This paper seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of political ethnicity by focusing on the role of northerners in Malawian politics between the mid-1950s and the cabinet crisis of 1964. My initial aim is to throw light on one of the most important yet most neglected episodes in the history of Malawian nationalism: the emergence of a radical peasant-based movement in the north, which gained strength from 1956 and continued to play an active role in the Karonga district in 1959, long after overt resistance had been suppressed elsewhere. Secondly, I examine the decline in northern involvement in nationalist politics, which I date not from the cabinet crisis but rather from the founding of the Malawi Congress Party in 1959. In both sections I seek to escape from too narrow a focus on the role of the first generation of cabinet ministers by extending my analysis to the activities of other less familiar activists, notably 'General' Flax Musopole. It is my contention that Musopole's heroic, tragic and, ultimately, profoundly ambivalent life story provides us with a valuable insight into the strengths and limitations of Malawian nationalism. Regional identity, in this formulation, emerges not as the fixed construct described in a number of recent studies but as an altogether more tentative and provisional force.