The Tumbuka (also known as Yombe, Tonga, Kamanga, Senga and Henga) are a group of Bantu people found in Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.Tumbuka people, Encyclopædia Britannica More than fifteen related groups are counted among the wider Tumbuka family, including the Senga, Nyika, Henga, Yombe, Phoka and Tonga, all of whom speak dialects of the same language and trace their history to a common kingdom. Their language, Chitumbuka, has around a dozen recorded dialects, among them Yombe, Senga and Wenya. These groups were at one time brought together under a single ruler, in what became known as the Nkhamanga Kingdom.
According to oral traditions recorded by the historians Yizenge Chondoka and Frackson Bota, several smaller Tumbuka groups also survive in the north-western corner of the old kingdom, between Kalonga and Isoka, and across the border in Tanzania; many of these belong to what is called the Kalonga wa Nkhonde segment of the wider Mulonga Mbulalubilo lineage.
Like a number of neighbouring peoples, the Tumbuka trace their origins to the Luba Kingdom in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which they are said to have left in the early 1400s, before any of the states of the region had taken the shape they would later have. Oral history holds that the group left in the company of the ancestors of the Hehe and Gogo peoples of Tanzania and the Mwakyusa, under an overall leader named Mudala, and that the Tumbuka contingent was itself led by a man remembered as Mulonga Mbulalubilo. A separate tradition describes the Tumbuka's departure from Luba territory as a flight from a warrior group known as Kongolo, who are said to have later absorbed the people who remained behind.
Demography and language Malawi's most recent national census, carried out by the National Statistical Office in September 2018, counted 1,614,955 Tumbuka by tribe, 9.2 percent of the country's enumerated population of 17,563,749; the great majority, 1,311,292 people, lived in the Northern Region, with a further 236,695 in the Central Region and 66,968 in the Southern Region, reflecting the long history of Tumbuka labour migration described above. The same census recorded 940,184 people in Mzimba district, 284,681 in Nkhata Bay, 229,161 in Rumphi and 234,927 in Chitipa, the districts that make up the historical Tumbuka and Tonga heartland, and it found the Northern Region to have Malawi's highest regional literacy rate, at 79 percent, with Rumphi ranking second among all Malawian districts, at 83 percent. These national census figures cover only Malawi and do not include Tumbuka communities in Zambia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
Various estimates suggest that, across these four countries, over ten million people speak Tumbuka as a first or second language. Ethnologue put the total number of Tumbuka speakers at 10,346,000 in 2022.Ethnologue report for Tumbuka language, Ethnologue Ember and her co-authors estimate that a further million or so Tumbuka people live elsewhere in central and southern Africa, in countries such as Tanzania and Zimbabwe, largely because of a long history of labour migration.
The Tumbuka language, or Chitumbuka, belongs to the Bantu family and is classified by Guthrie as Zone N, Group 20; its home territory runs roughly from Lake Malawi in the east to the Luangwa River valley in Zambia in the west, bordered by Tonga and Chewa speech to the south and by Ngonde, Sukwa and Lambya speech to the north. Twelve dialects have been identified and studied, among them Henga, Phoka, Wenya, Mzimba and the Lake Shore dialect. Chitumbuka is mutually intelligible with the Tonga language, which linguists treat as one of its dialects; in the nineteenth century, missionaries settled on these two dialects as the standard forms of what was, in effect, a single language.
Before Britain established a protectorate over Nyasaland, the area now known as Malawi's Northern Region held many culturally related but loosely organised communities, governed largely by autonomous village headmen and speaking various dialects of Chitumbuka. Missionaries active in the late nineteenth century consolidated these dialects into a small number of standard languages, settling on Chitumbuka as the medium of instruction across the north in preference to Ngoni, Tonga or Ngonde, which they treated as minor dialects.
Chitumbuka became an official language of Malawi in 1934, alongside Chewa and English, and for over two decades it was used in government, on national radio, in the school curriculum and in public life. Hastings Banda withdrew both Chichewa and Chitumbuka from official status in 1968, leaving English alone with that standing, and Chitumbuka was also dropped as a medium of instruction and in examinations, while Chichewa continued to be used in education. The secondary school entrance system was manipulated in ways that favoured candidates from the Central Region over those from the Northern Region. Some who objected to the ban on Chitumbuka were arrested or harassed in public, but both the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian and the Catholic Church went on using Chitumbuka religious texts and preaching in the language across the Northern and Central regions.
After Malawi returned to multi-party politics, Tumbuka-language radio programmes began broadcasting nationally in 1994, but a 1996 proposal to reintroduce Tumbuka as a medium of instruction for the first four years of compulsory schooling was turned down. Since then, a grassroots body, the Chitumbuka Language and Culture Association, has taken up both the practical work of standardising Chitumbuka spelling and teaching material and the more contested question of what should count as "proper" Chitumbuka, given the dialect variation described above.
Modern scholarship, ideophones and Bible translation Chitumbuka has been the subject of sustained modern linguistic study, including work on its noun class system, its tone and sentence stress, the syntax of embedded questions, and the phonetics of its nasal-consonant sequences and vowel length. Like other Bantu languages, Chitumbuka makes heavy use of ideophones, single words built mostly from verbs or nouns that compress a whole situation, state or action into one term, and that can be doubled for emphasis or repeated motion; a 2015 collection by Songiso Mvalo records many of these alongside the idioms and proverbs through which Chitumbuka speakers value economy of expression.
