History of Mozambique - Colonial History

Colonial History

From about 1500, Portuguese trading posts and forts became regular ports of call on the new route to the east. "Mozambique" first described a small coral island at the mouth of Mossuril Bay, then the fort and town on that island, São Sebastião de Moçambique, and later extended to the whole of the Portuguese colonies on the east coast of Africa. The square fort at the northern extremity of the island was built in 1510 entirely of ballast stone brought from Portugal.

With the decline of Portuguese power, especially during the period when the crown of Portugal was combined with the crown of Spain (1580–1640), the Portuguese coastal settlements were ignored and fell into a ruinous condition. Afterwards, investment lagged while Lisbon devoted itself to the more lucrative trade with India and the Far East and to the colonization of Brazil. Into the 19th century, a system prevailed of dividing the land into prazos (large agricultural estates) which the natives cultivated for the benefit of the European leaseholders, who were also tax-collector for each district and claimed the tax either in labour or produce, a system that kept the sharecropping farmers in a state of serfdom. Direct Portuguese influence was limited. On the coast between several native ports of call and Madagascar a large surreptitious trade in slaves was carried on until 1877, supplying slaves for Arabia and the Ottomans. European traders and prospectors barely penetrated the interior regions, until the Transvaal gold rush. The commercial and political importance of Mozambique was eclipsed by Lourenço Marques.

In 1891 the Portuguese shifted the administration of much of the country to a large private company, under a charter granting sovereign rights for 50 years to the Mozambique Company, which, though it had its headquarters at Beira, was controlled and financed mostly by the British. The 'Mozambique Company' issued postage stamps and established railroad lines to neighboring countries. It supplied cheap – and often forced – African labor to the goldmines and plantations of the nearby British colonies and South Africa. Because policies were designed to benefit white settlers and the Portuguese homeland, little attention was paid to the integration of Mozambique's indigenous population, its economic infrastructure, or the skills of its indigenous rural population. Under Salazar, Portugal instituted another form of cash crop creation called the concession system. The cotton concessionary system was government run. Prices were fixed at extremely low prices, regulations were set upon the native Africans, and inhabitants were forced to work up to 150 days a year on their fields (1 hectacre per male, 1/2 hectare per female). Africans could only sell their cotton for African (low) prices, while Europeans had special high selling prices. Mozambicans knew cotton as the "mother of all poverty" during this time, and intense periods of poverty and starvation were fairly common.