Mozambique

Overview

Mozambique stretches along the southeast African coast facing Madagascar, covering 801,590 square kilometres with about 34.9 million people; its capital is Maputo, in the far south. Bantu-speaking peoples settled the region in the first millennium, and from the 9th century Swahili-Arab trading towns such as Sofala and Mozambique Island exported gold from the interior kingdoms of Great Zimbabwe and Mutapa. Vasco da Gama reached the coast in 1498, and Portugal gradually built a colony from 1505, governed through the prazo estate system and, in the late 19th century, vast chartered companies; the capital moved to Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in 1898.

History

Armed resistance coalesced in FRELIMO, which launched its guerrilla war in September 1964. Portugal's 1974 revolution brought independence on 25 June 1975 under Samora Machel, and most of the roughly 250,000 Portuguese settlers departed, collapsing the colonial economy. FRELIMO proclaimed a Marxist one-party state, and from 1977 Rhodesia and later apartheid South Africa sponsored the RENAMO insurgency. The ensuing civil war killed around a million people and drove 1.7 million into exile; Machel died in a 1986 plane crash. His successor Joaquim Chissano liberalised the economy, adopted a multiparty constitution in 1990 and signed the Rome General Peace Accords with RENAMO in October 1992, mediated by the Sant'Egidio community.

Multiparty elections have been held since 1994, all won by FRELIMO — Chissano, Armando Guebuza, Filipe Nyusi and Daniel Chapo, sworn in January 2025 — though opposition and observer allegations of fraud have accompanied most votes. Mozambique joined the Commonwealth in 1995, unique among non-former-British colonies of its era. RENAMO waged a low-intensity insurgency from 2013 to 2019, and since 2017 a far deadlier Islamic State-linked insurgency has ravaged gas-rich Cabo Delgado province, displacing hundreds of thousands.

Later history and present status

The economy relies on agriculture and fisheries, aluminium smelting and some of the world's largest untapped offshore natural-gas reserves, whose development the insurgency has repeatedly stalled. Devastating cyclones — Idai and Kenneth in 2019, Freddy in 2023 — have underscored acute climate vulnerability. Portuguese is the official language; the population is overwhelmingly African (Makhuwa, Tsonga and others), about 62% Christian and 19% Muslim, concentrated in the north.