Ilha de Mozambique - Slave Trade

Slave Trade

«Caffres from Mozambique and Ethiopia», by Jan Huygen van Linschoten, 1638

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 Mozambique Island. 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 and Zimbabwe plateau to coastal entrepôts at Inhambane and Lourenço Marques (now 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, the French trade to the sugar-producing islands of the Indian Ocean, and to 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.

Chapel of Our Lady of the Bastion, Isaias Newton, 1881

During the first 30 years 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, 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, one under Zwangendaba 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.

More about Slave Trade in Africa

Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel : In the Mozambique Channel April and May 1843
Pascoe Grenfell Hill (December 1996)