Mozambique

Long before the Portuguese, the Mozambican coast was studded with Swahili trading towns — the Island of Mozambique, Sofala, and others — shipping gold and ivory from the interior into an Indian Ocean network. Vasco da Gama called in 1498, and Portugal seized the coast, making the Island of Mozambique the capital of Portuguese East Africa for centuries. Colonial rule meant deep involvement in the slave trade, forced labour, forced cotton growing, and the export of migrant miners to South Africa.

The liberation movement FRELIMO launched an armed struggle in 1964 and, after Portugal's 1974 revolution, took power at independence in 1975. Most Portuguese settlers left almost at once, taking skills and capital with them. FRELIMO set up a one-party Marxist state, and almost immediately faced the RENAMO insurgency, armed first by white-ruled Rhodesia and then by apartheid South Africa. The civil war that followed, from 1977 to 1992, killed around a million people, displaced millions more, and left the country mined and wrecked.

A 1992 peace accord brought multiparty politics, though FRELIMO has won every election since. The 2010s were shadowed by a "hidden debts" scandal of secret state-guaranteed loans that triggered a financial crisis. Since 2017 an Islamist insurgency has raged in the northern gas province of Cabo Delgado, and the disputed October 2024 election set off months of protest and a deadly crackdown before Daniel Chapo was inaugurated in early 2025.

Mozambique is really several cultural worlds. The north is coastal and Swahili- influenced, with a large Muslim population and Makonde communities famed for blackwood sculpture and masked mapiko dances. The Zambezi valley in the centre has its own peoples and history, and the south, around Maputo, is Tsonga in culture and closely tied to South Africa by a century of labour migration.

Music binds them: marrabenta, the guitar-driven popular sound of Maputo; the timbila xylophone orchestras of the Chopi in Inhambane, recognised by UNESCO; and modern pandza and South African house. The printed capulana cloth, worn, gifted, and used to carry babies and messages, is a common thread nationwide.

Christianity, both Catholic and a fast-growing Pentecostalism, is the majority faith, with Islam strong in the north. Extended-family obligation, community labour, and rotating savings clubs (xitique) are part of how people get by, and Portuguese colonial architecture — Art Deco Maputo, the iron house, the old railway station — is a distinctive backdrop in the cities.

Most Mozambicans live rurally and farm — cassava, maize, coconut, and cashew, of which the country was once the world's top exporter. Urban growth is concentrated in Maputo and its twin city Matola, and in Nampula, Beira, and Nacala. Poverty is widespread, power and water supply are unreliable outside the main cities, and the long, thin country's north has always been far from the government in the far south.

The formal economy runs on an aluminium smelter near Maputo, coal from Tete, the transport corridors and ports that serve landlocked neighbours, prawns, and, increasingly, offshore natural gas — the Rovuma Basin holds some of the largest finds anywhere, though the biggest onshore project stalled after a 2021 insurgent attack and is only now restarting.

Cyclones are a recurring catastrophe: Idai flattened much of Beira in 2019, and Kenneth and Freddy followed. Between the storms, the war's legacy, the debt crisis, and the northern conflict, the gas wealth has yet to reach most people's daily lives.

The staple is xima, a stiff maize porridge, eaten with a sauce or relish. The signature dish is matapa — cassava leaves stewed with ground peanuts and coconut milk, often with prawns or crab. Coconut runs through coastal cooking, in curries and rice, and the north adds Indian-influenced chamuças (samosas), curries, and flatbreads.

Portugal's legacy is everywhere: crusty bread rolls, prego and bifana meat sandwiches, custard tarts, and above all frango à piri-piri, chicken grilled with a fierce chilli-and-garlic sauce that is Mozambique's best-known contribution to world menus. Prawns from Maputo Bay, crab, grilled line fish, and lobster are the coastal treats.

To drink there are 2M and Laurentina beers, Tipo Tinto rum mixed with raspberry soda (the "R&R"), cashew feni, and strong coffee. Roasted, salted cashews are sold everywhere.

The Island of Mozambique, reached by a three-kilometre single-lane bridge, is a World Heritage Site: a lime-washed stone town, the huge sixteenth-century Fortress of São Sebastião, and a small chapel often called the oldest European building in the southern hemisphere, alongside a densely packed reed-house quarter.

The Bazaruto Archipelago, off Vilanculos, is the country's premier beach and diving destination — sand islands with towering dunes, coral reefs, and one of the last populations of dugong, all within a national park. Further south, Tofo and Barra near Inhambane are a diving hub known for manta rays and whale sharks, and the southern coast has a string of resorts — Vilanculos, Xai-Xai, Bilene — popular with South Africans driving up from the border.

Inland, Gorongosa National Park in the centre is a celebrated restoration project, its lions, elephants, and antelope rebuilt from near-nothing after the war. Maputo itself rewards a wander for its faded modernist architecture, its craft markets, and its seafood. The Quirimbas Archipelago in the north, with the crumbling Swahili-Portuguese town of Ibo, is a remarkable place that the insurgency has put out of reach.