Portuguese Mozambique
Substate | Defunct
1498 CE to 1895 CE
Portuguese Mozambique or Portuguese East Africa are the common terms by which Mozambique is designated when referring to the historic period when it was a Portuguese overseas territory.
Former Portuguese Mozambique constituted a string of Portuguese colonies and later a single Portuguese overseas province along the south-east African coast, which now form the Republic of Mozambique.During its history, Portuguese Mozambique has the following formal designations: "Captaincy of Sofala" (1501-1569), "Captaincy of Mozambique and Sofala" (1570-1676), "Captaincy-General of Mozambique and Rivers of Sofala" (1676-1836), "Province of Mozambique" (1836-1926), "Colony of Mozambique" (1926-1951), "Province of Mozambique" (1951-1972) and "State of Mozambique" (1972-1975).Portuguese trading settlements and, later, colonies are formed along the coast from 1498, when Vasco da Gama first reaches the Mozambican coast.
Lourenço Marques explores the area that is now Maputo Bay in 1544.
He settles permanently in present-day Mozambique, where he spends most of his life, and his work is followed by other Portuguese explorers, sailors and traders.
Some of these colonies are handed over in the late nineteenth century for rule by chartered companies such as the Companhia de Moçambique and the Companhia do Niassa.
In 1951, the colonies sre combined into a single overseas province under the name Moçambique as an integral part of Portugal.
Most of the original colonies have given their names to the modern provinces of Mozambique.Mozambique, according to official policy, is not a colony at all but rather a part of the "pluricontinental and multiracial nation" of Portugal.
Portugal seeks in Mozambique, as it does in all its colonies, to Europeanize the local population and assimilate them into Portuguese culture.
Lisbon also wants to retain the colonies as trading partners and markets for its goods.
African inhabitants of the colony are ultimately supposed to become full citizens with full political rights through a long development process.
To this end, segregation in Mozambique is minimal compared to that in neighboring South Africa.
However, paid forced labor, to which all Africans are liable if they fail to pay head taxes, is not abolished until the early 1960s.
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Two ships under Bartholomeu Dias eventually round the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and travel more than six hundred kilometers along the southwestern coast.
An expedition under Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape in 1497, sails up the east African coast to the
Arab port of Malindi (in present-day Kenya), then crosses the Indian Ocean to India, thereby opening up a way for Europeans to gain direct access to the spices of the East without having to go through Arab middlemen.
The Portuguese dominate this trade route throughout the sixteenth century.
They build forts and supply stations along the west and east African coasts, but they do not build south of present-day Angola and Mozambique because of the treacherous currents along the southern coast.
Swahili commercial settlements had existed along the East African coast and outlying islands for several centuries when Portuguese explorers reached East Africa in 1498.
The voyage of Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean in 1498 had marked the Portuguese entry into trade, politics, and society in the Indian Ocean world.
The Island of Mozambique had first been occupied by Portuguese explorers in the late fifteenth century.
They had quickly established a fort here, and with time a community will spring up and achieve importance as port of call, missionary base and a center for a thriving trade in gold, ivory, and enslaved East Africans.
Portuguese trading posts and forts will soon become regular ports of call on the new route to the east.
Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama, spurred by the discoveries of Columbus, and accompanied by Portuguese navigators, traders, soldiers, and missionaries, becomes the first European to sail around Africa to reach India.
Stopping on the East African coast, the expedition breaks up the storeship, and reaches present Mozambique, where, as Arab traders have preceded them, they are assumed Muslims.
The sultan of Mozambique supplies them with pilots, who guide them on their journey northward, sailing past the city-states of eastern Africa.
Before sailing east, they stop at Malindi and Mombasa, where Arab traders have settled, in present Kenya.
En route to India, the Portuguese sight the Laccadive Islands.
Da Gama’s three small ships cross the Indian Ocean in twenty-three days, aided by a local pilot, and reach Calicut, a town on India’s Malabar coast, on May 20.
Calicut’s ruler, the Zamorin, welcomes the Portuguese, who at first believe that the Indians, actually Hindus, are Christians.
The expedition’s traders purchase spices, but the trade goods and presents provided by the Portuguese king are suitable for Africa, not India, and the Arabs who already dominate trade in the Indian Ocean region rightly regard the Portuguese as rivals.
Da Gama is consequently unable to conclude a treaty or commercial agreement in Calicut.
After one further stop on the Indian coast, the Portuguese set out to return with a load of spices.
Their recrossing of the Indian Ocean takes three months, however, and so many men die of scurvy that da Gama is forced to burn the São Rafael for lack of a crew.
The expedition makes a few stops in East Africa, including the island of Zanzibar, then heads south for the Cape of Good Hope.
Two years later, Da Gama’s countryman Cabral rounds the Cape with a small fleet to reach Mozambique and Madagascar, where Arab traders have established coastal trading posts, and eventually India, where he establishes a trading factory at Cochin before returning to Lisbon.
