Portuguese Mozambique

Portuguese Mozambique, long known as Portuguese East Africa, was Portugal's colony on the south-east African coast, from the first trading forts of the early 1500s to independence on 25 June 1975. For most of that time Portuguese power was confined to a few ports and river posts; only after the scramble for Africa did Portugal conquer the interior, and its rule ended after a ten-year war of independence.

When Vasco da Gama reached the coast in 1498, Swahili Muslim merchants had been trading there for centuries. Within two decades Portugal had seized the Island of Mozambique and Sofala and dominated much of the coast, its main aim being to control the sea route and trade with India. The Island of Mozambique became the colony's capital and remained the governor's seat until the late 1890s. From the 1530s Portuguese traders moved up the Zambezi to Sena and Tete in search of gold, and in the 1560s they entered into direct dealings with the rulers of the Mutapa Empire.

To hold the interior Portugal granted large estates called prazos. Through marriage with local families many of these became Afro-Portuguese or Afro-Indian domains, defended by armies of enslaved Africans known as Chikunda. Slavery was woven into the economy: captives were bought and sold by African chiefs, Arab traders and Portuguese alike, and many were taken in raids and sold to the prazo holders. Portuguese influence remained thin. After Omani Arabs took Fort Jesus at Mombasa in 1698, Portugal lost much of the northern coastal trade and fell back to the south.

In the late nineteenth century Portugal set out to make its claims real. It annexed the Gaza Empire in 1895, subdued the Zambezi valley by 1902 and pushed into the north last of all, in the face of armed African resistance. In the late 1890s the governor-general's seat moved south to Lourenço Marques, today's Maputo. Large areas were handed to chartered companies, notably the Mozambique Company and the Niassa Company, which built railways to neighbouring British colonies. Although slavery had been legally abolished, these companies imposed forced labour and supplied cheap African workers to mines and plantations in other colonies. Their concessions were ended in 1929 and 1942, bringing the whole territory under direct government rule.

Under Salazar's Estado Novo, Mozambique was declared an inseparable part of a multiracial Portuguese nation and, from 1951, an overseas province. In practice the Indigenato statute of 1929 divided people into citizens, a small group of assimilated Africans, and the great majority classed as natives, who were subject to forced labour, pass controls and segregated schooling. By 1970 only 7.7 per cent of the population could read and write. The system was abolished in the early 1960s, though inequality remained. The economy grew fast in the 1950s and 1960s, the Cahora Bassa dam was begun in 1969, and by 1970 the colony had about 8.2 million people, including some 250,000 Europeans by 1974.

The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), based in Tanzania, began its guerrilla war in September 1964, part of the wider Portuguese Colonial War. Large Portuguese offensives such as Operation Gordian Knot in 1970 damaged FRELIMO's bases but brought no final victory, and the cost of fighting in Africa fed the discontent that produced the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon in April 1974. The Lusaka agreement then set the terms for handing power to FRELIMO. Most of the Portuguese population left within a year, some fleeing, some expelled, and Mozambique became independent in June 1975.

Colonial buildings, from the railway station built between 1913 and 1916 to the modernist designs of the 1960s, still shape central Maputo. The prazos, forced labour and the Indigenato left deep inequalities, while the colony also produced footballers such as Eusébio who starred for Portugal.

Our maps show Portuguese East Africa in 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800, 1815 and 1900, one of the African possessions of the Portuguese Empire. By 1900, after the conquests of the 1890s, it reached close to the borders of modern Mozambique.