2
Aspects of precolonial and colonial Nampula
Precolonial Nampula Nampula’s integration into international circuits of exchange dates from the end of the sixteenth century and coincided with the advent of the ivory trade in Mozambique.1 The Maravi conquest of the region at that time created a trading zone stretching from the Shire Valley in present-day Malawi through Nampula to Mozambique Island (Ilha de Moçambique). Some fifty years earlier Ilha de Moçambique had gained recognition as the first capital of Lisbon’s claimed possessions in south-east Africa.2 At the time – and until the late nineteenth century – the Portuguese presence throughout what today constitutes Mozambique was primarily limited to the littoral and to trading stations and military garrisons along the Zambézia river.3 Over the course of the next century, much of the ivory traded with the Portuguese originated from Nampula and had been paid to the Maravi states to the east as tribute. With the decline of Maravi power at the end of the seventeenth century, Yao traders based at Lake Niassa began to redirect their commercial operations from Kilwa to Mossuril and Cabaceiras, establishing a caravan route through northern Nampula. From that time onwards, Nampula was situated at the crossroads of two major trade arteries from the interior. During the second half of the eighteenth century, when the trafficking in human beings came to dwarf all other forms of exchange, Makua chiefs in the interior established themselves as traders in slaves as well as other commodities. Nampula was one of the two main sources of slaves in Mozambique (the other was the Zambézia valley) and Makua chiefs were the main suppliers. In the first phase, slave trafficking was dominated by the French (initially in contravention of Portuguese law), who shipped their cargo to the sugar and coffee plantations in France’s colonial possessions in the Mascarene islands. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the traffic was directed primarily to South America, most notably Brazil.4 Starting in the 1830s, Portugal made sporadic, less than wholehearted and largely abortive attempts to abolish the slave trade. The colonial administration’s own heavy dependence on customs remittances generated by slave dealing militated against enforcing abolitionist decrees. So did the fact that
