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Who colonized Mozambique?

Southern Africa — the powers that ruled Mozambique, the dates, and what independence did and did not change.

In short

Who colonized Mozambique?

Portugal, from coastal trading posts in 1505 to formal colonial rule and independence on 25 June 1975.

Mozambique was colonised on the cheap: Portugal leased whole provinces to chartered companies that taxed, policed and conscripted labour on their own account.

Reference

Who ruled Mozambique, and when

before 1505
Swahili coastal city-states, Mutapa and Gaza empires
1505–1975
Portugal

At a glance

Key facts

Colonising powers
Portugal
Independence
25 June 1975
Chartered rule
Large areas run by private companies with police and tax powers
Labour export
Mozambican miners supplied South African gold mines by treaty
Literacy at independence
Under 10%

Chronology

Key dates

  1. 1505

    Portuguese post at Sofala.

  2. 1890s

    Chartered companies granted governing powers over vast territories.

  3. 1930s–60s

    Forced cotton cultivation and migrant labour to South African mines.

  4. 1964–74

    Liberation war led by FRELIMO.

  5. 1975

    Independence.

Context

What the record shows

The country's chief export under late colonial rule was labour itself, contracted to the mines of South Africa in exchange for gold payments to Lisbon.

Questions

Frequently asked

Who colonised Mozambique?
Portugal, from 1505 until independence in 1975.
What was the forced cotton regime?
A system from the 1930s requiring African households to grow cotton for sale at fixed low prices, enforced by beatings and quotas, which caused recurrent food shortages.
When did Mozambique become independent?
25 June 1975.

Read on

Related in the archive

References

Sources — colonial Mozambique

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.