Portugal will subsequently establish coastal forts in the area of present Mozambique and implement a thriving trade in gold, ivory, and enslaved East Africans.
Vasco da Gama becomes in 1498 the first European to sail around Africa to reach India.
Stopping on the East African coast, where Arab-controlled territory is an integral part of the network of trade in the Indian Ocean, the expedition breaks up the storeship, and on March 2, 1498, reaches the vicinity of Mozambique Island, a major Arab port and boat building center.
The name of the island is derived from Ali Musa Mbiki, the current sultan of the island.
This name will subsequently be taken to the mainland country which is modern-day Mozambique, and the island will be renamed Ilha de Moçambique, or Island of Mozambique.
Fearing the local population will be hostile to Christians, Gama impersonates a Muslim and gains audience with the Sultan.
With the paltry trade goods he has to offer, Gama is unable to provide a suitable gift to the ruler and soon the local populace becomes suspicious of Gama and his men.
Forced by a hostile crowd to flee Mozambique, Gama departs the harbor on March 29, firing his cannons into the city in retaliation.
The port of Mombasa is an important center for the trade in spices, gold, and ivory.
Its trade links reach as far as the Indian subcontinent and modern-day China and oral historians today can still recall this period of local history.
There had been trade links between Mombasa and Cholas of South India.
A key node in the complex and far reaching Indian Ocean trading networks, Mombasa’s agricultural key exports are millet, sesamum and coconuts.
Vasco da Gama’s expedition, traveling north from Mozambique, resorts to piracy in the vicinity of modern Kenya, looting Arab merchant ships that are generally unarmed trading vessels without heavy cannons.
The Portuguese become the first known Europeans to visit Mombasa from April 7 to 13, 1498, but are met with hostility and soon depart.
Gama continues north, arriving at the friendlier port of Malindi on April 14, 1498—whose leaders are in conflict with those of Mombasa—and here the expedition first notes evidence of Indian traders.
Da Gama and his crew contract the services of a pilot whose knowledge of the monsoon winds will allow him to bring the expedition the rest of the way to Calicut, located on the southwest coast of India.
Sources differ over the identity of the pilot, calling him variously a Christian, a Muslim, and a Gujarati.
One traditional story describes the pilot as the famous Arab navigator Ibn Majid, but other contemporaneous accounts place Majid elsewhere, and he could not have been near the vicinity at the time.
Also, none of the Portuguese historians of the time mention Ibn Majid.
Vasco da Gama leaves Malindi for India on April 24, 1498.
Gama’s Portuguese fleet arrives in South India at a beach known as Kappad, near Thiruvangoor, on May 20, 1498.
The King of Calicut, the Samudiri (Zamorin), who is at this time staying in his second capital at Ponnani, returns to Calicut on hearing the news of the foreign fleet's arrival.
The navigator is received with traditional hospitality, including a grand procession of at least three thousand armed Nairs, but an interview with the Zamorin fails to produce any concrete results.
The presents that da Gama sends to the Zamorin as gifts from Dom Manuel—four cloaks of scarlet cloth, six hats, four branches of corals, a box with seven brass vessels, a chest of sugar, two barrels of oil and a cask of honey—are trivial, and fail to impress.
While the Zamorin's officials wonder at why there is no gold or silver, the Muslim merchants who consider da Gama their rival suggest that the latter is only an ordinary pirate and not a royal ambassador.
Vasco da Gama's request for permission to leave a factor behind him in charge of the merchandise he cannot sell is turned down by the King, who insists that da Gama pay customs duty—preferably in gold—like any other trader, which strains the relation between the two.
Annoyed by this, da Gama carries off with him by force a few Nairs and sixteen fishermen (mukkuva).
Nevertheless, da Gama's expedition is successful beyond all reasonable expectation, bringing in cargo that is worth sixty times the cost of the expedition.
Gama leaves Calicut on August 29, 1498.
Eager to set sail for home, he ignores the local knowledge of monsoon wind patterns that are still blowing onshore.
The fleet initially inches north along the Indian coast, and then anchors in at Anjediva island to await more favorable winds.
The Portuguese finally strike out for their Indian Ocean crossing on October 3, 1498.
But with the winter monsoon yet to set in, it will be a harrowing journey.
It had taken Vasco da Gama's fleet only twenty-three days to cross the Indian Ocean on the outgoing journey, sailing with the summer monsoon wind; now, on the return trip, sailing against the wind, it has taken one hundred and thirty-two days.
Gama sees land again only on January 2, 1499, passing before the coastal Somali city of Mogadishu, at this time under the influence of the Ajuran Empire in the Horn of Africa.
The fleet does not make a stop, but passing before Mogadishu, the anonymous diarist of the expedition notes that it is a large city with houses of four or five stories high and big palaces in its center and many mosques with cylindrical minarets.