A Short History of Mozambique

Malyn Newitt

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781868428526
• eBook ISBN:
  9781868428533
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This comprehensive history traces the evolution of modern Mozambique, from its early modern rigins in the Indian Ocean trading system and the Portuguese maritime empire to the fifteen-year civil war that followed independence and its continued after effects.Though peace was achieved in 1992 through international mediation, Mozambique's remarkable recovery has shown signs of stalling. Malyn Newitt explores the historical roots of Mozambican disunity and hampered development, beginning with the divisive effects of the slave trade, the drawing of colonial frontiers in the 1890s and the lasting particularities of the provinces.Following the nationalist guerrillas' victory against the Portuguese in 1975, these regional divisions resurfaced in a civil war pitting the south against the north and centre. The settlement of the early 1990s is now under threat from a revived insurgency, and the ghosts of the past remain.This book seeks to distil this complex history, and to understand why, twenty-five years after the Peace Accord, Mozambicans still remain among the poorest people in the world.

1

THE MOZAMBICAN ENVIRONMENT AND ETHNOGRAPHY

The Mozambican Environment

Modern Mozambique came into existence as a result of the Anglo-Portuguese boundary treaty of 1891 when the frontiers were drawn and Mozambique was formally separated from its neighbours, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and South Africa. The country was demarcated in 1891, added to slightly in 1919, and is 309,000 square miles in extent. By way of comparison, Angola is 481,354 square miles and Portugal 35,560 square miles.

Before the 1891 partition south-eastern Africa had a geographical unity and shared a common history, which the various treaties subdivided into six crudely cut out states. In the jigsaw puzzle that resulted, Mozambique was allocated the entire coastline from Delagoa Bay to Cape Delgado, which, at 1,535 miles, is a third of the whole coast of eastern Africa. Behind this long coastline is a relatively low-lying hinterland, before a series of escarpments rise towards the intermediate plateau and the high mountains along the borders with South Africa, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The mountains create some dramatic landscapes and the inselbergs that surround the northern city of Nampula challenge Monument Valley in the United States for their spectacular effect. The highest mountains in Mozambique are Mount Binga and Mount Namuli, both of which rise to around 8,000 feet.

From these highlands rivers flow towards the coast, cutting Mozambique into sections like the slices of a layer cake. Among the major rivers are the Rovuma which forms the northern boundary with Tanzania and the Lugenda which flows diagonally from the highlands of Malawi and joins the Rovuma before it enters the sea. The Zambesi rises in the far interior of Zambia and divides Mozambique in half, providing a narrow low-lying strip of river valley which cuts deeply into the African plateau in a series of gorges and rapids. The Zambesi is joined by a number of rivers that come down from the highlands and feed the main stream. In the history of Mozambique the most important of these have been the Shire and Luangwa entering from the north and the Luenha, the Mazoe and the Musengezi joining it from the south. In many respects the lower reaches of the Zambesi have been a kind of projection inland of the coastal zone. South of the Zambesi the Pungue, Buzi and Sabi rivers flow down from Zimbabwe and the Limpopo, Nkomati and the rivers that flow into Delagoa Bay come from South Africa. All these rivers rise in the interior but reach the sea at points along the Mozambican coast. As well as the major rivers that rise beyond Mozambique’s borders, there are many smaller rivers whose course lies completely or almost completely within Mozambique itself. The region immediately north of the Zambesi in particular, is criss-crossed by rivers that rise in the Milanje or Namuli highlands and that find outlets along the coast between the Zambesi delta and Mozambique Island.

Mozambique’s rivers form a framework around which the history of the country has gradually formed itself. Although most of them are not navigable more than fifty miles or so from the coast, they have nevertheless become routes for commerce and corridors for migration. The route from Lake Malawi down the Lugenda to the Rovuma, for example, is an ancient trade and migration route. Along it moved caravans bringing ivory and slaves to the coast and it was along this valley that the nineteenth-century migrations brought Yao to settle in the Shire highlands. Mozambique includes within its border the eastern shore of Lake Malawi and 5,000 square miles of the Lake itself, with the anomaly that Likoma Island, that lies within Mozambique’s territorial waters but where a UMCA mission was established in the nineteenth century, belongs to Malawi—not the only incident where history was to override geography.

