It aims to secure abundant rains at the appropriate season through the making of propitiatory gifts at cult shrines, and includes rainmaking rituals in the event of drought.
The third is about the exact historical role of the M'Bona cult and whether its ritual practices as recorded in the 20th centuries are a continuation of those of earlier times.
Much of the study of M'Bona was undertaken by Father Jan Matthew Schoffeleers (1928 – 2011), an anthropologist and researcher into African Religion, who was a Catholic missionary in the Lower Shire valley from 1955 to 1963 and then followed a largely academic career in Britain, Malawi and the Netherlands until his retirement in 1998.
[1] A number of speculative reconstructions of the origin of the Maravi cluster of peoples suggest that they entered the area of central and southern Malawi in relatively small groups from the 14th century, and that the trade in ivory they developed with the Muslim traders based on the coast of Nampula and Zambezia provinces was central to the rise of centralised Maravi states in the late 16th and 17th centuries in an area they had long occupied.
According to a further account of 1590, the Makua had recently lost control of the south bank of the Zambezi and the Lolo had been displaced eastward: these two groups then occupied roughly the same area of Zambezia province as today.
[7] Rather than a Maravi empire being formed well to the north of the Zambezi and expanding southwards, as in several accounts, it is more probable that a number of related but rather small groups from north of the Zambezi entered Zambezia in the 16th century and coalesced into loosely connected Maravi chieftainships which were forced, when their further advance was prevented by the Portuguese, to recognise one or more paramount chiefs.
[12] Another is that the Kalonga state, whose main seat is believed to have been south of Lake Malawi,[13] already existed but did not take part in the expansion into Zambezia so was unknown to the Portuguese in the early 17th Century.
[15] At the end of the 18th century, the original Lundu kingdom among the Mang'anja people was based in the Lower Shire valley, but was vulnerable to aggression from Portuguese slave-traders.
[16] The situation of the Mang'anja in the 1860s, as described by members of David Livingstone's expedition or the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, was that there was a hierarchy of chiefs and headmen of varying power and influence.
After Paul Mariano III reached adulthood, he reached an agreement with the Portuguese authorities in 1879 which left him in control of the Lower Shire Valley as far south as its confluence with the Zambezi, until a subsequent Portuguese governor attacked Mariano's stronghold in 1884-85, following which many of Mariano's chikunda, or native soldiers, moved into the area around the Khulubvi shrine, destroying villages and taking slaves until when, from 1889 onwards, first a Portuguese expedition led by Alexandre de Serpa Pinto and later a British one under Henry Hamilton Johnston entered the area to quell the disorder.
During his flight, M'Bona was said to have rested in several places in southern Malawi, all within the area inhabited by the Mang'anja, before he was killed by his pursuers and beheaded.
[26] Schoffeleers suggested that a change in Portuguese policy in the 1590s, which involved setting up forts in the Zambezi valley and employing African mercenaries called Zimba, who attacked uncooperative local rulers and raided for slaves, disrupted agriculture and caused widespread suffering throughout an area that included southern Malawi.
[28] However, the alien Lundu had no means of communicating with the territorial spirits whose shrines his mercenaries had destroyed, so the original population regarded his rule, and his claim to possess rain-making powers, as illegitimate.
[41] Initially, when they met Livingstone's party and the UMCA missionaries, officials of the M'Bona cult were hostile to their exposition of Christian doctrines, regarding them as likely to undermine Mang'anja society.
[51] At Khulubvi and other shrines, a woman of marriageable age was traditionally selected as the spirit wife of M'Bona with the title Salima and supported by a handmaiden.
[52] After the 1880s, the position of Salima lost status and was filled by elderly widows, and the handmaiden was a young girl with the name Camanga who only served until puberty, although the post may earlier have been one for a woman of marriageable age .
Rain prayers, accompanied by libations of millet beer, are said to be offered in October and November each year at the end of the dry season, and again if there is a drought.
In the aftermath of the famine, the colonial Agricultural Department introduced what it claimed were soil conservation techniques, more suited to sloping upland areas than the flat river valley.
The former, sometimes known as the Chipeta, had moved into the area around the south of Lake Malawi early in the second millennium, perhaps from the 11th century onwards and, although they did not form centralised states, their leaders had the clan name Banda.
The later ruling group were said to be migrants from the Katanga region who, sometime between the 14th and 16th centuries, brought ideas of chiefly power into what had been a stateless population.
The cult's main function is to secure the well-being of the local people through one or more of rain-making, the control of floods, maintaining the fertility of the soil or promoting success in fishing or hunting.
Territorial cults generally involve the whole community of a particular area, but are usually controlled by a local elite that provides priests, shrine guardians and other functionaries.
[80] Finally, the status of various shrines rose of fell as the fortunes of the states controlling them changed, to create the variety observed in recent times.
As the Lundu chiefs grew more powerful, the Khulubvi shrine gained prominence and the former priestess was demoted to the status of the newly named M'Bona's wife.
As the Lundu state expanded, it absorbed other cult sites, where the name M'Bona was applied to nature spirits of the river, who were protector against floods[83] Schoffeleers accepts that a generalised Central African belief in a High God with spirit intermediaries existed, adding that, in one particular instance, this belief was transformed into the story of a human martyr, and this later absorbed other cults.