groups, most of which lived in homesteads growing finger millet and herding goats and sheep. These were thinly scattered over the plateau between the Luangwa valley and Lake Malawi, in small, independent communities with limited central organisation. One group, the Henga, occupied the Henga Valley north of Rumphi; another, the Phoka, lived south of the Nyika Plateau.^[3] By the 18th century, the Luangwa valley, the plains south of the Nyika Plateau and the Henga valley held significant elephant populations, and the Henga and Phoka people of these areas had local chiefs with status but limited authority.^[4][2]

Arrival of the Balowoka

In the 18th century, rising European demand for ivory drove an expansion of the trade in East and Central Africa, financed by merchants based at Kilwa Kisiwani and Zanzibar. By the mid-18th century, traders dressed in the style of Arab merchants, though drawn from the Unyamwezi region of what is now Tanzania, were trading for ivory as far inland as the Luangwa valley.^[5] One such group of traders, and possibly elephant hunters, arrived in the area looking for ivory among people who had until then placed little value on it; oral tradition names their leader, or the most important among them, as Mlowoka, "one who crossed [the lake]".^[4] Mlowoka is traditionally said to have landed at Chilumba on the lakeshore before moving inland to an area west of the Nyika Plateau.^[1]

Yizenge Chondoka and Frackson Bota, drawing on clan-history research by H. Leroy Vail as well as their own fieldwork in the area, give a more detailed account: the traders crossed Lake Malawi at Manda Bay between roughly 1770 and 1780, and it was the Tumbuka themselves, not the traders, who coined Balowoka (singular Mlowoka) for these easterners who had crossed the lake, a description that became a praise name obscuring the individual traders' own names.^[2] They identify the most prominent of these traders as Kakalala Chisalanda Mlowoka, remembered as a light-skinned, generous man who settled around 1775 in the Nkhamanga area within the chiefdom of Mutimbula, married into the locally influential Luhanga family, and died in 1810; other Balowoka traders who settled permanently in the region alongside him are named as Katumbi, Mwamlowe, Jumbo and Kabunduli.^[2] It is not certain whether these traders originally intended to settle permanently, but their control of the goods, including cloth, beads, conus shells and sea salt, exchanged for ivory, animal skins and other produce gave them growing economic power.^[2] They formed marriage alliances with local Henga chiefs and, to secure a monopoly over local ivory trading, established their leading followers at strategic points on the routes between the elephant-rich Henga and Phoka areas and the shore of Lake Malawi. The Balowoka have since blended fully with the Tumbuka and are no longer distinguishable as a separate group, though clan names surviving from the original Balowoka include Gondwe; among those said in oral tradition to have crossed with Mlowoka on the same "plank" were Katumbi, Kabunduli, Mwahenga, Kyungu, Chipofya and Mwamlowe.^[1] Not all Tumbuka chiefdoms were affected by Balowoka settlement: large parts of the wider M'nyanjagha kingdom, particularly in its northern, southern, eastern and western reaches, were never brought under Balowoka influence, which remained concentrated in Nkhamanga, Hewe and northern Chama.^[2]

Two accounts of the dynasty's founding

Historians disagree on exactly how the Chikulamayembe title and chieftaincy originated. Chirembo's account, on which most people generally rely, holds that a son of Mlowoka named Gonapamuhanya, also known as Khalapamuhanya, who was on his mother's side the nephew of a leading Tumbuka clan head, became paramount chief of the areas west and south of the Nyika Plateau around 1805, founding the dynasty.^[1] Chondoka and Bota instead identify Gonapamuhanya/Khalapamuhanya as Mlowoka's own son by patrilineal descent, who succeeded his father on Mlowoka's death in 1810 and was, in their account, the first ruler to actually carry the Chikhulamayembe title; on this reading, Mlowoka himself never used or was known by the name, which arose only with his son.^[2] The two accounts also differ on how much territory the resulting chieftaincy actually controlled: both agree it amounted to little more than a loose federation of small chiefdoms strung along the ivory-trading route, rather than a unified territorial kingdom, but it is argued at length that the very notion of a centralised "Chikulamayembe Kingdom" was substantially a later myth, one that hardened into orthodoxy after Saulos Nyirenda's 1909 history of the Tumbuka-Henga, translated by the missionary T. Cullen Young in 1931, exaggerated the dynasty's nineteenth-century reach in ways later accepted uncritically by the colonial administration and reinforced by the Chikulamayembe chieftaincy itself to bolster its own legitimacy.^[6][2]

