Malawi
The warm heart of Africa beside a great lake
Malawi is a slender, lake-dominated country in southeastern Africa, friendly enough to have earned the nickname the warm heart of Africa. Nearly a fifth of its territory is water, almost all of it Lake Malawi, a shimmering inland sea that ranks among the largest and most species-rich lakes on Earth. Hemmed between Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania with no coastline of its own, this densely populated, overwhelmingly rural nation lives close to the land, growing tobacco, tea, and maize along the shores and highlands that frame its defining body of water.
The country stretches along the southern reach of the Great Rift Valley, and Lake Malawi fills the valley floor for much of its length, its clear waters home to hundreds of brilliantly colored cichlid fish found nowhere else. West of the lake the land climbs to plateaus and highlands, including the Nyika Plateau and the granite massif of Mount Mulanje, whose summit Sapitwa reaches 3,002 meters, the highest point in the country. The Shire River drains the lake southward toward the Zambezi. The climate is subtropical, with a warm wet season and a cooler dry season that shape the farming year.
Inhabited by Bantu peoples and drawn into the slave and ivory trades, the territory was claimed by Britain as Nyasaland in the nineteenth century, partly through the explorations of David Livingstone. It became independent in 1964 under Hastings Banda, who ruled as president for three decades before multiparty democracy arrived in the 1990s. Malawi remains one of the world's least urbanized and poorest countries, heavily dependent on rain-fed agriculture and vulnerable to drought and flood. Its culture is known for vibrant Gule Wamkulu masked dances, lakeside fishing villages, and a reputation for hospitality.