Mozambique

The earliest inhabitants of the territory now called Mozambique were Khoisan hunter-gatherers, who were gradually displaced or absorbed during the Bantu expansion of the first millennium of the common era. By around the eighth century, Bantu-speaking agriculturalists and ironworkers had established settled communities along the Zambezi valley and the Indian Ocean littoral. From roughly the ninth century onward, the coast was drawn into the Swahili trading world, and Arab and Persian merchants founded or developed harbour towns such as Sofala, Angoche, and the island of Mozambique, exporting gold, ivory, and slaves drawn from interior polities. The most powerful of those interior states was the Kingdom of Mwene Mutapa, which rose in the fifteenth century in the Zambezi basin and dominated the gold trade with the coast.

Portuguese navigators reached the coast in 1498 with the voyage of Vasco da Gama, and over the following century Portugal seized control of the Swahili ports, displacing existing Muslim merchant networks. From the seventeenth century, the Portuguese crown granted vast estates known as prazos along the Zambezi, while the slave trade to Brazil and the French Indian Ocean islands grew rapidly through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, Nguni migrations from the south produced the Gaza Empire under Soshangane, which ruled much of southern Mozambique until its defeat by Portuguese forces in 1895. The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 and subsequent agreements fixed the colony's modern borders, and effective Portuguese administration of the interior was only consolidated in the early twentieth century, partly through chartered companies such as the Mozambique Company and the Niassa Company.

Under the Estado Novo regime in Lisbon after 1933, Mozambique was reclassified as an overseas province and integrated tightly into Portuguese economic planning, with forced cotton cultivation and contract labour exports to South African mines. The Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO, was founded in 1962 under Eduardo Mondlane and launched an armed struggle in 1964. After the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon in 1974, Portugal agreed to decolonisation, and Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975 under President Samora Machel, who proclaimed a one-party Marxist-Leninist state. From 1977 a long civil war pitted FRELIMO against the Mozambican National Resistance, RENAMO, backed first by Rhodesia and then by apartheid South Africa; the conflict killed an estimated one million people and displaced several million more before the Rome General Peace Accords ended it in October 1992.

A new constitution in 1990 had already introduced multiparty politics and a market economy, and the first competitive elections were held in 1994, won by Joaquim Chissano of FRELIMO. The party has retained the presidency through every subsequent election, under Armando Guebuza from 2005, Filipe Nyusi from 2015, and Daniel Chapo following the disputed October 2024 vote. Recent decades have been marked by rapid but uneven growth driven by coal and offshore natural gas, devastating cyclones in 2019, and an ongoing Islamist insurgency in the northern province of Cabo Delgado that began in 2017 and drew in Rwandan and Southern African Development Community forces from 2021.

Mozambique today is a unitary presidential republic governed under the 2004 constitution, with an executive president, a single-chamber Assembly of the Republic, and ten provinces plus the capital city of Maputo, which together frame the institutions described in the rest of this dossier.