MOZAMBIQUE

	CLIMATE
	Mozambique has a humid, tropical climate. Its wet season lasts from November to March. The highlands receive the most rainfall. A dry season usually lingers between April and October, but on the southern coastal plains it often extends to form prolonged droughts.

A Land of Traders

Humans have lived in the Mozambique (moe-zahm-BEEK) region as hunters and gatherers for many thousands of years. Bantu-speaking peoples from the north and west (see CAMEROON) began arriving in the region nearly two thousand years ago, gradually displacing the hunter-gatherers. The Bantu were skilled ironworkers. They forged weapons and tools for farming.

The next arrivals, sometime between 800 and 900 C.E., were Arab merchants, who traded across the Indian Ocean. Some settled along the coast, bringing the religion of Islam to the region and intermarrying with local Bantu-speaking coastal people. From this mix emerged the Swahili (swah-HEE-lee) people, who built towns such as Sofala (probably modern Beira) in the 1200s and controlled the coastal trade. The Swahili, dealing in ivory and gold, traded with the African peoples occupying the Zambezi (zam-BEE-zee) Valley.

In the 1480s the Zambezi Valley came under the rule of a large Bantu-speaking empire known as the Maravi Confederacy, whose center was in what is now Malawi (see MALAWI). By 1650 the Maravi Confederacy stretched from the northern bank of the Zambezi River to the east coast around Moçambique Island and dominated the ivory trade of the region.

Under the Portuguese

During the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese arrived on the coast, lured by reports of the rich gold trade with the African interior. They also wanted to set up supply posts for their voyages to Asia. They soon clashed with the Swahili. The Portuguese sacked rich Swahili towns. They demolished mosques and used coral rock from the mosques to build fortresses. Like the Swahili, these Europeans traded profitably with the Maravi Confederacy.

The Portuguese attempted to establish a monopoly over the ivory trade in the lower Zambezi Valley. Their violence provoked the local people they displaced into forming an army and resisting the Portuguese in the 1580s.

From the 1630s the Portuguese moved inland south of the Zambezi River toward the Zimbabwe plateau to try to take control of the gold trade there. The region and the trade were controlled by the Shona (SHOE-nah) people of the Mwene Mutapa state, located on the Zambezi escarpment in what is now Zimbabwe (see ZIMBABWE). Portuguese attempts to control gold mining, using forced labor and much violence, provoked Shona resistance. Soldiers of the Rozvi Empire, also on the Zimbabwe plateau, eventually drove the Portuguese back down into the Zambezi Valley.

During the 1700s and 1800s, some Portuguese traders settled in the Zambezi Valley. These men, known as prazeros (prah-ZAE-roz), broke away from Portuguese control, married African women, and set themselves up as local chiefs, with armies of captive slaves. The prazeros ruled huge estates and treated the local Africans as their subjects. The African peoples and the prazeros of Mozambique continued to resist Portuguese rule, and the colonists were confined to the coast and the lower Zambezi Valley until the end of the nineteenth century. A series of treaties between Portugal and Germany and Portugal and Great Britain between 1885 and 1890 established the boundaries of the colony of Portuguese East Africa, as Mozambique was called.

In the 1930s the Portuguese drove peasant farmers off their land and set up plantations of rice and cotton. These crops were grown as cash crops for export. The plantations employed forced labor under brutal conditions. Local agriculture was abandoned, resulting in famine. More and more workers fled abroad rather than endure conditions close to slavery.