history of Mozambique

Early settlement

From at least the 3rd century ce, Iron Age people who practiced agriculture and kept both cattle and small livestock moved into Mozambique as part of the migration of Bantu speakers from west-central Africa toward the south and east. These people had mastered iron technology and combined the cultivation of some grains with knowledge of root and tree crops. In the process they created such sustained population growth that they needed to expand their territory. In a slow but fairly steady process, one branch of Bantu speakers moved east toward the Indian Ocean and then south along the coast, and another moved more directly south-southeast into the Zimbabwe plateau and highlands of western Mozambique.

The characteristic social unit was the extended patrilineal household headed by an elder male and consisting of his wives, their unmarried children, adult sons, and the sons’ families. Although both social and labour organization varied throughout the area, women were usually responsible for child care, cultivation, gathering of food crops, and food preparation, whereas men were involved in cattle keeping, hunting, toolmaking, and a range of crafts.

Toward the end of the 1st millennium ce, groups of households called nyika had emerged in south-central Mozambique as social units under the authority of a chief and chiefly household. In the 10th century a settlement known as Mapungubwe, which incorporated many nyika, developed in the upper reaches of the Limpopo River. It was the earliest of the settlements featuring stone enclosures, or zimbabwes.

The rise of the zimbabwe civilizations

The groups on the Zimbabwe plateau expanded their herds and moved between the plateau and the surrounding Mozambican lowlands in pursuit of seasonal pastures, although the tsetse fly, which causes sleeping sickness, was present in the region. The region’s economy was rooted in agriculture and cattle keeping, but its social and political organization became more complex with the development of local industries and trade, specifically the mining of gold, copper, and iron ore and the development of salt pans, tool forges, and potting industries. The civilization of Great Zimbabwe, which dominated the region politically from the mid-13th to the mid-15th century, controlled mining and trade.

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The zimbabwe settlement at Manekweni, about 30 miles (50 km) from the Indian Ocean in southern Mozambique, replicated in miniature the social and settlement patterns of the highland interior. Manekweni was a centre for agriculture, cattle keeping, and the gold trade from about the 12th to the 18th century.

From roughly the 10th to the 18th century, Great Zimbabwe and the area of Central Africa around Lake Kisale (in present-day Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) were the region’s centres of production and intra-African trade. Beginning in at least the 1st millennium, however, people of this region traded with various non-Africans. The earliest and most important external trade link for Mozambique was with Middle Eastern and South Asian peoples who traded beads and cloth for gold across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

By the 14th century, African Arab, or Swahili, trade cities were flourishing along the coast from Somalia in the north to Kilwa in what is now southern Tanzania. Smaller Swahili sultanates developed along the northern coast of Mozambique as far south as Angoche. A series of markets had arisen throughout the region by the 16th century, sustained by intraregional trade in raw materials and long-distance trade in gold, copper, ivory, and enslaved people.

Arrival of the Portuguese

The voyage of Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean in 1498 marked the European entry into trade, politics, and society in the Indian Ocean world. The Portuguese gained control of the Island of Mozambique and the port city of Sofala in the early 16th century, and by the 1530s small groups of Portuguese had pushed their way into the interior, where they set up garrisons and trading posts at Sena and Tete on the Zambezi River and tried to gain exclusive control over the gold trade. The Portuguese attempted to legitimate and consolidate their trade and settlement positions through the creation of prazos (land grants) tied to European occupation. While prazos were originally developed to be held by Europeans, through intermarriage they became African Portuguese or African Indian centres defended by large African armies of enslaved people known as Chikunda. Most prazos had declined by the mid-19th century, but several of them survived and strongly resisted Portuguese domination until the last quarter of the 19th century.

The Portuguese were able to wrest much of the coastal trade from Arabs between 1500 and 1700, but, with the Arab seizure of Portugal’s key foothold at Fort Jesus on Mombasa (now in Kenya) in 1698, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction. During the 18th and 19th centuries the Mazrui and Omani Arabs reclaimed much of the Indian Ocean trade, forcing the Portuguese to retreat south. During the 19th century other European powers, particularly the British and the French, became increasingly involved in the trade and politics of the region.

