Mozambique
A long Indian Ocean coast steeped in Swahili and Portuguese worlds
Mozambique unfurls along more than 2,500 kilometers of Indian Ocean coastline, a sweep of beaches, coral islands, and mangrove deltas that has drawn Arab, Swahili, and Portuguese traders for a thousand years. Portuguese-speaking and proudly resilient, it endured a brutal liberation struggle and a long civil war before emerging as one of the world's fastest-growing economies, buoyed by enormous offshore natural gas finds. From the coral-stone trading post of Ilha de Moçambique to the wide mouth of the Zambezi, the country bridges the Swahili coast and the southern African interior.
The land slopes from highlands on its western borders down to a broad coastal plain that widens toward the south. The Zambezi River crosses the center, impounded behind the vast Cahora Bassa Dam, while the Ruvuma marks the northern frontier with Tanzania. The highest point, Monte Binga at 2,436 meters, rises in the Chimanimani range along the Zimbabwean border. The coast is fringed with reefs and archipelagos like the Bazaruto and Quirimbas, and the climate is tropical, with a hot wet season that periodically brings devastating cyclones such as those that struck the port city of Beira.
Swahili city-states once traded gold and ivory along this coast before Vasco da Gama opened the Portuguese era, and Mozambique remained a Portuguese colony into the 1970s. Independence in 1975 under the FRELIMO movement was followed almost immediately by a sixteen-year civil war against RENAMO that killed roughly a million people. Peace in 1992 opened an era of reconstruction and rapid growth, though the country remains poor and now faces an Islamist insurgency in the gas-rich north. Portuguese unites a society of many Bantu languages and cultures, and music, from marrabenta to timbila xylophones, runs through national life.