Sports and recreation
Most people in rural Malawi spend their time attending to their farms; when they are not doing so—which is usually in the dry months—they may visit their friends or go to local school football (soccer) matches, often played on weekends on rough and uneven grounds. In many areas men play bawo, similar to checkers. Dance competitions, pitting teams from different areas against one another, are also popular in rural Malawi. Football, boxing, netball, cinema, and theatre arts play a major role in the leisure life of urban Malawians.
National football squads frequently compete in matches in neighbouring countries, but, because of a shortage of travel funds, they seldom venture far. In September 1999 the government awarded the Malawi Council of Sports a sizable grant to improve the country’s sporting infrastructure and allow Malawian teams to travel abroad more regularly. Malawian athletes have distinguished themselves in the sport of netball and have sent teams to the World Netball Championships and to the African Games. Malawi formed a national Olympic committee in 1968 and was recognized by the International Olympic Committee that year. Malawian athletes have attended most Summer Games since that time but did join in the boycotts of the 1976 and 1980 games.
Media and publishing
A variety of publications are circulated in Malawi. Widely read publications include The Daily Times, published in English; Malawi News, a weekly published in Chewa and English; The Nation, a daily published in English and Nyanja; The Mirror, a weekly published in English and Nyanja; and Odini, published fortnightly in Chewa and English. Of the periodicals in distribution, Boma Lathu, which is published quarterly in Chewa by the Ministry of Information, is the most widely circulated; Moni Magazine and This Is Malawi—monthlies published in both Chewa and English—are also important.
The state-owned Malawi Broadcasting Corporation is the major radio broadcaster in the country. Until 1994, programs were broadcast only in Chewa and English; programs have since been made available in additional languages, including Yao, Tumbuka, Lomwe, Sena, and Tonga. There are also a number of commercial radio stations in operation, some of which are operated by the country’s various religious organizations. TV Malawi, the first television establishment, started operating in 1999, initially in Blantyre and Lilongwe. Until that time, only those with satellite dishes and access to M-Net, a South African subscription television service, had any access to this form of entertainment. TV Malawi broadcasts both local and international programming.
Early history
The paleontological record of human cultural artifacts in Malawi dates back more than 50,000 years, although known fossil remains of early Homo sapiens belong to the period between 8000 and 2000 bce. These prehistoric forebears have affinities to the San people of southern Africa and were probably ancestral to the Twa and Fulani, whom Bantu-speaking peoples claimed to have found when they invaded the Malawi region between the 1st and 4th centuries ce. From then to about 1200 ce, Bantu settlement patterns spread, as did ironworking and the slash-and-burn method of cultivation. The identity of these early Bantu-speaking inhabitants is uncertain. According to oral tradition, names such as Kalimanjira, Katanga, and Zimba are associated with them.
With the arrival of another wave of Bantu-speaking peoples between the 13th and 15th centuries ce, the recorded history of the Malawi region began. These peoples migrated into the region from the north, and they interacted with and assimilated the earlier pre-Bantu and Bantu inhabitants. The descendants of these peoples maintained a rich oral history, and, from 1500, written records were kept in Portuguese and English.
Among the notable accomplishments of the last group of Bantu immigrants was the creation of political states, or the introduction of centralized systems of government. They established the Maravi Confederacy about 1480. During the 16th century the confederacy encompassed the greater part of what is now central and southern Malawi, and, at the height of its influence, in the 17th century, its system of government affected peoples in the adjacent areas of present-day Zambia and Mozambique. North of the Maravi territory, the Ngonde founded a kingdom about 1600. In the 18th century a group of immigrants from the eastern side of Lake Malawi created the Chikulamayembe state to the south of the Ngonde.
The precolonial period witnessed other important developments. In the 18th and 19th centuries, better and more productive agricultural practices were adopted. In some parts of the Malawi region, shifting cultivation of indigenous varieties of millet and sorghum began to give way to more intensive cultivation of crops with a higher carbohydrate content, such as corn (maize), cassava (manioc), and rice.
The independent growth of indigenous governments and improved economic systems was severely disturbed by the development of the slave trade in the late 18th century and by the arrival of foreign intruders in the late 19th century. The slave trade in Malawi increased dramatically between 1790 and 1860 because of the growing demand for slaves on Africa’s east coast.
Swahili-speaking people from the east coast and the Ngoni and Yao peoples entered the Malawi region between 1830 and 1860 as traders or as armed refugees fleeing the Zulu states to the south. All of them eventually created spheres of influence within which they became the dominant ruling class. The Swahili speakers and the Yao also played a major role in the slave trade.
Islam spread into Malawi from the east coast. It was first introduced at Nkhotakota by the ruling Swahili-speaking slave traders, the Jumbe, in the 1860s. Traders returning from the coast in the 1870s and ’80s brought Islam to the Yao of the Shire Highlands. Christianity was introduced in the 1860s by David Livingstone and by other Scottish missionaries who came to Malawi after Livingstone’s death in 1873. Missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa and the White Fathers of the Roman Catholic Church arrived between 1880 and 1910.
Christianity owed its success to the protection given to the missionaries by the colonial government, which the British established after occupying the Malawi region in the 1880s and ’90s. British colonial authority was welcomed by the missionaries and some African societies but was strongly resisted by the Yao, Chewa, and others.