Chongoni Rock Art Area
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
Seals, want-to-go and the year you stood here are recorded in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
In the forested granite hills of the central Malawi plateau, 127 rock art sites are spread over 126.4 square kilometres. It is the densest cluster of rock art in Central Africa and one of the rare places where farmers, not only hunters, painted on rock.
BaTwa hunter-gatherers, who lived here from the Late Stone Age, painted in red. Chewa farmers, who arrived in the Iron Age, painted in white clay and kept painting into the 20th century. The images are tied to women's initiation, rain-making and funeral rites, and they record the shift from foraging to farming, the later Ngoni invasion and the arrival of white people.
The forest became a reserve in 1924, and the first rock art was reported in the 1930s. Five sites were declared national monuments in 1969, and the area was inscribed in 2006. The Chewa girls' initiation, Chinamwali, still takes place, mostly in secret, in some of the painted shelters.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).