Effects of the slave trade in Mozambique

By the 18th century, enslaved people had become an increasingly important part of Mozambique’s overall export trade from the East African coast. Yao traders developed slave networks from the Marave area around the tip of Lake Nyasa to Kilwa and the Island of Mozambique. Prazo traders along the Zambezi sold gold and enslaved people from Zumbo, Tete, and Manica to Portuguese merchants at Quelimane, and Tsonga ivory traders developed routes from the Transvaal region of South Africa and from the Zimbabwe plateau to coastal entrepôts at Inhambane and Maputo. During the 19th century, Mozambicans were sold as enslaved people in the Portuguese and Brazilian South Atlantic trade, the Arab trade from the Swahili coast, and the French trade to the sugar-producing islands of the Indian Ocean and Madagascar. Although the trade in enslaved people declined as a result of the mid-19th-century slave-trade agreements between Portugal and Britain, clandestine trade—particularly from central and northern Mozambique—continued into the 20th century.

During the first three decades of the 19th century, the proliferation of military and raiding groups from the conflicts in the northern Nguni heartland southwest of Mozambique had an important impact on southern and west-central Mozambique. Several military groups, offshoots of the emerging Zulu state, invaded Mozambican territory, seizing cattle, hostages, and food as they went. The waves of armed groups disrupted both trade and day-to-day production throughout the area. Two groups, the Jere under Zwangendaba and the Ndwandwe (both later known as Ngoni) under Soshangane, swept through Mozambique. Zwangendaba’s group continued north across the Zambezi, settling to the west of contemporary Mozambique, but Soshangane’s group crossed the Limpopo into southern Mozambique, where it eventually consolidated itself into the Gaza state. In the 1860s a succession struggle between the sons of Soshangane caused enormous suffering in the region and weakened the Gaza state.

Consolidation of Portuguese control

By the 1880s the Portuguese controlled trade and collected tribute in coastal enclaves from Ibo in the north to Lourenço Marques in the south, but their ability to control events outside those areas was quite limited; that situation, however, was about to change. Increasingly, as neighbours of the Gaza state were raided periodically for refusing to pay tribute, they began to ally themselves with the Portuguese, which the Portuguese both encouraged and exploited. In the 1890s a coalition of Portuguese troops and African armies marched against the state. When the Gaza leadership was finally defeated in 1897, southern Mozambique passed into Portuguese control. Two decades later the Portuguese, who had mounted dozens of military campaigns by that time, directly controlled the Barue of central Mozambique, the African Portuguese of the Zambezi and Maganja da Costa prazos, the Yao of Mataka, the northern Makua chiefdoms, and the northern coastal sheikhdoms of Angoche.

Trade in ivory, gold, enslaved people, rubber, oilseeds, and a broad range of European goods continued throughout the 19th century. However, European economic interest and influence in the region changed rapidly by mid-century in response to developments in both Africa and Europe. African labour was needed on the sugar plantations and at South African ports and mines after diamonds (at Kimberley in the 1860s) and gold (at Witwatersrand in the 1880s) were discovered. Because of the need for labour, Europeans were determined to gain greater control over tracts of land and their inhabitants at the expense of African leadership. The combined struggle for access to mineral-bearing lands and the labour force to work them fueled the so-called “scramble” in Southern Africa.

Portugal claimed a swath of territory from present-day Mozambique to Angola. Although the Germans, whose territory bordered Mozambique to the north, accepted the Portuguese claims—establishing Mozambique’s northern boundary—British claims to the region contradicted those of Portugal, leading to prolonged negotiations. However, the Portuguese crown was heavily in debt to British financiers, and the small country was no match for Britain’s military; in 1891 Portugal was forced to accept Britain’s definition of Mozambique’s western and southern boundaries.

Portugal had little hope of developing the entire region on its own, and so it turned to its familiar colonial strategy of leasing large tracts of land to private companies. Chartered companies were granted the privilege of exploiting the lands and peoples of specific areas in exchange for an obligation to develop agriculture, communications, social services, and trade. The Mozambique Company, the Niassa Company, and the Zambezia Company were all established in this manner in the 1890s. Any economic development and investment in infrastructure was related directly to company interests and usually undertaken at African expense. Sugar, copra, and sisal plantations depending largely on conscripted labour and railways linking Beira with the British South Africa Company territory and British Nyasaland (now Malawi) to the west and northwest were all developed and built at a high cost to the African workforce.

