The groups on the Zimbabwe plateau expanded their herds and moved between the plateau and the surrounding Mozambican lowlands in pursuit of seasonal pastures, although the tsetse fly, which causes sleeping sickness, was present in the region. The region’s economy was rooted in agriculture and cattle keeping, but its social and political organization became more complex with the development of local industries and trade, specifically the mining of gold, copper, and iron ore and the development of salt pans, tool forges, and potting industries. The civilization of Great Zimbabwe, which dominated the region politically from the mid-13th to the mid-15th century, controlled mining and trade.

The zimbabwe settlement at Manekweni, about 30 miles (50 km) from the Indian Ocean in southern Mozambique, replicated in miniature the social and settlement patterns of the highland interior. Manekweni was a center for agriculture, cattle keeping, and the gold trade from about the 12th to the 18th century.

From roughly the 10th to the 18th century, Great Zimbabwe and the area of Central Africa around Lake Kisale (in present-day Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) were the region’s centers of production and intra-African trade. Beginning in at least the 1st millennium, however, people of this region traded with various non-Africans. The earliest and most important external trade link for Mozambique was with Middle Eastern and South Asian peoples who traded beads and cloth for gold across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

By the 14th century, African Arab, or Swahili, trade cities were flourishing along the coast from Somalia in the north to Kilwa in what is now southern Tanzania. Smaller Swahili sultanates developed along the northern coast of Mozambique as far south as Angoche. A series of markets had arisen throughout the region by the 16th century, sustained by intraregional trade in raw materials and long-distance trade in gold, copper, ivory, and slaves.

Arrival of the Portuguese

The voyage of Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean in 1498 marked the European entry into trade, politics, and society in the Indian Ocean world. 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 had pushed their way into the interior, where they set up garrisons and trading posts at Sena and Tete on the Zambezi River and tried to gain exclusive control over the gold trade. The Portuguese attempted to legitimate and consolidate their trade and settlement positions through the creation of prazos (land grants) tied to European occupation. While prazos were originally developed to be held by Europeans, through intermarriage they became African Portuguese or African Indian centers defended by large African slave armies known as Chikunda. Most prazos had declined by the mid-19th century, but several of them survived and strongly resisted Portuguese domination until the last quarter of the 19th century.

The Portuguese were able to wrest much of the coastal trade from Arabs between 1500 and 1700, but, with the Arab seizure of Portugal’s key foothold at Fort Jesus on Mombasa (now in Kenya) in 1698, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction. During the 18th and 19th centuries the Mazrui and Omani Arabs reclaimed much of the Indian Ocean trade, forcing the Portuguese to retreat south. During the 19th century other European powers, particularly the British and the French, became increasingly involved in the trade and politics of the region.

Effects of the slave trade

By the 18th century, slaves had become an increasingly important part of Mozambique’s overall export trade from the East African coast. Yao traders developed slave networks from the Marave area around the tip of Lake Nyasa to Kilwa and the Island of Mozambique. Prazo traders along the Zambezi sold gold and slaves from Zumbo, Tete, and Manica to Portuguese merchants at Quelimane, and Tsonga ivory traders developed routes from the Transvaal region of South Africa and from the Zimbabwe plateau to coastal entrepôts at Inhambane and Maputo. During the 19th century, Mozambicans were sold as slaves in the Portuguese and Brazilian South Atlantic trade, the Arab trade from the Swahili coast, and the French trade to the sugar-producing islands of the Indian Ocean and Madagascar. Although the trade in slaves declined as a result of the mid-19th-century slave-trade agreements between Portugal and Britain, clandestine trade—particularly from central and northern Mozambique—continued into the 20th century.

During the first three decades of the 19th century, the proliferation of military and raiding groups from the conflicts in the northern Nguni heartland southwest of Mozambique had an important impact on southern and west-central Mozambique. Several military groups, offshoots of the emerging Zulu state, invaded Mozambican territory, seizing cattle, hostages, and food as they went. The waves of armed groups disrupted both trade and day-to-day production throughout the area. Two groups, the Jere under Zwangendaba and the Ndwandwe (both later known as Ngoni) under Soshangane, swept through Mozambique. Zwangendaba’s group continued north across the Zambezi, settling to the west of contemporary Mozambique, but Soshangane’s group crossed the Limpopo into southern Mozambique, where it eventually consolidated itself into the Gaza state. In the 1860s a succession struggle between the sons of Soshangane caused enormous suffering in the region and weakened the Gaza state.