Africa During the Scramble – Making a Fiction Real
- cepmurphywrites
- Oct 10
- 14 min read
By Gary Oswald.
Portuguese Mozambique officially began in 1496 when Vasco de Gama arrived in Maputo Bay and didn't end until 1975. But in reality Mozambique is a big country and for most of that time, Portugal either had no men on the ground there at all or a tiny amount of traders on the coast, with native kingdoms ruling most of the land and often charging the Portuguese tribute or rent to be there. More than that, the men they did have there tended to go native, marry into local tribes, and not really follow orders from Lisbon. The rulers of the feudal Prazo estates in the Zambezi valley, the Prazeiros, normally spoke Portuguese but that was as far as their loyalty went; their land grants had actually been officially abolished in 1832 but they ignored that entirely. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that Portuguese Mozambique truly existed across the whole country.
As Henry E. O'Neill, the British agent in Mozambique, put it in the 1880s, "To speak of Portuguese colonies in East Africa is to speak of a mere fiction—a fiction colourably sustained by a few scattered seaboard settlements, beyond whose narrow littoral and local limits colonisation and government have no existence." Now O'Neill said this in the context of the British-Portuguese rivalry over central Africa, he had an agenda here. He would be unlikely to agree that the same thing was true about British Somalia, even though British control there was equally theoretical. But he was also right.
Portugal had attempted military conquests into Mozambique in both the 1560s and in the 1860s, but both times Portugal had retreated due to struggling to win battles and it simply not being economically worth to try and hold land directly. Portuguese control was indicated far more by treaties with local powers who theoretically owed them tribute, and large areas of land were sold to foreign companies or private actors who were given their own rights to set tariffs and claim taxes so long as they too recognised Portuguese over lordship and traded through Portuguese middlemen.
In the aftermath of the 1890 British Ultimatum (where Portugal was made to hand over Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia or face war with their most important ally) and the retreat of Portugal from much of their claimed land, however, it became a Portuguese priority to gain direct control over their lands in Mozambique. The fiction was no longer enough. Portuguese officials began demanding taxes, enforcing bans (on the trade of slaves and firearms both), and otherwise making their presence felt. This was, of course, fiercely resisted by the existing powers within Mozambique.
In Southern Mozambique, the most powerful force was the Gaza Empire, which fought in a similar style to that of the Zulus and had an alliance with the Matabele of Zimbabwe. The Gaza had a long and complicated relationship with the Portuguese, with both, at various points, agreeing fealty to the other. Their leader from 1861 to 1884, Umzilla, only gained that position through Portuguese aid but they weren’t in regular communication and Umzilla certainly had complete independence in all ways.
Umzila’s death in 1884 was an opportunity for the Portuguese to change that. They reached out to the new chief, Gungunhana, and asked him to sign a treaty of alliance and fealty. He would accept a Portuguese resident and they would help him fight off any challenges to his throne from his brothers, as they had helped his father fight off his brothers. After some debate, Gunguhana signed it, but shortly afterwards his men engaged in combat with tribes in Inhambane who had also agreed a treaty with the Portuguese. In Gungunhana’s mind, the Portuguese had recognised him as the overall ruler of the area, but the Portuguese weren’t willing to let the Gaza attack people who had never betrayed faith with Lisbon. Gazan and Portuguese troops soon clashed as the latter stepped in to defend their vassals, but both sides stepped down before it became a major conflict and the treaty was reaffirmed.
Shortly after that, British South Africans began to send messages to Gungunhana, telling him of Portuguese weakness and that he had no reason to back down to them. Their hope was that an independent Gazaland could be more easily conquered than one ran by Lisbon. Gungunhana, having long since tested his mettle against the Prazeiros of Zambezi, was not inclined to agree on Portuguese weakness so long as they could bribe the rulers of the Prazos into helping, as they had done in the past against the Gaza. As a result, he retreated south, moving his capital 300 miles to the Limpopo basin, further away from his disloyal vassals and so conflict with his new overlords but also further away from the Prazos whose men rarely campaigned outside their local regions.
This has traditionally been talked about as the whim of the Gaza King but that is not how decisions were made in Gazaland. Gungunhana could not make a decision like that without first consulting his chiefs, councillors, and vassals. This must have been a consensus decision. Clearly the Gaza were somewhat spooked by the more aggressive Portuguese actions in the colony as well as the increasing presence of English prospectors looking for minerals. Another sign of this worry was Gaza policy towards the minor Nkomati states. The Nkomati had historically been buffer states between the Gaza and the Portuguese, offering their alliance to which ever was stronger and fearing both. In the aftermath of the Gaza migration however, Gaza’s diplomacy shifted from aiming to secure their submission to pointing them at the Portuguese, hoping to weaken the latter through a frontier war.