The Portuguese government eventually terminated the charters of the major concession companies, bringing all of Mozambique under direct Portuguese rule. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, Portuguese rule in Mozambique was characterized by the exploitation of African people and resources by private parties, whether they were foreign company shareholders or colonial bureaucrats and settlers. The most egregious colonial abuses—forced labour, forced crop cultivation, high taxes, low wages, confiscation of the most promising lands—occurred regardless of which group of Europeans was in control.

Mozambique under the New State regime

The 1926 coup in Portugal created a Portuguese regime that came to be known as the “New State” (Estado Novo). Although most of the former abuses in Mozambique continued and in some cases were intensified, the New State consolidated the profit into fewer hands and promoted conditions that would favour capital accumulation by Portugal and the Portuguese over all others. While the administrative and educational systems in Mozambique were unified and developed more coherently under the New State, they were still principally directed toward settlers.

Colonial investment patterns began to change in the early 1950s, when Portugal set forth a series of development plans designed to extend and upgrade Mozambique’s transportation and communications infrastructure. Portuguese who had exploited monopolies and incentives to great profit were encouraged to invest in, expand, and diversify their undertakings. The generally favourable prices for tropical commodities in the post-World War II era fueled the trend, and the colonial economy expanded vigorously. At the same time, the New State retained tight control over the economic and physical mobility of the Africans, and thousands of Portuguese settlers arrived in the 1950s and ’60s to take advantage of employment and business opportunities denied to Africans. But, in promoting these policies, Portuguese colonial authorities antagonized Africans of all social classes.

The African leadership that emerged in the late 1950s represented a broad cross section of the population and was able to channel considerable discontent against colonial power. Because the New State dealt with any form of political dissent with imprisonment, deportation, or execution, the formal political challenge to the regime developed among African workers and students living outside Mozambique. In 1962 Mozambican representatives from exiled political groups met in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and formed the socialist Mozambique Liberation Front (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique; Frelimo), with Eduardo Mondlane as its first president.

Frelimo’s strategy was not immediately clear, but, after serious internal debate, the ascendant leadership committed itself to an armed challenge. Frelimo’s guerrilla forces, which had been trained and armed by African and Soviet-bloc supporters, attacked targets in northern Mozambique in September 1964, and the war for independence was launched. Portugal, faced with similar challenges in all its African territories (Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde), responded with enormous military effort. Mondlane was killed in 1969, but the leadership of Frelimo was ably assumed by Samora Machel, and the Portuguese remained frustrated and militarily ineffectual against Frelimo’s small-scale guerrilla engagements. By 1974 Frelimo forces could move about most of the north in relative freedom and had infiltrated central Mozambique, although the cities, most of the south, and the coastal areas as far north as Nacala remained in Portuguese hands.

In April 1974 the military in Portugal staged a coup, which was welcomed by those Portuguese who were unhappy with the New State regime, its African wars, and its ideology. Frelimo took advantage of its military position to insist on a cease-fire, which confirmed its right to assume power in an independent Mozambique. A quickly aborted countercoup attempt in Maputo in September and some rioting in October were the only overt challenges to Frelimo’s authority. Within a year of the Portuguese coup, most of the settler population had left Mozambique, and on June 25, 1975, Mozambique became an independent, single-party state led by Frelimo, with Machel serving as president.

Mozambique as a one-party state

Frelimo’s solidarity with other African guerrilla groups fighting for political rights in the region strongly shaped events after it controlled the entire country. Mozambicans widely supported Frelimo’s decisions to close the border with Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to implement international sanctions against the country, and to allow its guerrilla forces to develop bases in Mozambique, but these decisions proved costly when Mozambique suffered major losses of revenue and lives and the destruction of key infrastructure. Frelimo’s support for the African National Congress (ANC) brought similar economic and military retribution from the white regime in South Africa.

Frelimo had mixed success with its social and economic policies during its first decade of rule. Forced cultivation, forced labour, and ethnic discrimination were ended, but the party’s commitment to communal, cooperative, and state-run agriculture antagonized many African farmers, who had hoped to see land returned to their families. By 1985 Frelimo recognized the failure of its agricultural policy of moving farmers into communal villages. Under pressure from international creditors, it began de-emphasizing state ownership and control of markets in favour of the family agricultural sector.

