Bayete Nkosi!

I ran into one of my friends in town yesterday, whom I have known since he was a schoolboy over thirty years ago. He was sitting in a Toyota pick-up outside a small supermarket in Mzuzu, dressed in jeans and a casual shirt. It had been several months since I last saw him, but I didn't give him the usual chiTumbuka greeting of 'Monire; muli makora?'. (Hello; are you well?') Instead, with the slightest indication of a bow I greeted him with 'Bayete Nkosi' (Hail chief!), the traditional greeting for a Zulu king, or, in this case for the paramount chief of the Ngoni people of northern Malawi (of whom I am an honorary member of the royal clan).

The paramount chief, whose name is Zwangendaba Jere, goes by the official title of Nkosi yaMakosi M'mbelwa IV. He is the descendant of his namesake who, beginning not far short of two hundred years ago, led his ancestors on an epic migration of more than two thousand miles from kwaZulu in South Africa, all the way to northern Malawi. They began their march after having been defeated by the great Zulu leader Shaka, and survived the thirty-five year trip by fighting their way north and accumulating adherents (domestic slaves, if you want) as they went. Finally they settled in northern Malawi in 1855.

David Livingstone heard of their militaristic and cruel reputation and wrote about them in very negative terms, though it has to be said that he seems never to have met a real Ngoni. When the Livingstonia mission arrived in Malawi in the 1870s they soon ran into the Ngoni. The first missionary interaction with the northern Ngoni (there are other Ngoni groups in different parts of Malawi) took place in 1879 when the Xhosa evangelist William Koyi and the Scottish artisan Alexander Riddel met with M'mbelwa's great-great grandfather. Riddel, perhaps overwhelmed by the occasion, described the Gospel they had brought in terms which, even a hundred and thirty years later, make me blush with embarrassment:

       [I] told them whence we had come - from a far country full of every good thing - for what we had come - to give the people of this country God's message to them. I showed them a Bible and told them it was it that made our nation rich and powerful... I then gave them a sample of the commandments and some of the leading virtues it inculcated. I said if they received it, it would make them wise and happy and teach them how to become wealthy by fair means not by robbery etc.

A few weeks later, when Dr. Robert Laws, the leader of the mission made his first visit to M'mbelwa he was again accompanied by William Koyi. Somewhat surprisingly he and the chief struck up a friendship which was to endure until M'mbelwa's death more than ten years later. While the old chief resisted the call of the Gospel and his people were at first slow to respond and give up their militaristic way of life, the Ngoni eventually became some of the staunchest Christians in Malawi and became famous as writers of local Christian hymns, many set to the tunes of Ngoni war dances!

A few years ago, when the Synod of Livingstonia decided to celebrate the beginnings of mission work among the Ngoni I was asked to come out to Malawi and give a historical lecture at the somewhat remote mission station of Njuyu. I was able to prepare for that in the weeks before I flew out to Malawi; but after I got there another assignment emerged for which there was little chance to prepare. The paramount chief M'mbelwa at the last minute requested that there should be a drama, illustrating the first meeting between his great-great-grandfather and Dr. Laws. He, of course, would play his ancestor. He asked that I should play Dr. Laws.

A couple of days later, after one perfunctory rehearsal (for which most of the main characters did not turn up) we launched ourselves into a somewhat ad libbed reconstruction of that famous first meeting, in front of the then President of Malawi, Bakili Muluzi, and the live television cameras of TV Malawi. On one level, the drama was light-hearted, such as the point when 'Dr. Laws' was forced to drink from a huge calabash of local beer: except that, unbeknown to the audience, the calabash had nothing more than a few rocks in the bottom. On another level, however, the drama represented something much more significant. The very fact that the paramount chief had wanted to have it at all, indicated the depth of the relationship between the Ngoni and the church which has survived for well over a century - even though successive paramounts (though not the present one) have tended to be polygamists, and thus not church members.

Too many histories of mission over-simplify the story of bringing the Gospel to new peoples. The process was often complex and involved the give and take of cultural and religious exchange. This was certainly the case with the Ngoni of northern Malawi. To a much greater extent than with many other groups in Malawi, the Ngoni managed to retain aspects of their own culture alongside and within their new-found Christian faith. Foremost amongst these aspects are their music and their dance. That is something to rejoice about, and that is why, though I am happy to meet my friend the paramount chief outside the supermarket in his jeans and sports shirt, I prefer to see him in his traditional regalia in the dancing arena, leading his people (in spite of his considerable girth) in their time-honoured iNgoma dance.

TJT

14/12/2011