Owen Kalinga Towards Better Understanding of Socio-Economie Change iSth- and ipth-Century Ungonde* During the past few years have endeavoured to reconstruct the pre- colonial history of the southern Songwe region of Malawi by among other things charting and explaining migration and settlement of peoples in the area and by examining the nature of State formation In the process of doing this have commented on the once popular theory of trade and politics by demonstrating that contrary to the accepted view commerce had little to do with the rise of the Ngonde kingdom and that an explanation for the latter phenomenon should be sought elsewhere Kalinga i979a 1979 However no serious effort has been made to explain socio-economic and political change in the area in the manner in which some historians of precolonial Africa have recently done Cohen 1981 Iliffe 1979 eh 2-3 Guy 1980 Chanaiwa 1980 This paper is the first attempt to fill gap in my work and that of other scholars Wilson 1939 Wilson 1972 who have worked in this section of the lakes Tanganyika-Malawi corridor and in this sense it is an exercise in self-criticism The paper seeks to explore factors other than the simple connection between trade and politics responsible for changes which took place in Ungonde between the middle of the i8th century and the arrival of Europeans towards the end of the i9th century However the devel opments in the i7th century will be briefly presented to enable the reader to better appreciate the forthcoming discussion When the kyungu and his followers arrived in the Karonga plain in about 1600 they found number of families which had been living in the area for some time These first inhabitants of the plain were basic-

Cahiers tudes africaines XXI V-1 1984 pp 87-100