In February 1895 they would get their wish as 3,000 Nkomati ambushed a force of around 850 Portuguese, most of the defenders of Lourenço Marques. A year earlier this might have worked but unknown to the Africans, the Portuguese had equipped themselves with new machine guns and repeating rifle and, despite their camp being breached, won a decisive victory. Nor did they have to spend their limited manpower following up on their victory, as their African allies (from peoples opposed to the Nkomati but too cowed to fight them by themselves) chased down the Nkomati for them, brutally sacking enemy villages.
If the Gaza had pushed for this battle in the aiming of weakening Portuguese power, in truth it had the opposite effect. Such a conclusive victory meant African people all over Southern Mozambique began swearing allegiance to Lourenço Marques rather than to Gungunhana. The Gaza had won vassals by being the most powerful military force around and now it looked like that was no longer the case.
Three months later, in April, Portugal planned a full out assault on the Gaza, something they were only able to do thanks to logistical support from nearby British colonies, to bring them fully into their Empire. But officially they made it clear that they were only to fight Nkomati guerrillas who had taken refuge with the Gaza. This presented Gungunhana with a problem. His legitimacy as a ruler depended on being able to protect his vassals and the Nkomati had been accepted into his realm, but he also didn’t want to start a war with Portugal after their recent demonstration of martial prowess. Instead, he tried to have his cake and eat it, sending his army after African vassals of Portugal to protect the Nkomati but withdrawing it when Portuguese regulars emerged, forcing the Nkomati to fight them alone. This, unsurprisingly, satisfied no one. He won the hostility of the Portuguese without gaining the alliance of the Nkomati.
Gungunhana also prepared for war with the Portuguese but in this effort he was hindered massively by the lack of repeating rifles. He had actually bought 800 from Cecil Rhodes four years earlier but they had been destroyed in a fire during the years of peace. Moreover, while the Gaza kept 10,000 troops in the field in April, by the time September came and fighting with regular Portuguese infantry became inevitable, that number had been halved. Desertion, disease, and starvation (Mozambique was suffering from the El Niño famines that plagued East Africa during this time) vastly reduced the numbers the Gaza had available. And diplomatic attempts to bring the British into the war on the Gaza’s side went nowhere. It is difficult to see what advantages Gungunhana gained by his delaying act. He had much better odds had he engaged in April.
In November 1895, the Portuguese won the Battle of Coolela against the Gaza army and the Gaza Empire crumbled, with numerous peoples surrendering and switching sides. On the 17th December, Gungunhana himself was captured and send to the Azores. Five years after the British Ultimatum, Portugal had truly conquered Southern Mozambique.
Without the Ultimatum meaning they gave up their claims in Zambia and Zimbabwe, Portugal has a lot more native enemies and might struggle significantly more. It is not impossible for the Gaza and Matabele to work together on this and be far more militarily successful. Certainly it is hard to argue that Gungunhana was a bad general who constantly weakened his own position by refusing to commit and could have benefited from some else taking command. He was a genuinely talented diplomat who had done a good job of playing off Portugal and the UK against each other to get better terms and of binding his vassals to him, but his inability to realise that peace was no longer an option cost him. The decision to try and buy time by delaying the first fight with Portuguese regulars was perhaps justified by his belief that British intervention was his only hope. But that was never likely and he vastly weakened his own authority by not engaging earlier.
Arguably in hindsight, his best chance was to launch a full assault alongside the Nkomati in February 1895. Wipe out the Portuguese there before they could reinforce and even if they do send reinforcements again, which is likely, the Gaza myth of invincibility is still alive. Not losing his repeating rifles in a fire would also help. Notwithstanding those mistakes it is important to recognise that the Portuguese achieved these victories primarily because of their new weapons which represented a genuine game changer and allowed the conquest. Politically Portugal had more incentive to engage in conquest post-Ultimatum, but they also newly had the technology to make that possible.
