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The name Malawi comes from a Chewa word meaning flames and is linked to the Maravi people from whom the Chewa language originated. The Maravi settled in what is now Malawi around 1400AD during one of the later waves of Bantu migration across central and southern Africa. Several of Malawi’s ethnic groups trace their origins to different Maravi lineages. A powerful Maravi kingdom, established around 1500AD, reached its zenith around 1700AD, when it controlled what is now southern and central Malawi, as well as portions of neighbouring Mozambique and Zambia before beginning to decline because of destabilization from the escalating global trade in enslaved people. In the early 1800s, widespread conflict in southern Africa displaced various ethnic Ngoni groups, some of which moved into Malawi and further undermined the Maravi. Members of the Yao ethnic group - which had long traded with Malawi from Mozambique - introduced Islam and began to settle in Malawi in significant numbers the mid-1800s; in the late 1800s, members of the Lomwe ethnic group also moved into southern Malawi from Mozambique. British missionary and trading activity increased in the area around Lake Nyasa in the mid-1800s, and Britain declared a protectorate, called British Central Africa, over what is now Malawi in 1891. The British renamed the territory Nyasaland in 1907 and it was part of the colonial Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland - including present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe - from 1953 to 1963 before gaining independence as Malawi in 1964. |
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