The government’s extensive investment in education, health care, and services for the majority population was initially highly successful. Within a decade of independence, however, these gains had been totally undermined by the actions of the Mozambique National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana; Renamo), an insurgency group trained, supplied, and supported by Rhodesia, South Africa, former Portuguese settlers, and Mozambicans opposed to Frelimo. Renamo began economic sabotage and a campaign of terror against the rural population shortly after independence. In 1984 the governments of Mozambique and South Africa signed the Nkomati Accord, under which each country would no longer support the other country’s opposition movement (ANC in South Africa and Renamo in Mozambique). Because this agreement did little to curb Renamo’s activity and was violated by South Africa, Frelimo continued attempts to end the conflict through negotiation. The leaders of Frelimo and Renamo finally accepted a peace agreement in October 1992, whereby Frelimo’s leadership agreed to change the constitution and to open the political process to competing parties in exchange for Renamo’s promise to end the war. Issues between the two groups were not totally resolved until 1994.

Peace in Mozambique

The multiparty elections that finally took place in October 1994 were the culmination of years of effort to reach a peaceful end to the war between Frelimo and Renamo. Frelimo, once a self-described Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and still progressive if not clearly socialist, made several important concessions to the peace process. Mozambique joined the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1984 and adopted their demands to privatize the economy under a structural-adjustment program. Several years later Joaquim Chissano, who had become Mozambique’s president when Machel died in a plane crash in 1986, introduced a new constitution that ended Frelimo’s one-party rule and Mozambique’s identity as a socialist country. That constitution allowed for multiparty elections, though other goals had to be met before elections could be held.

Renamo changed its image as an international pariah known for burning schools and health clinics and became a legitimate political party. Renamo’s leader, Afonso Dhlakama, met with international political leaders and was accepted as a presidential candidate. During the election campaign the United Nations provided military and civilian police, who supervised the activities of their Mozambican counterparts, while the European Union supplied election materials. Although Frelimo and Renamo were the main contenders in the elections, many other smaller parties also emerged, including several founded by Mozambican businessmen who had been in exile for years. There were a dozen presidential candidates and a similar number of parties fielding candidates for the National Assembly. The elections were considered free and fair by international observers, with Frelimo president Chissano garnering the majority of the votes. Renamo, however, was strongly represented in the national government and the National Assembly.

The new government faced the lingering effects of the war, notably the presence of up to two million land mines in the countryside. An international operation has cleared some areas of mines, especially along roads, but many rural areas remain endangered. The effort to demobilize both Frelimo and Renamo forces and form a new, unified military also met with delays and difficulties, and in the mid-1990s soldiers waiting in demobilization camps for weeks without food, money, or prospects for work staged scattered violent uprisings.

In the early 21st century, Mozambique suffered several natural disasters, including drought, an earthquake, and devastating floods. The country’s economic growth, though adversely affected by these events, was bolstered by significant debt relief and by economic reform measures enacted by the government. The country also saw an economic boom as foreign investors were drawn to existing and newly discovered sources of coal and natural gas. The new century also ushered in a change in leadership: in 2001 Chissano announced that he would not stand in the next presidential election. Frelimo, however, maintained control of the presidency when its candidate, Armando Guebuza, was victorious in the 2004 presidential election. He was reelected with 75 percent of the vote in 2009, easily defeating Renamo’s candidate, Dhlakama, and Daviz Simango, who earlier that year had broken from Renamo to form the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM). Frelimo also maintained control of the legislature, winning about three-quarters of the seats.

Although the country experienced tremendous economic growth in the 21st century, particularly after 2010, most Mozambicans did not benefit, and more than half of the population remained mired in poverty. That imbalance, as well as fears of political marginalization, heightened tensions between Renamo and the Frelimo-led government. Discussions of political reform did not bear fruit, and Renamo launched a low-level insurgency. Sporadic fighting between Renamo and police or government forces culminated in October 2013 with Renamo’s abrogating the 1992 Rome peace accord that had ended Mozambique’s civil war. A new peace agreement between Renamo and the government was reached in late August 2014, and Dhlakama and Guebuza signed it in a public ceremony on September 5.

