Gonapamuhanya

Gonapamuhanya (also Khalapamuhanya) is remembered in Tumbuka oral tradition as the son of the lake-crossing trader Mlowoka and, through his mother, kinsman of a leading indigenous clan. He became the first holder of the Chikulamayembe title, ruling the Nkhamanga plain west and south of the Nyika Plateau around the early nineteenth century. His title, 'the great one of the hoes', recalls his distribution of imported iron hoes to influential clans. As founding paramount he is a heroic ancestor of the Tumbuka, commemorated today in the annual Gonapamuhanya cultural festival at Bolero in Rumphi District, northern Malawi.

Parentage

• parent: Mlowoka

Domains

• kingship

Powers

• to receive veneration and commemoration as the founding paramount ancestor of the Chikulamayembe line

Epithets

• ChikulamayembeT. Cullen Young, Notes on the History of the Tumbuka-Kamanga Peoples in the Northern Province of Nyasaland (1932) (secondary)

Relations

• subordinate to: ChiutaAs a human paramount and venerated ancestor, Gonapamuhanya stands, like all Tumbuka ancestors, beneath the supreme creator Chiuta in the religious hierarchy of intercession.Leroy Vail, 'Religion, Language and the Tribal Myth: The Tumbuka and Chewa of Malawi', in J. M. Schoffeleers (ed.), Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults (Gwelo: Mambo Press, 1979) (secondary)

Sources

• Gonapamuhanya, son of Mlowoka, was the first Chikulamayembe paramount of the Tumbuka Nkhamanga kingdom and remains a venerated founding ancestor commemorated in an annual festival.: T. Cullen Young, Notes on the History of the Tumbuka-Kamanga Peoples in the Northern Province of Nyasaland (London: Religious Tract Society, 1932) (secondary); Leroy Vail, 'Suggestions towards a Reinterpreted Tumbuka History', in B. Pachai (ed.), The Early History of Malawi (London: Longman, 1972) (secondary); John McCracken, A History of Malawi, 1859-1966 (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2012) (secondary)