In this book, archaeological evidence has been used to re-examine the origins and early history of the Chewa, Malawi's largest ethnic group. Much of the evidence has come from the archaeological site of Mankhamba, located in the southern Lake Malawi area. Until now, scholars have documented the history of the Chewa largely through using oral traditions. Many sources of the traditions agree that Mankhamba was the place where the king of the Chewa, whose title was Kalonga, established his major settlement many centuries ago. The author was fortunate to discover this site, the excavation of which has helped clarify the early history of the Chewa and has shed some light on other aspects of their way of life.

The earliest of the written documents on Malawi go back to the sixteenth century. Some adventurous Portuguese explorers and traders who periodically passed through central and southern Malawi as they sought minerals and other resources in the interior of the region wrote these documents. In their reports home, they sometimes mentioned the places they had passed through and described some of the people they had seen or met. It is from such accounts that historians first read about the ‘Maravi’ people. The term ‘Maravi’ was the Portuguese rendering of the term ‘Malawi’, by which the Chewa referred to themselves. It is also from such records that historians were able to crosscheck the accuracy of oral traditions about Kalonga and other Maravi kings such as Lundu. Some of the Portuguese also described the nature of local villages and towns but very little else.

Because there was not much in these documents to enable historians to reconstruct the history of the Chewa or of any other ethnic group, they resorted to recording oral traditions. Of the more than a dozen ethnic groups in Malawi, historians mostly recorded the oral traditions of the Chewa. This was probably because the Chewa or the ‘Maravi’ were the most mentioned of Malawi's ethnic groups in the Portuguese documents and this gave historians a good starting point for understanding them and their history.