Topic summary
Chitumbuka
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Tumbuka language.
Official and regional status
In 1947, Chitumbuka was made an official language of Malawi for 21 years along with Chewa and English. It was in 1968 when Hastings Kamuzu Banda removed the language as a result of his one-nation, one-language policy. The Chitumbuka language suffered a lot during the rule of President Banda due to his tribalistic and racist policies. Chitumbuka was removed from the school curriculum, the national radio, and the print media. With the advent of multi-party democracy in 1994, Chitumbuka programmes were started again on the radio.