Historically, the Fipa lived on the largely treeless Ufipa Plateau looking down on Lake Tanganyika, appearing as a bridge joining east to central Africa and the Congo. They were a mixed population – Fipa, Wanda, and Nyika – with roughly 20,000 people in the 1890s. Many had come from the Congo, with chiefdoms dominating a number of clans. Since iron was a precious commodity, and iron smelting required technical knowledge, it was jealously guarded, resulting in a number of clans being subject to ironsmiths. The central chiefdom, Milanzi (""the eternal village""), was headed by a dynasty of ironsmiths, which exchanged its products for woven cloth.