History of Mozambique
In 2007 Julio Mercader, of the University of Calgary, recovered dozens of 100,000-year-old stone tools from a deep limestone cave (Ngalue) near Lake Niassa in Mozambique showing that wild sorghum, the ancestor of the chief cereal consumed today in sub-Saharan Africa for flours, bread, porridges, and alcoholic beverages, was being consumed by Homo sapiens along with African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges, and the African "potato."
Between the 1st and 5th centuries AD,[citation needed] waves of Bantu-speaking peoples migrated from the north through the Zambezi River valley and then gradually into the plateau and coastal areas.
From about 1500, Portuguese trading posts and forts displaced the Arabic commercial and military hegemony, becoming regular ports of call on the new European sea route to the east.
The voyage of Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 marked the Portuguese entry into trade, politics, and society of the region.
The Portuguese gained control of the Island of Mozambique and the port city of Sofala in the early 16th century, and by the 1530s, small groups of Portuguese traders and prospectors seeking gold penetrated the interior regions, where they set up garrisons and trading posts at Sena and Tete on the River Zambezi and tried to gain exclusive control over the gold trade.
[2] Although Portuguese influence gradually expanded, its power was limited and exercised through individual settlers and officials who were granted extensive autonomy.
During these wars, the Mazrui and Omani Arabs reclaimed much of the Indian Ocean trade, forcing the Portuguese to retreat south.
Although slavery had been legally abolished in Mozambique, at the end of the 19th century the Chartered companies enacted a forced labor policy and supplied cheap—often forced—African labour to the mines and plantations of the nearby British colonies and South Africa.
[4][5][6] As communist and anti-colonial ideologies spread out across Africa, many clandestine political movements were established in support of Mozambican independence.
From a military standpoint, the Portuguese regular army maintained control of the population centres while the guerrilla forces sought to undermine their influence in rural and tribal areas in the north and west.
As part of their response to FRELIMO, the Portuguese government began to pay more attention to creating favourable conditions for social development and economic growth.
A law had been passed on the initiative of the then relatively unknown Armando Guebuza of the FRELIMO party ordering the Portuguese to leave the country in 24 hours with only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of luggage.
[9] Formed in 1975, Mozambican National Resistance, an anti-communist group sponsored by the Rhodesian Intelligence Service, and the apartheid government in South Africa, launched a series of attacks on transport routes, schools and health clinics, and the country descended into civil war.
By mid-1995, over 1.7 million refugees who had sought asylum in neighboring countries had returned to Mozambique, part of the largest repatriation witnessed in sub-Saharan Africa.
RENAMO accused FRELIMO of fraud, and threatened to return to civil war, but backed down after taking the matter to the Supreme Court and losing.
Much of the economic recovery which has followed the end of the Mozambican Civil War (1977–1992) is being led by investors and tourists from neighbour South Africa and from East Asia.
[18] The candidate of the ruling Mozambican Liberation Front's (Frelimo) Filipe Nyusi has been the President of Mozambique since January 2015 after winning the election in October 2014.
