Page 23 - SoMJ Vol 74 - No 1, 2021

Chichewa words in the Polyglotta Africana 13

Koelle’s informant
In the introduction to his book Koelle wrote a short note about each of his 200
informants, detailing their place of origin and the number of years they had been
away. Koelle’s Márāwi informant was called Matẹ ̄́ke, also named ‘James Wilson’.
He is described as follows:

Márāwi – From Matẹ ̄́ke, or James Wilson of MacDonald, born in the
town of N·gṓwa, where he lived till his twentieth year. He has now been
away from his home about twenty-two years and has four countrymen in
Sierra Leone.
Remarks: Márāwi is west of Adṣā̄́wa or Kúyāo, and north of
Man·gūlu.

The word Matéke in Chichewa means ‘kicks’ (noun); perhaps he was so
named because he kicked his mother in the womb. Mateke was captured and
enslaved at about the age of twenty. Koelle gives no further details, but
presumably the ship on which he was being transported to Brazil was intercepted
at some stage by the British Navy and like many thousands of other slaves he was
3
put ashore in Sierra Leone.
The fate of another informant from the same part of Africa, a speaker of
‘Nyámbān’ (Mozambican Tonga), may have been similar to that of Mateke.
Koelle writes of him:

‘born in the town of Nyámavilḗni, where he lived to about his sixteenth
year, when he was kidnapped by the Mān·gúnu, and one month afterwards
shipped on board a Portuguese slave-vessel. He has been in Sierra Leone
eighteen years, with twenty country-people, one of whom he married.’

The name Ngowa is not found on today’s Atlas of Malawi. Ajawa is another
name for the Yao people. Manguru is a name associated with the Lomwe people,
but the exact location is unclear. Macdonald is a village about 20 miles south of
4
Freetown where Mateke was living at the time Koelle met him.

The language
Koelle calls Mateke’s language Márāwi (i.e., Maláŵi). The same name was used
in Rebmann’s dictionary of the dialect spoken in the southern half of what is now
Malawi. In the preface to his dictionary Rebmann writes:

3 Between 1810 and 1840 some 94,703 slaves were recaptured by the British Navy and
landed alive; of this number, about three-quarters (70,809) were landed in Sierra Leone.
See Philip D. Curtin and Jan Vansina, ‘Sources of the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave
Trade’, The Journal of African History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1964), pp. 185–208.
4 The Brazilian traveller Francisco José de Lacerda e Almeida was informed after setting
off north from Tete in 1798 that ivory and slaves were sold from that region to the
Manguros, who in turn traded them to the Mujaos.