This book adds significantly to the archaeology and oral history of Malawi, a relatively understudied area of Africa landlocked between modern-day Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia. Yusuf Juwayeyi has conducted research and published on diverse topics and periods in Malawi, from the Late Stone Age to Iron Age to historic period, and he has added archaeological perspectives to oral histories and documentary accounts. Juwayeyi's distinguished career has included serving as Malawi's director of antiquities and as ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations. This monograph benefits from that career path, with attention paid to the many ways Malawian people and institutions, as well as international researchers, have contributed to knowledge production about the past (and present) in Malawi.
Juwayeyi contributes to efforts to get beyond European histories of African states and ethnic histories, and to merge the wealth of knowledge in regional oral traditions with community-based archaeological research. He has pursued historical questions relevant to modern Malawi—in particular, the origins of the Chewa people. As he reports, the Chewa are the largest ethnic group in Malawi, numbering more than six million people, almost a third of the nation's population. Yet, prior to Juwayeyi's work, the long-known oral history there had not been merged with archaeological data. In doing so, the author directed archaeological research at what he was able to identify as the important capital of Mankhamba near the southern extent of Lake Malawi. His excavations there provided important chronological evidence relating to the migrations of the Chewa into what is today Malawi and documented their material and spiritual culture. The evidence from Mankhamba has been previously published, but this monograph establishes a broad context in which to understand the local and regional social dynamics of this part of southeastern Africa.
Chapter 1 introduces Malawi's contemporary and historic ethnic mosaic, providing context for the Chewa who would eventually found Mankhamba and the Maravi state. Although Juwayeyi features his contributions to the topic, his approach is a model of how to construct an expansive community-based history. Chapter 2 places the peopling of Malawi into an Iron Age archaeological sequence populated primarily by Bantu speakers. Based on ceramic assemblages at Mankhamba and elsewhere in southern Africa, Juwayeyi argues that the Chewa derived from the western stream of the Bantu expansion, with antecedents in the Luba region of Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Chapter 3 engages Chewa origins vis-à-vis oral traditions, and Chapter 4 further develops scenarios in the traditions about Chewa expansion after their arrival in southeastern Africa.
With consideration for nonspecialists, Chapter 5 discusses how problem-oriented archaeology builds step by step, from shovel-test survey and excavation to specialist analyses, radiocarbon dating, and curation. Chapter 6 reviews the Lake Malawi Iron Age, particularly the Chewa heartland along the lake's southwest border. In Chapter 7, Juwayeyi provides a discussion of the regional ceramic sequence that anchored his work and links that study with oral traditions and the counsel of contemporary leaders in the area. Chapters 8–11 are discussions of the finds (ceramics/stone, metal/beads, faunal remains) and reasoning underlying his argument that the site is the historically noted Maravi capital of Mankhamba.
In Chapter 12, Juwayeyi discusses the emergence of the Maravi state, tying that transformation to control over land rather than long-distance trade, as others have maintained. By doing so, he pushes Maravi's founding back into the fifteenth century, earlier than historical data and an emphasis on trade goods suggested. The sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Maravi kingdoms would indeed build on trade relations, exporting locally produced materials—such as iron, cotton cloth, and beeswax—and importing goods including copper, shell, glass beads, and metals. The final chapter chronicles the Maravi state into the nineteenth century, when effects from internal leadership stresses in the context of the British colonial presence, as well as migrations of and predations from other groups, had severe impacts.
Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi deserves a wide readership. Juwayeyi's book is an important contribution to topics of general interest: the study of historic African states and long-term archaeological studies in southern Africa. The book is also interspersed with the biographies of Malawian historians and archaeologists, both informally and professionally trained. Juwayeyi has written this book for multiple audiences, perhaps principally for students and interested publics, but in a manner that recommends itself to professional archaeologists. The book is a service to an important but previously underreported aspect of African archaeology, and Juwayeyi's braiding together of archaeology and Indigenous histories should inspire other archaeologists and historians in Africa and beyond.
