Nkhata Bay

The bay's shelter and deep water made it a landing place long before it was a town. The Tonga, who farm and fish along this stretch of shore, were raided in the nineteenth century from the north and west, and the arrival of the Free Church of Scotland mission on the escarpment at Livingstonia in 1894, and of British administration after the Nyasaland protectorate was declared in 1891, brought schools, a boma and a port to the lakeside villages below.

Nkhata Bay became the northern shore's harbour. Lake steamers called at the pier with cargo and passengers when there was no useful road, rubber, timber and other produce from the district went out by water, and the town grew as the district's administrative centre. In March 1959, during the state of emergency declared across Nyasaland on 3 March after opposition to the Central African Federation, colonial forces opened fire on a crowd at Nkhata Bay and a number of people were killed; 51 people died across the protectorate during the emergency and the weeks around it, and the Nkhata Bay killings are long remembered in northern Malawi.

After independence in 1964 the town remained a district headquarters and a ferry stop, and from the 1980s it acquired a second life as a travellers' halt: the rocky coves proved to be an unusually cheap and easy place to snorkel and dive among the lake's cichlids, and a line of small lodges grew along the headlands. Its fortunes since have followed the road to Mzuzu, the fishing and the ferry, and the wider ups and downs of Malawi's economy.

Nkhata Bay is the centre of Tonga country, a lakeshore people counted as part of the wider Tumbuka group and speaking Chitonga, a dialect of Chitumbuka, with a long tradition of fishing, cassava farming and labour migration. Families here have sent workers to the mines and cities of southern Africa for generations, and money and ideas returning from abroad have shaped the town as much as the lake has.

Church life is strong, as it is across the north, with Presbyterian congregations tracing back to the Livingstonia mission alongside Catholic, Anglican and Pentecostal churches; Sunday singing carries across the water. Funerals and chiefs' ceremonies draw whole villages, and drumming and dance — including the Tumbuka vimbuza tradition of the wider region — mark the big occasions.

The town also has an easy, mixed social life that comes from decades of visitors. Reggae and Malawian pop play from bars on the hill, wood carvers and painters sell from stalls along the road, and lodge staff, boat crews and dive guides are often young people from the district itself. Manners are unhurried: greetings come before business, elders are addressed first, and bargaining in the market is polite and good-humoured rather than sharp.

About 14,000 people lived in the town at the 2018 census, and it serves a district of about 165,000 spread along the shore and up into the hills. The day begins on the water, with boats landing usipa and chambo at first light and women carrying fish up to the drying racks and the market. Cassava is the staple crop on the thin lakeside soils, along with bananas, mangoes and maize where the land allows, and rubber, macadamia, sugar and rice are grown on plantations around the town.

The other economies are the harbour and the visitors. The pier handles cargo and ferry passengers, and the lodges, dive schools, boat crews and craft stalls give steady work to a town with few other employers. Government offices, the district hospital and schools fill out the formal jobs; most people work for themselves, trading, fishing, farming or carrying.

Life is shaped by things beyond the town's control: fuel and foreign-exchange shortages that make transport dear and erratic, a kwacha that has lost value repeatedly, and the condition of the escarpment road to Mzuzu, which everything depends on. Electricity and water supplies are intermittent, bicycle taxis do the work buses would do elsewhere, and many young people leave for Mzuzu, Lilongwe or South Africa, sending money home.

Fish and cassava define eating here more than anywhere else in Malawi. Usipa, the lake's small sardine-like fish, is fried fresh the morning it is landed or sun-dried on racks along the shore and sold by the cupful; chambo, the prized tilapia, is grilled whole over charcoal; and larger catches such as kampango, the big lake catfish, appear in season.

The staple that goes with them is kondowole, a stiff, stretchy porridge made from cassava flour rather than the maize nsima eaten in most of the country — a northern lakeshore dish that surprises Malawians from elsewhere. It is torn by hand and dipped into fish or a relish, or ndiwo, of beans, pumpkin leaves or greens in groundnut sauce. Cassava itself is also boiled, roasted at the roadside or pounded, and bananas, mangoes and sugar cane grow in the gardens above the bay.

Street food is simple and cheap: mandasi, small fried dough buns, sold warm in the morning; roasted maize; chips with fried fish; and samosas near the bus stage. Lodge kitchens on the headlands add curries, pizzas and banana bread for travellers. To drink there is thobwa, a lightly fermented maize or millet drink, strong sweet tea, chibuku sorghum beer in the bars, and Malawian lager and gin; coffee, when it appears, usually comes from the smallholders' cooperative around Mzuzu.