The Zambesi, exceptionally navigable for two hundred miles into the interior, has always been a major highway fed by its major tributaries the Shire, the Luangwa and the Kafue, river routes which for centuries have linked central Africa with the world of the Indian Ocean. Until the 1960s the Zambesi was a wild and turbulent river. Flood water descending after the rains turned it into a massive torrent which in its lower reaches spread over a bed two miles wide. Vast amounts of alluvial soil came with the floods and the river channels, and the outflows through the delta changed almost on an annual basis as banks of sand shifted and resettled in the floods. Permanent settlements on the banks were routinely endangered as the floods ate away at banks that had appeared secure only a year before. Then in 1962 the Kariba dam, built by the British, began the process of taming the river. In 1969 the Cabora Bassa dam was built in Mozambique and large stretches of the Zambesi, which at one time had raged in torrents through narrow gorges became great inland seas. The flooding on the lower river now became a distant memory but, as with so many other dam schemes elsewhere in the world, the Zambesi dams brought with them profound changes to the ecology of the valley and the lives of the inhabitants.

South of the Zambesi, between the escarpment and the coast, the rivers cross a land which is, at the best of times, relatively infertile. The soil is sandy and the vegetation consists of light woodland and dry savannah. The rivers, with their flood plains, form corridors with richer alluvial soil which are relatively better watered. It is in these areas that population density has always been highest.

Rainfall in the south is irregular and this factor, coupled with the poor soils, has resulted in much of the south being thinly populated. North of approximately latitude 24 south, the land falls under the influence of the seasonal monsoon winds (which at sea can form powerful typhoons) but even here rains are irregular and the country can be subject to droughts which may last years. These droughts were, and still are, profoundly disruptive and can bring with them famine, epidemics and locust swarms. Although rural communities have traditionally had strategies for dealing with famine, these are seldom sufficient if the drought lasts over two years. Then migration becomes the only recourse forcing people to move towards areas which are better watered. This has created a population which is used to being mobile and has led to migrations, conquests and profound political disturbance. In more recent times, droughts and famines have fed the slave trade with cohorts of the destitute and have driven rural populations towards the towns.

Drought and famine punctuate the history of Mozambique and have profoundly influenced its development, as a few examples will illustrate. The famines of the 1570s and 1580s coincided with, and possibly caused, the Maravi invasions. A hundred years later famine and disease weakened the settlements of the Portuguese on the Zimbabwe plateau prior to their expulsion in the 1690s, and the environmental crises of the 1760s severely affected the Monomotapa state and the gold trade of Zumbo. The long series of droughts, accompanied by locusts and epidemics, that began in the 1790s and continued until the 1830s, coincide with the rise of the slave trade and the Ngoni invasions. In the 1860s drought and famine, following on the Gaza war of succession, brought profound social and political change, including the beginnings of the flow of migrant labour to South Africa. W.P. Johnson describes a severe famine among the Yao in the early 1880s at a moment of crisis in their relations with their neighbours. The famine years of 1920–24 helped to swell the numbers of labourers forced from their farms into working for private employers or the government and in 1990–1 a famine contributed to ending the civil war.

There are many other years when the rains failed or partly failed and ironically many incidents also of devastating flooding. There were serious floods in the south in 1966 and 1967 and again in 1977 but the best remembered are the floods of 2000 on the lower reaches of the Nkomati and Limpopo when 700,000 people were displaced and 200,000 head of cattle were lost.

Many parts of the Mozambique lowlands are infested with tsetse fly so that it has been virtually impossible for cattle, and hence a cattle-based economy and society, to thrive. The human communities inhabiting this region have been deeply influenced by this climate. Kin groups have traditionally inhabited small villages and made a living from agriculture rather than from cattle herding. The need for an agricultural labour force has put a premium on the attachment of outsiders (clients or slaves) and, in particular, of women who were often the principal form of booty taken in local wars. At other times individuals fleeing famine or war have been assimilated into clans to help expand the labour force. As a result ‘the following of one individual chief was never restricted to a single clan or extended family’.1

Mozambican communities in all parts of the country have been characterised by the incorporation of captives taken in war, slaves purchased from dealers or destitute outsiders displaced by war or famine. In the nineteenth century slaves were purchased in northern Mozambique to supply the labour needed for the production of cash crops. In central Mozambique a kaleidoscope of polities, some dominated by Afro-Portuguese or Indo-Portuguese warlords, supported themselves through attracting clients or purchasing slaves to form their armies or to hunt for ivory. In the south the struggle between rival lineages and state systems again benefited those who could attract clients and followers and this historic form of clientship became transmuted into the political patrimonialism that marks modern Mozambique society and politics.

