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The Maravi Confederacy. The Maravi confederacy (c. 1480-1890) was a family of related states that dominated the lands south and west of Lake Malawi for four centuries. The ancestors of the Maravi peoples migrated into the region from the Congo basin, and oral traditions tell how their leaders, following a fiery comet or a sacred fire, established chiefdoms around the lake and the Shire valley. By the sixteenth century a Maravi ruler known as the Kalonga, based among the Chewa of central Malawi, had built the greatest of these states, while related dynasties ruled the Nyanja and Mang'anja peoples further south.
The confederacy's wealth rested on trade and tribute. Maravi chiefs controlled the routes carrying ivory, and later enslaved people, from the interior to the Swahili and Portuguese traders of the Mozambique coast, and their authority reached at its height from the Luangwa River to the Indian Ocean. The Kalonga's court was a ritual center as much as a political one: sacred fire was carried from his capital to install new chiefs, and rainmaking and ancestral cults underpinned royal power. The Portuguese, arriving in the seventeenth century, dealt with the Maravi state as the principal power of the region.
From the eighteenth century the confederacy weakened. Trade routes shifted, regional chiefs such as Undi and Mwase asserted their independence, and the nineteenth century brought devastating new pressures: slave raiding, Yao migrations from the east, and finally the arrival of the Ngoni, southern African warriors fleeing the wars of Shaka's time, who overran much of the Maravi world. By the 1890s the British had established the protectorate of Nyasaland over the old Maravi lands.
The Maravi states are the ancestors of modern Malawi, whose name comes from the confederacy itself. The Chewa, Nyanja, and related peoples still make up most of the population of Malawi and eastern Zambia, and their chiefs, language, and traditions of kingship descend directly from the states built by the Kalonga and his kin half a millennium ago.
Britannica: Maravi Confederacy
Wiley Encyclopedia of Empire: Maravi Kingdom
Wikipedia: Maravi