Drought in Mozambique 1823–1831

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to shift the emphasis in the interpretation of the nineteenth century history of Mozambique. During the 1820s much of the region was devastated by drought and famine and the social and economic dislocation that followed brought with it important long term political changes, as well as the demise of the traditional commercial life of the region. The paper looks at some of the ways in which the local population responded to the drought and how they coped or failed to cope with the problems that it brought. Re-examining this period through the eyes of contemporary observers reveals the extent to which African problems, often seen as the result of external economic and political pressures, can also have causes emanating from within Africa itself. Recent studies have suggested that the major changes that effected the societies of south-eastern Africa during the first three decades of the nineteenth century were closely related to the expansion of European commercial and industrial capital. Foremost among these changes was the rapid growth of the slave trade. The east African slave trade had been a relatively minor affair until the development of French sugar plantations in Ile de France during the eighteenth century, but by 1800 10,000 slaves a year were being exported and that number grew rapidly with the diversion of Cuban, Brazilian and American buyers to eastern Africa. By the 1 820s Mozambique exported upwards of 15,000 slaves a year and had become the main supplier of the trans-Atlantic trade. The most important port was Quelimane from which slave exports were between 3,000 and 10,000 a year.' Following the classic analysis of governor-general Sebastiao Xavier Botelho, modern historians have argued that there was a fundamental link between the rise of