The gold coast
Sofala and, later, the Island of Mozambique were Swahili trading towns plugged into the Indian Ocean world — gold from the interior kingdom of Mutapa, ivory, and cloth and beads coming back from India and Arabia. The Island gave the whole country its name and served as the Portuguese colonial capital for centuries; its stone town is a UNESCO site.
Vasco da Gama put in here in 1498 on his way to India, and Portugal gradually turned trade into control. Much of the interior was run through prazos, huge estates, and through a chartered company; forced labour and forced cotton-growing lasted well into the twentieth century.
FRELIMO and independence
The liberation front FRELIMO launched an armed struggle in 1964 under Eduardo Mondlane, an academic assassinated by a parcel bomb in 1969, and then Samora Machel. As in Angola, the empire ended not on the battlefield but in Lisbon, when the 1974 coup toppled Portugal's dictatorship. Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975, a one-party Marxist state with Machel as president.
Almost all of the Portuguese settlers left within months, taking skills and capital with them and, in many cases, wrecking what they could not carry. The new state inherited very little and very few trained people. The flight was so complete that at independence the country had only a few dozen university graduates and almost no doctors or engineers of its own.
The war
The civil war ran from 1977 to 1992. RENAMO was created by Rhodesian intelligence and then sponsored by apartheid South Africa, both determined to punish Mozambique for backing their own liberation movements. It was a Cold War proxy war and a regional destabilisation campaign at once, fought largely against civilians, with mass use of child soldiers and land mines. Around a million people died and millions more were displaced.
Samora Machel himself died in 1986 when his aircraft crashed on the South African side of the border in circumstances still not fully explained and widely suspected. The Rome peace accords ended the war in 1992, and — unusually — the peace held; RENAMO became an opposition party.
Gas, cyclones and a new insurgency
Enormous offshore gas fields were found in the Rovuma basin off Cabo Delgado in the far north from 2010, promising to make Mozambique a major liquefied-natural-gas exporter. Then in 2017 an Islamist insurgency, linked to the Islamic State, erupted in the same province, displacing around a million people and forcing TotalEnergies to suspend its multibillion-dollar project. Rwandan and regional troops pushed the militants back from 2021 but did not end it.
On top of that, the coast is battered by some of the strongest cyclones in the southern hemisphere — Idai in 2019 all but destroyed the port city of Beira. The 2024 election that installed Daniel Chapo of the still-ruling FRELIMO was disputed and followed by deadly protests. A hidden-debt scandal, in which state firms secretly borrowed around two billion dollars for tuna boats and coastal security that largely vanished, cut Mozambique off from the IMF and donors for years after 2016. The gas is a promise the country has not yet been allowed to keep.