ABSTRACT
Precolonial Mozambique was roughly divided into three regions, each with its own dominant ethnic group. The sparsely populated north was inhabited by the Lomwe-and Makua-speaking peoples, who largely lived off subsistence agriculture. The agriculturally rich Zambezi valley was populated by the Shona, who often traded their agricultural surplus with trading cities along the coast. The southern highlands were inhabited by the cattle-herding Tsonga. When the Portuguese arrived in the late fifteenth century, some of the Tsonga, descendants of the great Zimbabwe
Empire of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, formed the Mutapa kingdom, though most of the Mutapa’s domains were located in what is now Zimbabwe. A number of Arab trading settlements existed along the coast, part of a vast archipelago that girded the Indian Ocean.
