Mozambique

Ths nation is today known as the Republic of Mozambique (República de Moçambique). Migrations of Bantu-speaking people from the 1st through 5th centuries CE populated most of the region, establishing agricultural communities in the interior, and societies based on fishing towards the coast. In later years, the arrival of Arab traders brought an abundance of new products, technologies and ideas, and a desire for gold and slaves. From around 1500, Portuguese merchants began arriving in Mozambique, establishing small trading settlements and forts along the coast and displacing many of the Arab coastal establishments. Expanding their influence to the interior, the Portuguese encountered Arab resistance around 1698 and retreated south, where they were forced to compete with British and French trading interests. Nevertheless, Portugal solidified its hold on the Overseas Province of Mozambique by shifting much of the administrative duties over to large, private companies. With British financing, these companies established ports, roads, and railroads to the interior and neighboring countries, mostly with incredibly cheap or forced local labor.

By the early 20th century, however, the Portuguese government labored towards greater control over its colonial overseas possessions and did not renew the companies' concessions. In the 1950s, the status of Mozambique changed from colony to overseas province, and in the early 1970s it became a non-sovereign state. Despite the Portuguese policy of assimilation and a greater degree of administrative automony, however, the push for universal African independence reached the nation in the early 1960s. This manifested primarily in the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique or FRELIMO (Liberation front of Mozambique), a Marxist-Leninist political party which organized an armed guerilla movement to wrest control away from the Portuguese. From 1964 until 1974, European and African units of the Portuguese Armed Forces effectively held the guerilla army at bay, despite FRELIMO's support from both the USSR and Communist China. The Colonial War (which Portugal was fighting concurrently in Angola and Portuguese Guinea as well) eventually took its toll on the European nation, and in April 1974 when a military junta wrested control of the government from the nation's Estado Novo regime, liberation for the province was not away. On 25 June 1975, Mozambique became independent.