Village agriculture has always been supplemented by other forms of economic activity, hunting, trade, mining and artisan crafts such as working gold and iron, the weaving of cotton cloth and, more recently, the carving of ebony. Men in these communities were often traders, hunters, river boatmen or migrant workers, which made them absentees, while female labour was static and remained focused on the agricultural sector. North of the Zambesi this commonly led to the dominance of social relations based on matrilineal descent. Village agriculture, the allocation of land, and the organisation of labour, was the responsibility of female heads of lineages, and descent systems and conflict resolution recognised the primacy of a woman’s brother rather than her husband.

The small, lineage-based communities of the lowlands (the ‘little society’), particularly in the north, would frequently come together to form loose confederations under some charismatic leader but they did not build large and permanent state systems. They were easily dominated by warlords who acquired an armed following, swelled its numbers with captives and created semi-militarised polities. Over the longue durée this low veldt region was vulnerable to invasion from cattle-based states on the high veldt which wanted access to the sea and the networks of Indian Ocean trade. The historical record, both the chronicles of the Portuguese, the archaeological record and the oral histories of the indigenous inhabitants themselves, tell of invasions by Karanga-speaking rulers from the Zimbabwe plateau in the fifteenth century, the Maravi coming from the interior north of the Zambesi in the sixteenth, the so-called landins in the eighteenth century and the Ngoni moving north from South Africa in the nineteenth century.

Links with the wider Indian Ocean World

The seasonal monsoon winds blow as far south as latitude 24 south, roughly where the port of Inhambane is situated. When the winds are regular they not only bring rain but they link the communities of the Mozambique coast with the ports of the Red Sea, the Hadramaut, the Gulf and India as well as the nearby Comoro Islands and northern Madagascar. Between October and March trading dhows would visit the coast, primarily to trade for Central African gold but also taking on cargoes of exotic skins, turtle shell, ivory, mangrove poles and slaves. Here a maritime and commercial economy led to the formation of substantial urbanised settlements, some large like those situated on Mozambique Island and Angoche, which had commercial links throughout the western Indian Ocean. The port-town on Mozambique Island was visited by Vasco da Gama in 1498 on his pioneering journey to India. The chronicler who accompanied his fleet recorded that the inhabitants

are Mohammedans, and their language is the same as that of the Moors. Their dresses are of fine linen or cotton stuffs, with variously coloured stripes, and of rich and elaborate workmanship. They all wear toucas with borders of silk embroidered in gold. They are merchants and have transactions with white Moors, four of whose vessels were at the time in port, laden with gold, silver, cloves, pepper, ginger and silver rings and also quantities of pearls, jewels and rubies all of which articles are used by the people of this country.2

Other smaller settlements were founded either on the relative safety of offshore islands or in river estuaries, wherever there was a secure anchorage for dhows. These smaller settlements were principally concerned with local rather than international trade, building boats and dealing in foodstuffs, pottery, timber, straw mats and local artisan crafts. Through intermarriage and commercial contact much of the coastal population adopted aspects of Islamic culture. South of Inhambane, however, the monsoon did not blow. The trading dhows did not venture there and Islamic coastal culture never took root.

Opposite Mozambique Island, the Mozambique Channel narrows and the coast of Madagascar is only three hundred miles away, with the four Comoro Islands lying like stepping stones to connect it to mainland Africa. Northern Madagascar, the Comoros and coastal Mozambique form a single maritime region where trade and migration have helped to create communities with a shared Islamic cultural tradition.

Although it has a very extensive coastline, Mozambique has very few ports suitable for oceanic shipping. Much of the northern part of the coast is lined with coral islands and reefs while the rivers that enter the sea bring with them alluvial sand which the strong Mozambique current stretches out into spits or deposits as sand bars. The old port of Sofala used by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century first silted up and was then swept away by the tide; access to Quelimane, for centuries the main port of entry for the Zambesi, had a notorious sand bar which made it almost inaccessible to any boats but those with the shallowest draft. Mozambique Island was suitable for ships in the age of sail, although its entrance was dangerous, but Ibo wa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise for the Author
• List of maps and illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Chapter 1 – The Mozambican environment and ethnography
• Chapter 2 – The sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries
• Chapter 3 – The nineteenth century: African agency in the creation of Mozambique
• Chapter 4 – The intervention of Europeans and the scramble for Africa
• Chapter 5 – Portuguese colonial rule to 1919
• Chapter 6 – Colonial Mozambique 1919 to 1975
• Chapter 7 – Independence and civil war
• Chapter 8 – Mozambique after the civil war
• Chapter 9 – Economy and society since 1994
• Further Reading
• Notes
• About the Book
• About the Author
• Imprint Page