In the North, the main centre of resistance was the Islamic Swahili chiefs centred largely around Farelay of the Angoche Sultanate. The Angoche had emerged in the 1480s and as Portugal fought for control of the Swahili coast, it became a centre of the Islamic trade that organised contraband during the Portuguese attempts to install a monopoly. As a result, Portugal repeatedly attacked it, though years of war were often followed by years of relatively good relations. When, in 1844, Britain forced the Portuguese Empire to stop dealing in slaves, the ports of the independent Angoche became increasingly popular for slave traders to dock in instead. The slave trade in the Indian Ocean rapidly increased in the 19th century, with slaves heading to French Mauritius, Portuguese Mozambique, independent Madagascar, Arabia via Oman, and the New World. An increasing network of Muslim slavers from Zanzibar, Madagascar, and the Swahili coast became reliant on Angoche.
In 1846, British ships engaged American slave ships outside Angoche. Portugal complained about this attack on what was supposedly a vassal kingdom of theirs and were told essentially that either they dealt with the Sultanate or Britain would. Thus in July 1847, Portugal presented an anti-slavery treaty for Amadi, the Sultan of Angoche, to sign, and their diplomatic party, upon this being made public, was attacked by a mob and had to be locked away by Amadi for their own safety. This had rather demonstrated Portugal’s weakness in the area and the British made the offer that maybe next time the Portuguese presented Sultan Amadi a treaty, British soldiers would be there to escort the diplomats.
In November 1847, the treaty was given to the Sultan once more and this time it was accompanied by a naval British bombardment of the city. Amadi agreed to house both a Portuguese resident and a garrison in his city to enforce the shutting down of the slave trade. Only the Portuguese Empire didn’t really have any men spare and neither ever actually arrived. Soon, the British were bombarding Angoche once again.
By 1855, Angoche had decided that Portugal was a paper tiger and so they would extend their borders by conquering land from the aforementioned Prazo estates in the Zambezi valley. This was a fatal mistake. The Prazeiros were de-facto independent, they were equally likely to fight against Portugal as with her, but now they had a reason to work with Lisbon. In 1861, after six years of bitter fighting, a primarily black Portuguese army stormed Angoche and conquered it.
The new Sultan, Mussa Quanto, was imprisoned but he escaped a year later and for the first time, the threat of the Portuguese and the end of the slave trade was enough that he could rely on the support and assistance of most of his neighbours. For the next 15 years Mussa and the Portuguese fought over control of the Northern Mozambique coast with neither managing to score a decisive victory over the other, something helped by a reduction in Portuguese investment in their colonial military. Mussa knew at this point that he was fighting for independence and offered to sign an anti-slave trade treaty with the British if they recognised him as independent ruler, something they, mindful of their alliance with Portugal, refused to do.
In 1877, with the Portuguese holding only a small foothold on the coastline, Mussa died of old age and more than seven people claimed his throne, allowing the Portuguese to grab most of the coast in the upheaval. By the 1880s however, Farelay (Omar Bin Nacogo Farrahali) had emerged from that chaos as the most popular choice for ruling Angoche and the centre of an alliance of Muslims in Northern Mozambique. This alliance fought on in East Africa long after most of the rest of that region had been subdued by the European empires.
Farelay was finally declared Sultan of Angoche in 1903 and did a better job than his predecessors at holding together an alliance of Muslim and non-Muslim Africans. His weakness however was at sea. The European conquest of Madagascar and Zanzibar had reduced the slave trade to barely anything after 1902 and as a result there simply weren’t friendly ships on the ocean. Time after time Farelay attempted to seize a coastal town and was driven off by a gun ship (not always a Portuguese one either, in 1903 it was the French who drove him off). While Portuguese attacks in the interior were equally unsuccessful for the first thirty years of the conflict, eventually the stalemate was broken when Portugal, having few other enemies left, managed to send a large enough army against him in 1910 to break his defences and captured him, sending him to the Cabo Verde Islands.
The two most persistent native opponents to Portuguese control in the country had both been exiled. Neither had been easy, but for Lisbon the fiction of their control was increasingly becoming a reality. The bigger problem they had was the nature of the economy of the country they now ruled, which was still reliant on slave labour and the Prazos.
The Prazos were large estates granted to colonists, settlers, and traders in Portuguese Africa for a fixed annual fee in the 17th century. While this makes you think of white plantation owners such as ruled Rhodesia, most of the early takers were actual of Indian ethnicity, from Portuguese Goa, and the lack of female settlers meant that by the 19th century, most Prazeiros were black in appearance due to years of intermarriage with African women. The Prazos’ isolation meant the Prazeiros, were much more likely to follow African custom and laws (such as about female inheritance) than Portuguese. They had family and slaves on their estates but also had influence on the surrounding peoples who often paid them in tribute or services, though they had no judicial authority over them.
