Stone Age and later Iron Age settlements has been found around Lake Nyasa. Bantu peoples moved into the territory in the 1st millennium ad. By the 16th century a Malawi kingdom, from which the present name of the country is derived, had a prospering trade with the coastal areas of Mozambique. Jesuit missionaries from Portugal visited the territory near Lake Nyasa as early as the 17th century, but the lake probably was not known to Europeans until Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone reached its shores in 1859. European involvement began in 1875 and 1876, when Scottish church missions were established; a British consul was stationed in the country in 1883. Subsequent warfare with Arab slave traders and fear of Portuguese expansion from Mozambique led to a mission by British explorer and colonial official Harry Johnston, who negotiated treaties with the indigenous rulers. In 1891 the treaties resulted in a formal declaration of a British protectorate, called the Nyasaland Districts Protectorate. Beginning in 1893, it was known as the British Central Africa Protectorate, and in 1907 the area was officially designated the Nyasaland Protectorate. In 1915 John Chilembwe, an African preacher, staged a short, bloody uprising in response to the treatment of Africans by British colonists. The uprising is considered a forerunner of later nationalist movements.

The paleontological record of human cultural artifacts in Malawi dates back more than 50,000 years, although known fossil remains of early Homo sapiens belong to the period between 8000 and 2000 BC. These prehistoric forebears have affinities to the San (Bushmen) of southern Africa and were probably ancestral to the Twa and Fula, whom Bantu-speaking peoples claimed to have found when they invaded the Malawi region between the 1st and 4th centuries AD. From then to about AD 1200, Bantu settlement patterns spread, as did ironworking and the slash-and-burn method of cultivation. The identity of these early Bantu-speaking inhabitants is uncertain. According to oral tradition, names such as Kalimanjira, Katanga, and Zimba are associated with them.

After World War II (1939-1945), nationalist movements gained strength. From 1953 the protectorate was joined for ten years in a federation with Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), called the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. However, this federation was heavily opposed by nationalists who advocated political freedom from British rule. Following the federation’s dissolution in 1963, Nyasaland achieved internal self-government, with Hastings Kamuzu Banda, leader of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), as the first prime minister. The protectorate gained independence on July 6, 1964, under its new name, Malawi. It was declared a republic on July 6, 1966, and Prime Minister Banda was elected president by the National Assembly.