Trading people of the plateaux between the Rovuma and Lujenda rivers who carried ivory and captives from the interior to Kilwa and Mozambique Island, and whose chiefs — Mataka, Makanjila, Machemba, Mponda — built armed, Muslim, gun-owning chiefdoms styled sultanates. From the 1830s Yao groups pushed west across the Shire highlands and the south-eastern lakeshore, displacing and absorbing Nyanja communities.
Not an ending: Johnston's forces broke the Makanjila chiefdoms on Lake Nyasa by the mid-1890s, the Germans forced Machemba's submission by 1899, and the Portuguese Niassa Company took the Rovuma-Lujenda homeland — splitting the Yao between three colonies. Yao communities remain numerous in Malawi, Mozambique and southern Tanzania and are strongly Muslim.
The standard account of the Yao ivory and slave trade that made the Rovuma-Lujenda chiefdoms; the book that reconstructs Yao commercial expansion.
A Yao-authored history of the Yao written from their own traditions — the insider source on chiefly origins and the westward migrations.