The 2014 elections

Given the recent discontent, the October 2014 presidential and legislative elections were hotly contested. With Guebuza constitutionally barred from serving a third term, Frelimo’s candidate was Filipe Nyusi, who faced off against Dhlakama and MDM’s Simango. Although Nyusi handily defeated his opponents—he garnered about 57 percent of the vote, while Dhlakama and Simango won about 36 percent and 6 percent, respectively—Frelimo in general did not perform as strongly as in the previous election. Frelimo managed to maintain the most seats in the legislature, but the party saw its share of seats drop from about three-quarters to slightly more than one-half.

Relationship between the government and Renamo

Friction between the Frelimo-led government and Renamo persisted after the election, with a flare-up in fighting occurring in late 2015 and continuing into the next year. Fighting was centred in the northwestern part of the country, and thousands of Mozambicans there fled to neighbouring Malawi. Peace talks between the two sides began in mid-2016, and in December Renamo announced a unilateral two-month truce, which the group extended several times thereafter as both sides continued with ongoing peace discussions. An indication of the progress made, in August 2017 Dhlakama and Nyusi met face-to-face, the first such meeting between the two men since 2015.

Dhlakama’s death in May 2018 left some uncertainty regarding the tenuous peace established between Renamo and the Frelimo-led government, especially since much of the discussions had taken place between Nyusi and Dhlakama. Peace negotiations continued, however, with Dhlakama’s successor, Ossufo Momade. Progress continued, and in August 2019 the two leaders signed a pair of widely acclaimed agreements that were intended to end hostilities and to foster peace and reconciliation. The agreements set the stage for the possibility that the next round of presidential, legislative, and provincial elections, scheduled to be held later that year in October, would be held in a peaceful environment.

Economic developments

Meanwhile, Mozambique’s impressive economic growth slowed dramatically in 2016, partly because of a drop in commodity prices that had begun the previous year as well as an alarming admission by the government that it had a large amount of undeclared debt, later found to be worth about $2 billion. Even more troubling was the fact that some one-fourth of the money could not be accounted for. As a result of the debt admission, the IMF, the World Bank, and other donors suspended aid to the country, exacerbating the existing economic problems. The fallout included Mozambique’s default in early 2017 on a high-profile and recently restructured loan. In spite of its challenges, Mozambique was still poised to see impressive economic growth again on the basis of its natural gas reserves, although this was not expected to have a significant impact on the country’s economy for at least a few more years.

The 2019 cyclones

In March 2019 Mozambique was pummeled by Cyclone Idai, which killed about 600 people and devastated a sizable swath of the country. Hardest hit was the port city of Beira, which was almost completely destroyed. This was followed in April by another cyclone, named Kenneth, which hit the northern part of the country and left more than 40 people dead. In all, more than 162,000 Mozambicans were estimated to have been displaced by the two storms.

The 2019 elections

Hopes for a peaceful campaign period after the August peace agreement were largely sustained, although there were incidents of election-related violence in some of the country’s provinces. There were also isolated reports of violence on the day of the election, October 15, as well as reports of voter intimidation and fraud. When the election results were released, Nyusi and Frelimo were declared the overwhelming winners: Nyusi with more than 73 percent of the presidential vote and Frelimo with more than 71 percent of the legislative vote, which allowed them to increase their share in the legislature from slightly more than one-half to a two-thirds majority. Both Renamo and MDM saw their legislative percentages decrease from the last election (Renamo won slightly more than 22 percent while the MDM won only some 4 percent) and lost seats. In the past, Renamo had performed quite well in some provincial assembly elections, and it was expected to do so again, but the party failed to win a majority of the vote in any of them. Under changes to the constitution that replaced presidentially appointed provincial governors with those who were indirectly elected—meeting one of Renamo’s main demands during peace talks in recent years—the election results meant that Renamo would not hold the governor’s post in any province. Renamo had complained of voting intimidation, irregularities, and fraud while the results were still being tabulated—complaints corroborated by some of the election observers—so it came as no surprise when the party filed a legal challenge to the results with the Constitutional Council. The court, however, dismissed the challenge, saying that Renamo had not provided sufficient evidence to support its complaint. Nyusi was sworn in for his second term as president on January 15, 2020.