Page 44 - 2020 SoMJ Vol 73 No 2_Neat

The Establishment of Islam in Malawi 35

1895, and most of the Swahili left Nkhotakota, by that time most of the chiefs in
the area and many of the people were Muslims, a situation that remains till today.
A second Swahili trader to set up a base in Malawi was Mlozi bin
Kazbadema. Modelling himself on the Jumbes further south, he set up a trading
post near Karonga on the Northern end of the lake in about 1880 and declared
himself to be ‘Sultan of the Ngonde’. Though Mlozi was less successful than the
Jumbes and was killed in 1895 by the British in a trade war, there are still villages
of Muslims in Karonga district today which date back to his time.
By the time groups of Yao moved into the area around the southern end
of Lake Malawi, from the 1830s onward, many of their people had had long
contact with the coast, some having travelled and probably even lived there. When
Swahili and Arab traders began to travel into the region, using the trade routes
already established, it was with some of the Yao chiefs that they cooperated.
Often, they would stay in the chiefs’ villages, providing them with guns while
their hosts procured the commodities they were looking for, particularly ivory and
slaves. From this period onward there is evidence that the people from the coast
were having an influence on the way local people dressed, the way they built their
houses and boats and even the crops they planted. Eventually some of them,
especially from among the chiefs, took on the religion of their Swahili partners
and began to declare themselves as Muslims.
Though there would have been earlier conversion of some Yao people,
especially among those who had been to the coast, the first of their chiefs to
convert to Islam, was probably Makanjila III, around 1870. In 1876 a British
traveller noted a school at his court where children were being taught the Qur’an
by a Muslim teacher, or mwalimu. Literate Muslims from the coast were also used
by chiefs as advisers and secretaries to handle their communications with their
trading partners. By the end of that decade, Makanjila’s powerful neighbours,
Chiefs Jalasi (Zarafi) and Mponda had followed his lead and converted to Islam.
Much of the written evidence for the spread of Islam during this period comes
from Christian missionaries, who came into the region some time after the Yao. It
is likely that they underestimated how strongly Islam had already taken hold.
Certainly, in Mponda’s town Catholic White Fathers were surprised to find that,
by 1891, there were twelve Qur’anic schools, madrassas, each with its own
teacher, and to find the month of Ramadan being observed.
It was Christian missionaries and their commercial allies who were the
first Europeans to come to Malawi. They were strongly influenced by the ideas of
David Livingstone whose vision was to put an end to the traffic in slaves and to
prepare the way for ‘Christian civilization’ by establishing what he called
‘legitimate’ commerce. The Yao chiefs as well as the Jumbe in Nkhotakota and
Mlozi in Karonga, along with the Swahili who were their partners and advisers,
feared that the trading patterns that the British wished to promote would be a threat
to them and to their own way of trading. Their fears were justified. In Karonga, a