Mozambique

From the gold ports of the Swahili coast to Portuguese conquest, a hard-won independence and a long road out of war.

For a thousand years Mozambique's coast lay at the heart of the Indian Ocean trade, its town of Sofala channelling the gold of Great Zimbabwe and the Mutapa state out to Arab, Swahili and Indian merchants, while the Island of Mozambique grew into a cosmopolitan Afro-Islamic port. Vasco da Gama reached the coast in 1498, and over the following century the Portuguese seized the trade, fortified the island with the great Fort São Sebastião, and pushed up the Zambezi where settlers held semi-feudal prazo estates. Effective colonial rule came only in the 1890s, with the defeat of Gungunhana's Gaza Empire in 1895 and the grant of vast territories to chartered companies that imposed forced cultivation of cotton and the forced-labour system known as chibalo. The liberation front FRELIMO launched a war of independence in 1964 under Eduardo Mondlane and then Samora Machel, winning independence on 25 June 1975. Almost at once the new state was engulfed in a devastating civil war against RENAMO, backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, which killed about a million people before the Rome General Peace Accords of 1992. Modern Mozambique has held multiparty elections since 1994 and discovered vast offshore gas reserves, but since 2017 has faced a brutal insurgency in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.