At their height in the 1700s, the most successful Prazeiros were rich traders and farmers with private armies and work forces up to 500 strong and no real like of Lisbon. Drought and smallpox epidemics had vastly reduced their numbers in the early 19th century though. By the 1840s, only five major Prazeiro families remained: the da Cruz, Caetano Pereira, Vas dos Anjos, Ferrão, and Alves da Silva. By the 1860s three new families would emerge, in the de Sousa (who arrived from India) and in the Kanyembe and Matakenya (who were African workers on the Prazos who built their own estates). During the 1860s period of Portuguese military expansion into the colony, the same period that saw the conquest of Angoche and the installation of Umzilla as leader of the Gaza, the Portuguese launched five major campaigns against the Prazos. This was a result of their inability to bring their old settlers diplomatically back into the colonial system through recognising their titles or paying wages. The Prazeiros continued to ignore all commands from Portugal.
The five major campaigns were not a complete failure, as the Vas dos Anjos were driven north and the Alves da Silva were co-opted and allied with Portugal to take out the Angoche. However, the main assaults were against the Da Cruz stronghold of Massangano and, despite the aid of the Alves da Silva, all of those were a failure. In 1869, Portugal, as it did elsewhere in its empire, stopped supporting new military efforts against the Prazeiros and settled for a loose acknowledgement of control. This meant that when slavery was banned in Mozambique in 1875 and direct control over all land grants was declared in 1878, the Prazeiros ignored both laws entirely.
As the 1880s began most of Mozambique was still filled with slave plantations who traded heavily with Arabic slave traders through Angoche. In 1887 and 1888 however, Portugal finally managed to take the stronghold of Massangano and with military control ensured, most of the Prazeiros came back into the fold. As a result, Portugal established its new plan for the Zambezi valley. Instead of the Prazos, the area would come under the control of several newly chartered companies: the Mozambique Company, the Zambezia Company, and the Niassa Company. The companies would collect taxes but not pay them, instead 8% of its profits would go directly to Portugal. These companies would ‘free slaves’ but use conscripted labour in replace of taxes – so in practice they would still be using slaves. Crucially however, the companies’ shareholders would be in Lisbon and so controllable and they would be required to send thousands of white Portuguese to the colony to work there, who would hopefully be more loyal than the Prazeiros had been.
The landowners within those companies would have their land size maximised so they couldn’t form grand estates as the old Prazeiros had; would be forced to move from trade into agriculture, with rules set up of how much of their land must be cultivated; and pay a flat land tax for that to the Company, as would be enforced by a series of laws. The problem Portugal had is it lacked the power to enforce this and so none of this actually happened, with little agriculture emerging and single landowners still owning vast plantations. These new Prazeiros meanwhile quickly became absentee landlords, demanding taxes but not enforcing laws and the Company not only made no profit but had to be bailed out by the government from rebellions by Africans unhappy with their forced labour in both 1902 and 1917.
The army which put down the 1902 rebellion was 15,000 strong, the largest Portugal had ever fielded in Mozambique (and more than six times bigger than any force they fielded in Angola) and would stay in the colony long enough to bring down the native states established by Kanyembe and Matakenya (with the help of cooperation with British Rhodesia). While economically, the colony was struggling, militarily Portugal managed to fully establish control in Mozambique around ten years before the same was established in Angola. This was largely because of being able to co-opt the men from the Prazos into their military. The conquest of Massangano, much like the victory over the Nkomati, acted as a force multiplier for the Portuguese. By proving their military prowess, they won over new recruits who decided it was better to join them then beat them. In particular, the de Sousa family’s alignment with Portugal was critical in their growing power into the region. Manuel de Sousa’s arrest by the British during the undeclared fighting that surrounded the 1890 Ultimatum removed him from the board and meant his men largely came directly over to Portugal, a huge bonus for them.
When we talk about the extent to which Africa was transformed by the Scramble of Africa, there is often the response that Europeans had been living in Africa for centuries by that point. But as important as those Europeans had been in transforming the economic and political fabric of African societies (by the Atlantic slave trade for instance), they had done so as outsiders to the political system rather than rulers of it. Mozambique demonstrates the difference between getting their candidate to the throne into control of the Gaza Empire or getting the Sultan of Angoche to sign a treaty, and actual direct imperial control. And the latter did not become economically, politically or militarily possible until the late 19th century.
Without the pressure put on Portugal by the other colonial powers to extend their control within Mozambique than the Gaza, the Prazeiros and the Angoche probably survive further into the 20th century.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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