Some Proverbs of the Tumbuka-Nkamanga Peoples of the Northern Province of Nyasaland

Abstract

In the year 1796 Dr. Lacerda, on his way to the capital of ‘the Great Kazembe’, mentions the existence of a ‘Tomboka’ people near the head waters of the Loangwa River in what is now Northern Rhodesia. By 1850 the German missionary Rebmann at Kilimanjaro had compiled a map from slaver sources in which he inserted the name ‘Kamanga’ to the east side of Lake Nyasa at its northern end. Later, when his book on the Kilimanjaro area was published, he corrected this and placed the Kamanga people to the west of the north end of Nyasa. And by that time the Coast traders used no other name to designate the area of their operations west of Nyasa, northwards of a line provided by the Dwangwa River which flows east to Nyasa from the Rhodesian border in Lat. 12½ S. It is quite possible that Lacerda's ‘Loangwa’ should be taken as the Nyasaland Dwangwa and not the Rhodesian Luangwa, but the point is, for the purposes of this note, unimportant. It is sufficient to emphasize the fact that, in a large area lying between Lat. 9½ S. and 12½ S., the two names used here represent the earliest traceable occupants, and in the order here used.