Mozambique is a country with a long and uninterrupted coastline in south-eastern Africa currently inhabited by Bantu speaking people. Arabian and Mali traders and Portuguese colonialists lent a multicultural flair to urban coastal areas.
Long after the Atlantic slave trade was abolished, British colonial companies in South Africa were still exploiting intertribal conflicts to impress people into forced labor in mines in Mozambique, Rhodesia and South Africa and and for plantations owned by the Portuguese crown and investors and managed by British companies.
The Portuguese government refused to grant independence to Mozambique after WWII until 1975 after ten years of insurrection. The emergent Marxist government endured nearly twenty years of civil war with South African backed opposition fighters before a successful democratic republic was established in 2001.
The current stable government has encouraged foreign investment and debt relief/forgiveness. The country’s GPD, while very low, is rapidly improving. Most Mozambiqueans who live in the interior remain reliant upon small scale agriculture and are seriously imperiled by anti-personnel land mines.
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