Portuguese Mozambique

Portuguese Mozambique dates from trading settlements on the Swahili coast from 1498, and for centuries it was a chain of coastal forts and river estates rather than a state. Inland authority was delegated to prazos - vast crown estates whose holders raised private armies - and later, from the 1890s, to chartered companies that governed a third of the territory with their own police, currencies and flags, and whose principal business was supplying labour to South African mines under contracts that paid part of the wage to the Portuguese state in gold. That labour export, along with the transit trade through Lourenco Marques to the Rand, was the colony's economy. Forced cotton cultivation was imposed on smallholders from the 1930s and produced hunger, and the indigenato system divided the population into a small assimilated minority with civil rights and everyone else without them. Reclassification as an overseas province in 1951 changed the vocabulary and not the arrangement. Frelimo launched an armed struggle in 1964 which by the early 1970s tied down substantial Portuguese forces; the Wiriyamu massacre of 1972, reported in the British press, damaged Lisbon's position internationally. As in Angola, the war ended at the metropolitan end: the Carnation Revolution of 1974 brought a government that negotiated withdrawal, and independence came on 25 June 1975. Almost the entire Portuguese population left within a year, and a civil war backed by Rhodesia and South Africa followed until 1992. The capital, Lourenco Marques, was renamed Maputo at independence. Portugal had ruled parts of the coast for four hundred and seventy-seven years when it left. The Cahora Bassa dam, completed in 1974 on the Zambezi, was built to supply South Africa and remained Portuguese-owned for three decades after the colony ended.

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