[1] They are found in the valleys near the rivers, lake as well as the highlands of Nyika Plateau, where they are frequently referred to as Henga although this is strictly speaking the name of a subdivision.

Various estimates suggest that over ten million Tumbuka speakers live in north Malawi, northeast Zambia and Tanzania.

At the start of the 18th century, they formed a number of groups, of which the Henga was one, living in small, independent communities without a central organisation, spread thinly over this area.

[13] By the mid-18th century, traders dressed “as Arabs”, although coming from the Unyamwezi region of what is now Tanzania were involved in trading for ivory and to some extent slaves as far inland as the Luangwa valley.

[20] The rising demand for ivory in the European market led to conflicts to control the export trade, resulting in greater social distinctions and politically centralized chiefdoms among the Tumbuka.

The alliance of the Swahili and the Henga faced a rival alliance between the Ngonde and the African Lakes Company which eventually led to the so-called Karonga War between them, a series of skirmishes and sieges of stockades between 1887 and 1889[28] The Ngoni invasion led initially to a devastation of the Tumbuka people,[5][29] through the death, destruction, loss of family members, abandonment of the settled valleys, and disruption of their traditional agricultural methods as the Tumbuka people hid in mountains, small islands, and marshes to escape from the violence associated with large-scale human raids and elephant hunting.

The education provided by Scottish-run missions at several sites in the Northern Region of Nyasaland was more eagerly embraced by the Tumbuka and Tonga peoples, whose earlier social organisation and religion had suffered from the attacks of slave raiders and Ngoni, than by the Ngoni and Ngonde peoples, who retained these institutions intact, and more mission schools were opened among the Tumbuka than any other group in Nyasaland.

[3] During the first three decades of colonial rule, commercial agriculture developed both on European-owned states and the smallholdings of African peasants in the southern and central parts of the protectorate.

[33] However, attempts to introduce commercial agriculture into the Northern Region were frustrated by a lack of suitable crops and high transport costs arising from its distance from the available markets.

As early as the 1880s, Tumbuka and Tonga men began to leave the region to work as porters and estate workers in the Southern Region of Nyasaland and, once those Tumbuka that had received a mission education reached adulthood, they travelled to Southern Rhodesia and South Africa where their literacy and numeracy commanded much high wages than they could earn in within Nyasaland.

Although the colonial government was concerned about the scale of labour migration, it was a virtual necessity for many in the north of the country where there were few alternatives besides subsistence agriculture.

[34] The colonial government were concerned that the Tumbuka-speaking areas had become the "Dead North" of the country but only invested small amounts in developing infrastructure or promoting commercial crops[1] One supporter of the underdevelopment hypothesis blames the impoverishment and stagnation of Tumbuka-speaking areas on a step-by-step process that started in the middle of the 19th century when the Indian Ocean ivory and slave trade created a demand for imported goods and prompted social differentiation within their traditional societies.

Ngoni agricultural practices of shifting or slash-and-burn cultivation and overstocking cattle were said to impoverish the soil and promoted the spread of the tsetse fly.

[36] According to Vail, the effect of the Ngoni invasions was exacerbated during the period of colonial rule up to 1939 as, at best, local African men in the "Dead North" of Nyasaland had little choice but to become labour migrants and, at worst, their recruitment for the mines, farms and other employers of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa was forced.

[40] Since independence, the economic conditions of the Tumbuka people have remained largely unchanged, their political power limited given the numerous ethnic groups in this region of Africa.

Thomas Cullen Young was one of the first missionaries to publish on the culture in Notes on the history of the Tumbuka-Kamanga peoples in the Northern Province of Nyasaland.

It included the concept of a supreme creator called Chiuta symbolizing the sun, who Tumbuka faith holds was "self created and all knowing".

This practice is locally called Vimbuza, includes a therapeutic dance performed by those possessed, and this is a part of modern syncretistic Christianity observed by the Tumbuka people.

[46][47][48] The Tumbuka people have been rural, living in villages or dispersed agnatically related clusters of rectangular thatched houses.

of Chimbuza) is a term used among the Tumbuka-speaking peoples of northern Malawi and eastern Zambia to describe several classes of possessive spirits, the embodied states of illness they produce in a person, and the therapeutic drumming, music, dance, and ritual that is performed to remedy the symptoms.

[52] As a cultural practice, Vimbuza is a local version of a more widespread therapeutic complex known as ngoma, which is found throughout much of central and southern Africa and has been the focus of important scholarship by John M. Janzen and others,[53] and even earlier by Victor Turner in his writings about Ndembu drums of affliction.

The Vimbuza causes imbalance in the hot and cold forces within the human body, whose healing process, to Tumbuka people, is a ritual dance with singing and music.