Page 24 - SoMJ Vol 74 - No 1, 2021

14 The Society of Malaŵi Journal

‘The Wahiáo are spread on the Eastern banks of the lake; to the south and
South-West are the Wamarávi, and north from these the Wakamdunda’.

Rebmann’s informant Salimini, who came from near Lilongwe, was one of the
Wakamtunda (‘people of the plateau’). In one entry he distinguishes between his
own dialect Kikamtunda and the Kimaravi spoken further south, noting that the
5
tree called kamphoni in his own dialect was called mombo in Kimaravi. In the
entry M’maravi, Rebmann writes:

M’maravi, s. (pl. wa-), the name given by the tribes E. of the Niassa to
those in the west, including not only the Wamaravi proper but also the
Wakamdunda.

The Portuguese traveller Gamitto also, travelling north from Tete in 1832
following Almeida’s route, distinguished two dialects which he called Marave
and Chéva. The Maraves were subject to king Undi, whose territory extended up
to the river Chambwe (just south of the present Zambia-Mozambique border),
while the southern Chevas to the northern side of that stream were ruled by king
Mucanda (Mkanda).
6
Both dialects, Salimini’s and Mateke’s, are very clearly early versions of
7
Chinyanja or Chichewa. There are, however, some features in both dialects which
differ slightly from modern Chichewa; for example, both Salimini and Mateke
(though Mateke less consistently than Salimini) use the plural prefix ŵa- in class
2 words such as ŵana ‘children’ and ŵagalu ‘dogs’, which for most speakers
today have been simplified to aná and agalú. Both of them use affricate sounds
nts, ndz, pf, and bv in words such as ntsomba ‘fish’, bwendz(i) ‘friend’, pfupa
‘bone’, and mbvula ‘rain’, which in modern Chichewa have been simplified to
nsómba, bwenzí, fúpa, and mvúla.
There are also a few words in which the two dialects differ from each other
as well as from modern Chichewa: for example, ‘two years’ (zaká ziwíri) in
Salimini’s Chichewa is bzaka bziŵiri, while Mateke has dzaka dziŵiri. For ‘wasp’
(bavu), Salimini has babvu, while Mateke has libvu. For ‘frogs’ (achulé), Salimini
has bzule, while Mateke has ŵachule.

5 See the entry M’ombo. Mombo is a kind of brachystegia tree.
6 See M. G. Marwick, ‘History and Tradition in East Central Africa Through the Eyes of
the Northern Rhodesian Cheŵa’, Journal of African History, IV, 3 (1963), p. 383. Salimini
in Rebmann’s dictionary (entries Midawa, M’ombo) also mentions that the Malaŵi people
were subject to king Undi.
7 So, Malcolm Guthrie (‘Bantu Languages in the Polyglotta Africana’, Sierra Leone
Language Review 3, 1964, p. 63) writes: ‘Both from the angle of the words recorded and
the indications of locality the identification of [Márāwi] as Nyanja (N.31) is amply
confirmed.’