The history of Mozambique

Mozambique's long coastline made it part of the Indian Ocean world for more than a thousand years before Europeans arrived. Swahili port towns such as Sofala and Mozambique Island shipped gold and ivory from inland African states, among them Great Zimbabwe and the Mutapa kingdom, to Arabia and India. The Portuguese, who arrived in 1498, held only scattered forts and estates for centuries, and turned the territory into a full colony only in the 1890s after conquering the Gaza kingdom. Independence in 1975 followed a ten-year liberation war and was soon overshadowed by a civil war that killed about a million people. Since peace in 1992 the country has held regular elections dominated by the ruling FRELIMO party, while facing cyclones, debt scandals and an Islamist insurgency in the north.

Mozambique has a deep human past. In Ngalue cave near Lake Niassa, archaeologists found stone tools around 100,000 years old bearing traces of wild sorghum, some of the earliest evidence of people processing wild cereals. For tens of thousands of years the land was home to hunter-gatherers, ancestors of the San, whose rock paintings survive in the western highlands.

During the Bantu expansion, farming peoples speaking Bantu languages moved into the region, mainly in the first centuries CE, following the Zambezi valley and spreading onto the plateaus and along the coast. They brought iron smelting, pottery, cattle and crops such as sorghum and millet. Over the following centuries their descendants formed the ancestors of the country's main peoples, among them the Makua and Lomwe of the north, the Sena and Shona-speaking groups of the centre, and the Tsonga and Chopi of the south.

From the late first millennium CE the Indian Ocean trade reached the southern coast. At Chibuene, near Vilankulo, glass beads and pottery from the Persian Gulf show trade from around the eighth century. Merchants sailing on the monsoon winds connected the coast with Arabia, the Gulf and India, and the coastal towns shared in the wider Swahili culture, with a Bantu language, Muslim elites, coral-stone mosques and houses, and close ties to the interior. In the tenth century the geographer al-Masudi described Sofala as a land of gold, where Muslims lived among the African population. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Sofala was a dependency of Kilwa, the great trading city in present-day Tanzania, and its gold made Kilwa rich. Further north, Angoche and Mozambique Island were important trading sultanates by the fifteenth century, and Islam spread among coastal communities.

The gold came from the plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. From the eleventh to the fifteenth century this trade enriched the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe, whose stone enclosures stand in present-day Zimbabwe, and smaller stone-walled centres in its tradition were built inside Mozambique, such as Manyikeni near Vilankulo. After Great Zimbabwe declined, Shona rulers in the fifteenth century founded the Mutapa kingdom in the north of the plateau. Tradition credits its foundation to Mutota and its expansion to his son Matope, who extended Mutapa's control over the Zambezi valley and towards the sea. The rulers' title, Mwenemutapa, became the Portuguese Monomotapa. Around 1490 a governor named Changamire rebelled, and the kingdoms of Barue, Manyika, Uteve and Madanda in the centre of modern Mozambique became largely independent, often fighting Mutapa for control of the gold routes to Sofala.

North of the Zambezi, the Maravi peoples formed a group of kingdoms from the sixteenth century, stretching into present-day Malawi and Zambia, whose rulers traded ivory and iron goods with the coast. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Yao of the far north and the Makua became major traders in ivory and, increasingly, in captives, and many Yao adopted Islam through their links with the Swahili coast.

Vasco da Gama reached Mozambique Island in 1498, where local accounts say the island's sheikh, Mussa Bin Bique, gave his name to the island and later the country. The Portuguese Empire quickly seized the coastal trade: it built a fort at Sofala in 1505 and made Mozambique Island its main base and a vital port of call on the route to Goa. Massive fortifications later helped it beat off Dutch attacks in 1607 and 1608. From the 1530s Portuguese traders pushed up the Zambezi to found Sena and Tete and set up trade fairs inside the Mutapa kingdom. A Jesuit missionary, Gonçalo da Silveira, baptised the Mwenemutapa in 1561 but was killed soon afterwards on the king's orders, and a large Portuguese expedition sent to avenge him and seize the gold mines collapsed from disease in the 1570s.

