Bantu tribes moved into the area, part of which is now Mozambique, from central and west Africa during the third century. The 11th-century empire of the Shona – the main ethnic group in modern Zimbabwe – covered part of Mozambique; relations between the two peoples are still very close.
Much of the historical data for this period comes from the records of Arab and Indian traders who made contact with the region in the 10th century. Settlements featured stone enclosures, and their inhabitants played an important role in intra-African tradeto the west.
Over the next several centuries, traders from northeastern Africa and later from the Middle East and Asia arrived by sea, prompting ports along the Mozambican coast to flourish. Sofala, among the most prominent ports, developed as a tradecenter for gold from the interior. Commercial settlements also developed to the north of Sofala at Angoche, Moçambique Island, the Querimba Islands, and the mouth of the Zambezi River. Beads, cloth, and other goods brought by Arab and Asian traders attracted caravans of agrarian-based traders from inland Mozambique. They in turn distributed the goods to the African interior. A struggle for control of this trade developed, and it was soon won by the cattle-owning chiefs of the Karanga in the south and the Makua in the north. Slave trading was also common throughout this period, in both the coastal and interior regions.
The first European expedition to Mozambique was led by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama who arrived in 1498. Thereafter, Portuguese influence gradually displaced the Arabs and Indians in the trading system. The Portuguese gradually moved inland, usurping the local rulers and taking over land and mineral resources.
They were eventually evicted, but despite that, the Portuguese gradually extended their control up the Zambezi Valley and north and south along the Mozambican coast. In 1727 they founded a trading post at Inhambane, on the southern coast, and in 1781 they permanently occupied Delagoa Bay, an important location farther south on the site of modern Maputo. Dutch and Austrian traders had briefly settled at Delagoa Bay, and English and American traders had hunted whales and traded ivory with the nearby Nguni and Tonga chiefs. From Delagoa Bay, Portugal controlled a prosperous ivory trade, which in turn attracted caravans from the interior.
At roughly the same time as the rise of the ivory trade, climatic changes and the rise of the slave trade had even greater effects on Mozambique. The trade in slaves, which had existed at a low level before the arrival of Europeans, continued throughout the colonial period, under the hand of African and European traders. By the late 1700s, however, demand for slaves had grown markedly in response to European colonization of Mauritius and Réunion. When prolonged droughts started in Mozambique in the 1760s and became endemic from the 1790s, crops failed, cattle suffered, chiefdoms faltered, and traditional patterns of long-distance commerce were disrupted. Banditry and slave raiding increased, and large numbers of slaves were brought to the coast. By 1800 Mozambique had become one of the world’s major slave-trading centers. Hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans were sold to slave traders and sent to the Americas. Until at least the 1870s, no other form of commerce generated as much profit.
In the 18th century, Mozambique became a major center for the slave trade, an industry which continued to thrive for decades after its official banning in 1842. By this time, Mozambique had become a Portuguese colony, but administration was left to the trading companies who had received long-term leases from Lisbon. By the end of the 19th century, the Portuguese had made boundary agreements with their colonial rivals, the United Kingdom and Germany, and had suppressed much of the African resistance. Authority was given to trading companies such as Mozambique Co., which forced local people to pay taxes and work on the plantations.
Beira , a well-located city on the Indian Ocean became a commercial center beginning in 1891 as the terminus of a railroad into the interior. Beira has handled the foreign trade of Congo (Kinshasa), Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi as well as of Mozambique.
