Mlowoka

Mlowoka, 'the one who crossed over', is the appellation of Kakalala Musawira Gondwe, the legendary ivory trader who, in Tumbuka oral tradition, crossed Lake Malawi from the east around the late eighteenth century and settled in the Nkhamanga plain. Through wealth in ivory, cloth and imported goods, and through marriage alliances with indigenous clan heads, he became the apical ancestor of the Chikulamayembe paramountcy. He belongs to legendary-historical rather than divine tradition, but stands as the founding heroic ancestor of the Tumbuka royal line and is remembered in dynastic ritual and oral history.

Children

• Gonapamuhanya

Domains

• trade and exchange

Powers

• to confer legitimacy on his descendants as the remembered founding ancestor of the ruling line

Epithets

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

Relations

• father of: GonapamuhanyaDynastic tradition makes Gonapamuhanya, first Chikulamayembe, a son of Mlowoka by a woman of a leading indigenous Tumbuka clan.T. Cullen Young, Notes on the History of the Tumbuka-Kamanga Peoples in the Northern Province of Nyasaland (1932) (secondary)

Sources

• Mlowoka (Kakalala Gondwe) is the legendary trader-ancestor who crossed Lake Malawi and founded the ruling lineage of the Tumbuka Nkhamanga kingdom.: 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)