The Portuguese exploited Mutapa's internal conflicts. In 1629, after defeating the ruler Kapararidze, they installed Mamvura, who accepted Portuguese overlordship and granted them mining rights. Their power on the plateau ended when Changamire Dombo, ruler of the rising Rozvi state, attacked their fairs from 1693 and drove them back to the Zambezi valley. The Omani capture of Fort Jesus at Mombasa in 1698 confined Portugal to the coast south of Cape Delgado.

Along the Zambezi, Portuguese, Indian and mixed-race settlers held vast estates called prazos, granted by the crown. Through intermarriage and isolation the prazos became African institutions, ruled by powerful families who commanded private armies of enslaved soldiers known as Chikunda. Indian merchants from Gujarat and Goa came to dominate much of the trade.

From the late eighteenth century the slave trade became the dominant business of the coast. French planters on the Mascarene islands of Mauritius and Réunion bought tens of thousands of captives from Mozambique, and in the nineteenth century slave ships carried many more to the Empire of Brazil and Cuba. African rulers, Swahili and Arab traders and Portuguese officials all took part. Portugal outlawed the trade in 1836, but it continued illegally for decades, while Zambezi warlords such as the Goan-born Manuel António de Sousa raided the interior from fortified bases.

In the south, the upheavals that followed the rise of the Zulu Kingdom under Shaka sent Nguni armies north in the 1820s. One of them, under Soshangane, conquered the Tsonga, Chopi and Ndau peoples and built the Gaza kingdom, which at its height in the 1860s controlled most of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo. Soshangane imposed Nguni military organisation and customs on his subjects and took part in the slave trade. His grandson Ngungunhane, who came to power in 1884, moved his capital south to Mandlakazi, close to Portuguese-held Lourenço Marques.

The Scramble for Africa forced Portugal to turn its claims into real control. Britain's ultimatum of 1890 blocked Portuguese ambitions to link Mozambique with Angola, and a treaty in 1891 fixed most of the borders with British Central Africa and the territories that became Rhodesia. Portugal then waged campaigns of conquest. In 1895 its forces defeated the Gaza army at Magul and Coolela, and in December Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque captured Ngungunhane at Chaimite and sent him into exile in the Azores, where he died in 1906. Resistance continued in many regions, including the Barue rising of 1917, and during the First World War German forces from East Africa fought in the north of the colony. In 1898 the capital was moved from Mozambique Island to Lourenço Marques, which grew as the port for the mines and farms of the Transvaal.

Much of the territory was handed to chartered companies, mainly financed by British capital: the Mozambique Company in the centre, the Niassa Company in the north and the Zambezia Company along the river. They built railways linking the ports of Beira and Lourenço Marques with Rhodesia and South Africa, and relied on forced labour. The colonial state imposed chibalo, compulsory paid or unpaid labour, and from the late 1930s forced peasants to grow cotton or rice for export, causing hunger in many areas. Hundreds of thousands of men from the south worked on contract in South African gold mines, with the colony earning revenue from their wages.

Under António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo dictatorship, Lisbon tightened control, ending the company concessions, and in 1951 Mozambique was renamed an overseas province of Portugal. Portuguese settlement grew rapidly after the Second World War, reaching about 250,000 people by the early 1970s, while the great majority of Africans had no political rights and very limited access to education. In June 1960 Portuguese forces fired on a crowd of protesters at Mueda in the north, an event that turned many towards armed struggle.

The Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO, was founded in Dar es Salaam in June 1962 by uniting exile groups under the sociologist Eduardo Mondlane, and on 25 September 1964 it began guerrilla attacks in the north from bases in Tanzania. It received weapons from the Soviet Union and China, and Mondlane met Che Guevara in Dar es Salaam in 1965, making the war part of the Cold War contest in Africa. FRELIMO established control over areas of Cabo Delgado and Niassa, running schools and clinics there. Mondlane was killed by a parcel bomb in his Dar es Salaam office on 3 February 1969, an attack widely attributed to the Portuguese secret police, and after a power struggle Samora Machel became leader and moved the movement further left.