The Bible has been translated into Chitumbuka three times: a first translation appeared in 1952 and was revised in 1989, and the Bible Society of Malawi launched a new "common language" translation, intended to be more accessible than its predecessors, at Mzuzu in February 2018. That translation had taken from 1994 to 2013 to complete, involved three main translators and about twenty reviewers, and was overseen by United Bible Societies consultants; the CCAP Synod of Livingstonia and the Reformed Mission League supported the project with office space and staff funding respectively.
History
The Tumbuka probably entered the area between the Luangwa valley and northern Lake Malawi in the fifteenth century. By the start of the eighteenth century they had formed a number of groups, among them the Henga, living in small, independent communities spread thinly across the area without any central organisation.
Mulowoka, the Balowoka and the Chikulamayembe chieftainship By the mid-eighteenth century, traders dressed "as Arabs" but originating from the Unyamwezi region of what is now Tanzania were trading for ivory, and to some extent slaves, as far inland as the Luangwa valley. They formed alliances with groups of Henga, and their leader founded the Chikulamayembe Dynasty, which ruled a federation of small chiefdoms. By the 1830s, however, the dynasty was in decline, and the area reverted to political and military disorganisation.
Historians researching the Tumbuka's own oral traditions have added further detail to this founding story. Around 1780, a group of traders known as the Balowoka settled among the Tumbuka under a leader remembered as Mulowoka, whose real name was Kakalala Musaiwila; Mulowoka ("the one who crossed") referred to his having led his people across Lake Malawi from its eastern to its western shore. Very little is recorded of Tumbuka history before Mulowoka's arrival, beyond the fact that the Luhanga clan, led by an influential figure named Mubila, was then dominant in the Nkhamanga area, alongside the Bota and Kumwenda clans.
Mulowoka and his companions were traders seeking ivory, which the Tumbuka at the time regarded as having little value and bartered away for cloth, beads and cowrie shells. He married into the Luhanga clan without having children by that marriage, and later into the Kumwenda clan, by whom he had several children; his generosity, and the fact that he settled peaceably among the Tumbuka, led the local clans to make him their chief. The resulting chieftainship took the title Chikulamayembe, said to derive from the Swahili phrase chukua majembe, "pick up the hoes" — reportedly an instruction Mulowoka gave his assistants as they travelled through Nkhamanga distributing hoes and cloth free of charge. Mulowoka himself never held the title; it passed first to his son, remembered as Khalapamuhanya or Gonapamuhanya ("sit in the sun" and "sleep in the sun", names referring to his habit of dozing in the sun after his midday meal), whose grave near the Lunyina River at Mphande later gave the area its association with the modern Gonapamuhanya festival, before the Chikulamayembe seat moved to Bolero, where it remains.
Because Gonapamuhanya was an only son, the chieftainship passed on his death to his nephew, Kamphungu Nkhonjera, whose violent attempt to keep the title within his own line — killing and driving out members of the Chikulamayembe lineage — led his subjects to burn him to death in his hut and restore the chieftainship to the Chikulamayembe family. Successive chiefs, Pitamkusa Gondwe, Bwati Gondwe I, Cheyeka Gondwe, Mujuma Gondwe and Bamantha Gondwe, held the title in relatively uneventful succession, until the Ngoni invasion of the Nkhamanga Kingdom during the reign of Bwati Gondwe II, discussed further below; the chieftainship was eventually restored under colonial rule in 1907, when Chilongozi Gondwe became Chikulamayembe.
Ivory and the slave trade
The large elephant herds of the region attracted coastal Swahili ivory hunters and traders, followed in the colonial era by European ivory traders. In the 1840s, Swahili Arabs entered the northern Malawi region: Jumbe Salim bin Abdallah established a trading centre at Nkhotakota near Lake Malawi, and his trade in slaves for the clove plantations of Zanzibar and the wider Middle Eastern market provoked raids and violence against the Tumbuka.Malawi Slave Routes and Dr. David Livingstone Trail, UNESCO (2011), Quote: "Slave trade was introduced in Malawi by the Swahili-Arab traders in the 19th century following a great demand for ivory and slave in the East African markets namely Zanzibar, Kilwa, Mombasa and Quelimane. The Swahilis and Omani Arabs moved further into the interior of Africa including Malawi to obtain slaves and ivory. One of Slave Trade Route was Nkhotakota where one of the Swahili-Arab slave traders, Salim-bin Abdullah (Jumbe) set up his headquarters on the shore of Lake Malawi in the 1840s. From Nkhota kotawhere he organized his expeditions to obtain slaves and ship them across the lake to East African markets, Kilwa. About 20,000 slaves were annually shipped by Jumbe to Kilwa from Nkhotakota." A male slave was known as muzga or kapolo, and a young female slave as chituntulu.C. J. W. Fleming (1972), The Peculiar Institution Among The Early Tumbuka, The Society of Malawi Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1 (January, 1972), page 5