Karonga War
The name Karonga War is given to a number of armed clashes that took place between mid-1887 and mid-1889 near Karonga at the northern end of Lake Malawi in what is now Malawi between a Scottish trading concern called the African Lakes Company Limited and elements of the Ngonde people on one side and Swahili traders and their Henga allies on the other. In the 19th century, it was referred to as the “Arab War”, despite few actual Arabs being involved. Although these conflicts predate formal endorsement of a British Central Africa Protectorate west of Lake Malawi in 1891, European involvement, both by the African Lakes Company and by Germans attempting to prevent Swahili slave trading around Lake Tanganyika in German East Africa, had upset the previous balance between the Ngonde and their neighbours and created the conditions for this conflict. It was between the Tumbuka and Nyakyusa-Ngonde ethnic groups.
Situation before the conflict
The area to the west of northern Lake Malawi was occupied by two established indigenous peoples, the Tumbuka and Ngonde, and the recently arrived Ngoni. Although the Tumbuka were already involved in the East African ivory trade, in the 1820s and 1830s Swahili traders from the Indian Ocean coast entered the area and displaced the earlier local merchants. These traders, who were backed by Indian financiers in Zanzibar, were as much interested in slaves as ivory. Finally, in the late 1870s, the African Lakes Company began trading in ivory along the shores of Lake Malawi, establishing its trading posts there in the early 1880s.Local peoples
The Tumbuka 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, of which that known as the Henga was an important one, and they lived in small, independent communities without a central organisation, that were spread thinly over this area. By the mid-18th century, traders dressed “as Arabs”, although coming from the Unyamwezi region of what is now Tanzania, were involved in 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 established a dynasty ruling a federation of small chiefdoms around the lakeshore. By the 1830s, this Chikulamayembe dynasty was in decline and the area reverted to a state of political and military disorganisation.The Ngonde occupy the north-western shore of Lake Malawi south of the Songwe River are an offshoot of the Nyakyusa people, who live north of that river in Tanzania. The Ngonde probably moved into Malawi around 1600 and densely settled the area between the Songwe and North Rukuru rivers. Their political organisation involved with relatively strong local chiefs, and a paramount chief or Kyungu from one of two princely lineages. The Kyungu was primarily a religious leader with limited power over the local chiefs. Because the environment of the Karonga plain was favourable for their mixed farming practices, the Ngonde gradually extended the area they occupied, but were not involved in ivory trading networks before the late 19th century.
The Ngoni of Mbelwa were a branch of Zwangendaba’s Ngoni, which began its migration from South Africa between 1819 and 1822, eventually reaching southern Tanzania and remained there until Zwangendaba’s death in the mid-1840s. After this, his followers split into several groups, one of which under his son Mbelwa settled permanently in what is now the Mzimba district of northern Malawi around 1855.
Mbelwa’s Ngoni treated the Henga as a subject population, exacting tribute and taking captives through raiding. These captives were rarely sold to the Swahili traders, but retained as unfree agricultural workers or enrolled in Ngoni regiments. Some Henga soldiers fled back to their original homeland around 1879 but were attacked by the Ngoni in 1881 and forced to move north into Ngonde territory, where the Ngonde settled them as a buffer against their enemies. Zwangendaba’s Ngoni had raided the Ngonde in the 1840s and Mbelwa’s Ngoni did so in the 1850s and 1870s. Each time, the Ngonde had been forced to surrender many cattle, so they feared further raids.
Advent of the Swahili and Europeans
Around 1880, a group of Swahili traders who were established in the elephant-rich Luangwa valley sent one of their number, Mlozi bin Kazbadema from Ujiji, now in Tanzania, to act as their agent in the area to the north-west of Lake Malawi. He headed a party which established a camp near Mbande Hill, the seat of the Ngonde paramount chief, about inland from the lake, and a stockade at Chilumba on Lake Malawi, from where ivory and slaves could be shipped across the lake. This was followed by other stockades, from which Mlozi also carried out an active trade in ivory with the African Lakes Company’s depot at Karonga.Contemporary Europeans in East Africa described these traders as Arabs, one writer dividing them into three classes: a few “White Arabs” from Oman, other Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Iran or Balochistan and the majority, either Muslim “Mswahili” from the east coast of Africa or Nyamwezi people from Unyamwezi, who imitated Arab dress and customs but were only rarely Muslim. Other Nyamwezi who had not adopted Arab ways and who acted as the traders’ armed guards were known as Ruga-Ruga.