Portugal responded with large offensives, notably Operation Gordian Knot in 1970, resettled rural people in fortified villages and began the giant Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi. On 16 December 1972 Portuguese commandos massacred the inhabitants of Wiriyamu in Tete province; estimates of the dead range from about 150 to several hundred, and the revelation of the killings in the foreign press damaged Portugal's reputation. The war, together with those in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, helped bring about the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon in April 1974. The new Portuguese government agreed to hand power to FRELIMO in the Lusaka Accord, and Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975, as part of the wider decolonisation of Africa. Most of the Portuguese population left within a year, many forced out at short notice with little of their property.

President Machel's FRELIMO built a one-party socialist state, formally Marxist-Leninist from 1977, nationalising land and businesses, creating communal villages and sending opponents and people deemed undesirable to re-education camps where thousands died. It supported the liberation movements fighting white-minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa. In response, Rhodesian intelligence created the Mozambican National Resistance, RENAMO, in the late 1970s, and after Zimbabwe's independence in 1980 South Africa's apartheid government took over its sponsorship. RENAMO attacked roads, railways, schools and clinics and became notorious for atrocities against civilians, while government forces also committed serious abuses. Drought and war produced famine in the 1980s.

Under economic pressure, Mozambique signed the Nkomati Accord with South Africa in 1984, agreeing to expel the African National Congress in return for an end to support for RENAMO, but South African backing continued in secret. On 19 October 1986 Machel was killed when his plane crashed at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa; a South African inquiry blamed the crew, but suspicion of South African involvement persists. His widow, Graça Machel, later married Nelson Mandela. Machel's successor, Joaquim Chissano, abandoned Marxism-Leninism, joined the Western financial institutions and introduced a multiparty constitution in 1990. Talks mediated by the Catholic Community of Sant'Egidio led to the General Peace Accords, signed in Rome on 4 October 1992. About a million Mozambicans had died from fighting, hunger and disease, and around five million had been displaced, including some 1.7 million refugees in neighbouring countries.

A UN peacekeeping mission oversaw demobilisation, and in 1994 the first multiparty elections were won by Chissano and FRELIMO, with RENAMO under Afonso Dhlakama becoming the main opposition. In 1995 Mozambique joined the Commonwealth, at the time the only member that had never been part of the British Empire. Economic growth was rapid but uneven, and catastrophic floods in 2000 killed hundreds. FRELIMO has won every election since, under Armando Guebuza from 2005 and Filipe Nyusi from 2015, amid repeated opposition accusations of fraud. The discovery of huge offshore gas fields in the Rovuma basin from 2010 raised hopes of wealth, but in 2016 it emerged that state-linked companies had taken on about two billion dollars in secret loans, plunging the country into a debt crisis. RENAMO took up arms again between 2013 and 2018, and a final peace agreement was signed in 2019, the year Cyclones Idai and Kenneth devastated the centre and north.

In October 2017 Islamist militants known locally as al-Shabaab, later linked to the Islamic State, attacked police stations in Mocímboa da Praia in Cabo Delgado. The insurgency grew into a war that displaced hundreds of thousands of people; in March 2021 militants overran the town of Palma, next to a major gas project, which was suspended. Troops from Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community were deployed from 2021 and recovered much territory, but attacks continued into 2025 and 2026. The general election of 9 October 2024 declared FRELIMO's Daniel Chapo the winner, a result rejected by the opposition candidate Venâncio Mondlane, backed by the PODEMOS party, and questioned by the Catholic bishops and European Union observers. Months of protests followed in which hundreds of people were killed, most of them demonstrators shot by the security forces, and Chapo was sworn in as president on 15 January 2025.