Etymology of the Chikhulamayembe title

The origin of the title itself is likewise disputed. Three possible derivations current among the Tumbuka and in earlier missionary and colonial writing are discussed. One holds that Chikhulamayembe is a corruption of the Swahili chukua majembe ("to carry hoes"), a name the Phoka, who supplied Mlowoka with hoes for him to distribute as gifts, are said to have given him; the authors note this is hard to square with the Tumbuka's own long-standing skill at manufacturing hoes, which would have made imported ones of little value as trade goods.^[2] A second holds that the name instead commemorates Gonapamuhanya's practice, after he succeeded his father in 1810, of collecting tribute in the form of hoe blades pulled (kukhula) from their wooden handles.^[2] A third derives the name from yembe, mango, and a tribute of mango fruit that Gonapamuhanya is said to have demanded from surrounding villages.^[2] Chondoka and Bota conclude that no single explanation is fully satisfactory, but that whichever is correct, the title became attached to Gonapamuhanya personally and was carried thereafter by every subsequent head of the main Balowoka line at Nkhamanga.^[2]

Choosing a Themba

The Northern Ngoni finally accepted British rule in 1904, and the Tumbuka people ceased to be their vassals or returned from wherever they had taken refuge. European missionaries found the Tumbuka ready to accept Western education and supported their wish to have a paramount chief of their own. The Chikulamayembe claim to chieftainship over a wide area was supported by Saulos Nyirenda's 1909 history of the Tumbuka, translated by a missionary in 1931, which greatly exaggerated the power the Chikulamayembe had actually held in the 19th century; this version of Tumbuka history was nonetheless accepted by the colonial authorities.^[6]

There were several candidates wishing to become paramount chief, all descendants of Gonapamuhanya, but the colonial administration chose Mbawuwo Mgonanjerwa Gondwe, who was westernised, and gave him the title Themba (chief) Chikulamayembe in 1907, making him paramount chief of the Tumbuka people, with other chiefs in the area subordinated to him.^[1]

The Themba's powers

At first, the role of the Themba Chikulamayembe was largely ceremonial, but in 1913 he was given a role assisting the local district commissioner. In the 1920s the colonial administration favoured the introduction of indirect rule and proposed that the north of Malawi be divided into three districts, each with one predominant ethnic group and its own paramount chief. When the Native Authority Ordinance was passed in 1933, the Themba Chikulamayembe was made native authority over all Tumbukaland, with his own budget; the passing of the Native Courts Ordinance the same year gave him appellate jurisdiction over cases from his sub-chiefs.^[11]

The first Themba died in 1931 and was succeeded by his son Ziwange, generally known as John Hardy Gondwe, who ruled from 1932 until his death in 1977, when he was succeeded by his son Walter Gondwe.^[12]

Succession since 2018

Walter Gondwe died in late November 2018 after a two-week illness.^[1] A succession dispute followed between the installed Paramount Chief, Chikulamayembe Joseph Bongololo Gondwe, and Walter Gondwe's son Mtima Gondwe, whose supporters maintain he was wrongly passed over for the chieftaincy; Mtima Gondwe was recognised as acting Chikulamayembe from 2019 before being removed by the Malawian courts in April 2021, and Joseph Bongololo Gondwe was formally installed by President Lazarus Chakwera in April 2022, amid what press reports described as chaotic scenes.^[13][14] The dispute has continued to surface publicly since: it broke into open violence at the 2025 Gonapamuhanya festival, prompting Malawi's second vice-president, Enock Chihana, to publicly caution against political interference in chieftaincy succession and to insist that royal families be left free to choose their own leaders.^[15]