The African Lakes Company, which cooperated closely with the Scottish missions, began its transport and trading concern that aimed to replace the slave trade by legitimate commerce and develop European influence in 1878. Its local managers, the brothers John Moir and Frederick Moir concentrated on trading ivory rather than cash crops, facing stiff completion from established Swahili merchants. In 1883, the company set up a base in Karonga to exchange ivory for trade goods.
Growth of tensions
Trading rivalries
The popularity of the so-called Arab traders arose from the ready supply of a wide range of trade goods they brought, not only guns and ammunition, but also iron tools and utensils, and cloth. This varied supply, for which African chiefs were prepared to exchange slaves as well as ivory, could not be matched by the African Lakes Company's intermittent supplies of European goods. The Swahili initially had good relations with the Ngonde, but as many of their stockades were built in the area where the Henga had been settled, the Ngonde began to distrust both the Henga and the Swahili.Initially, relations between Mlozi and Low Monteith Fotheringham, the African Lakes Company's local representative, were cordial, but their relationship later deteriorated, partly because of the company's delays in supplying goods in exchange for ivory, its unwillingness to provide guns or ammunition and its limited supply of other trade goods, and also because the Swahili traders turned more to slaving and began to attack the Ngonde communities that the company had promised to protect.
The African Lakes Company's failure lay in part with its lack of sufficient finances to realise its ambitious plans, but also because it thought that trading in ivory and in slaves were intimately connected, as David Livingstone among others had observed recently enslaved Africans being forced to carry ivory to the coast. However, by the 1870s, most ivory porters were paid specialists, not slaves, and the relation between in ivory and slaves was an inverse one: the increasing European demand for ivory led to a depletion of the elephant herds in many areas, whose people were then forced to sell slaves in exchange for the trade goods they wanted, which they had formerly bartered ivory to acquire.
After spending several years trying unsuccessfully to undermine the Swahili trading networks, by 1884 the African Lakes Company was almost bankrupt. It blamed the Swahili for this, and tried to revive its fortunes by making treaties with Ngonde chiefs on the Karonga lakeshore, with a view to preventing them trading with the Swahili traders. These treaties were not only commercial but promised protection, which the Ngonde interpreted as protection against the Swahili and Henga and not only from the Ngoni, which is what the company had intended.
Although the African Lakes Company was formed with the benevolent aims of cooperating with the Scottish missions and combating the slave trade, its local agents claimed to have made a series of treaties with local chiefs around its trading station at Karonga. There was little documentation for these, some of which may have been spurious, but several treaties offered protection and claimed to transfer sovereignty over the territory involved to the company, which may have had the ambition to become a Chartered company. This ambition was strongly opposed by missionaries based in Blantyre, south of Lake Malawi and Hawes, the Consul to the Lake Region, but initially supported by missionaries based further north in Livingstonia.
Indigenous volatility
The Ngonde were concerned both about Mbelwa's Ngoni, even though the latter were settled some distance to the south, and about the Nyakyusa people to the north. Although the Nyakyusa were closely related to the Ngonde, they nevertheless raided their more affluent relatives. To protect their northern border, the Ngonde resettled those Henga warriors who had been drafted into Ngoni regiments but had later revolted, and also hoped to use the Swahili traders and their well-armed guards to protect their southern flank. However, the Swahili preferred to remain on good terms with the Ngoni. The Henga, who were trained soldiers, could not adapt to life as farmers and remained unassimilated into Ngonde society, although they initially prevented Nyakyusa raids.After the death of an unusually strong Ngonde Kyungu in 1878 or 1879, his successor was weak and unable to provide firm leadership. In 1885 several powerful men among the Ngonde signed treaties with the African Lakes Company which claimed to cede large areas of land to it without consulting the paramount chief, and one Ngonde faction planned to massacre the Henga without the Kyungu's knowledge. This faction wished to use the African Lakes Company to oppose and possibly replace their paramount chief, who consequently attempted to use the Swahili to strengthen his position.
In addition to the internal conflict within the Ngonde state, the Henga leader died in 1887 and his following split into two groups, one led by his son, which represented the warriors, the other included those that had adapted to agricultural life.