and
Portuguese Mozambique.
In Angola At the start of the 19th century, effective
Portuguese governance in Africa south of the
equator was limited. Portuguese Angola consisted of areas around
Luanda and
Benguela, and a few almost independent towns over which Portugal claimed suzerainty, the most northerly being
Ambriz. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Angola's main function within the
Portuguese Empire was supplying
Brazil with slaves. This was facilitated first by the development of coffee plantations in southern Brazil from the 1790s onward, and second by the 1815 and 1817 agreements between the
United Kingdom and Portugal limiting—at least on paper—Portuguese slave trading to areas south of the equator. This trade diminished after Brazilian independence in 1822 and more sharply following an 1830 agreement between Britain and Brazil by which the Brazilian government prohibited further imports of slaves. To find people for export as slaves from Angolan towns, Afro-Portuguese traders penetrated as far inland as
Katanga and
Kazembe, but otherwise few Portuguese moved inland and they did not attempt to establish control there. When the Brazilian slave trade declined, the Portuguese began using slaves for agricultural work on plantations stretching inland from Luanda along the
Cuanza River, and to a lesser extent around Benguela. After the Portuguese founded
Moçâmedes, south of Benguela, in 1840 and occupied Ambriz in 1855, Portugal controlled a continuous coastal strip from Ambriz to Moçâmedes, but little inland territory. Although Portugal claimed the
Congo River estuary, Britain at best accepted limited Portuguese trading rights in the
Cabinda enclave north of the river, although these rights did not make Cabinda Portuguese territory.
In Mozambique Portugal had occupied parts of the Mozambique coast since the 16th century, but at the start of the 19th century Portuguese presence was limited to
Mozambique Island,
Ibo and
Quelimane in northern Mozambique, outposts at
Sena and
Tete in the Zambezi valley,
Sofala to the south of the Zambezi, and the port town
Inhambane further south. Although
Delagoa Bay was regarded as Portuguese territory,
Lourenço Marques was not settled until 1781, and was temporarily abandoned after a 1796 French raid. In the late 18th century most of the people exported as slaves through Portuguese settlements in Mozambique were sent to
Mauritius and
Réunion, at that time both French colonies, but the
Napoleonic Wars disrupted this trade, and by the early 19th century the Portuguese sent Mozambican slaves to Brazil. As was the case with Angola, slave exports declined after 1830 and were partly replaced by exports of ivory through Lourenço Marques from the 1840s onward. The nadir of Portuguese fortunes in Mozambique came in the 1830s and 1840s when Lourenço Marques was sacked in 1833 and
Sofala in 1835.
Zumbo was abandoned in 1836 and the
Gaza Empire forced Afro-Portuguese settlers near
Vila de Sena to pay tribute. Although Portugal claimed
sovereignty over
Angoche and a number of smaller Muslim coastal towns, these were virtually independent at the start of the 19th century. However, after Portugal renounced the slave trade, these towns continued the practice. Fearing British or French anti-slavery interventions, Portugal began bringing these towns under stricter control. Angoche resisted and fought off a Portuguese warship attempting to prevent slave trading in 1847. It took another military expedition and occupation in 1860–1 to end Angoche's slave trade. Portugal also initiated the
Prazo system of large leased estates under nominal Portuguese rule in the Zambezi valley. By the end of the 18th century, the valleys of the Zambezi and lower
Shire River were controlled by a few families who claimed to be Portuguese subjects but who were virtually independent. However, starting in 1840 the Portuguese government embarked on a series of military campaigns in an attempt to bring the prazos under its control. Portuguese troops suffered several major setbacks before forcing the last prazo to submit in 1869. In other inland areas, there was not even the pretence of Portuguese control. In the interior of what is today southern and central Mozambique,
Nguni people who had entered the area from South Africa under their leader
Soshangane created the
Gaza Empire in the 1830s and, up to Soshangane's death in 1856, dominated southern Mozambique outside the two towns of Inhambane and Lourenço Marques. Lourenço Marques only remained in Portuguese hands in the 1840s and early 1850s because the
Swazi people vied with Gaza for its control. After Soshangane's death two of his sons struggled for succession, with the eventual winner
Mzila coming to power with Portuguese help in 1861. Under Mzila the centre of Gaza power moved north to central Mozambique and came into conflict with the prazo owners who were expanding south from the Zambezi valley. As in Angola, during the 18th century Afro-Portuguese traders employed by the Mozambican prazo owners penetrated inland from the Zambezi valley as far as Kazembe in search of ivory and copper. In 1798
Francisco de Lacerda, a Portuguese officer based in Mozambique, organised an expedition from Tete to the interior hoping to reach Kazembe, but he died en route in what is now Zambia. Antonio Gamitto tried to establish commercial relations with Kazembe peoples in the upper Zambezi valley in 1831 also without success. Apart from Lacerda's expedition, none of the trading ventures into the interior from Angola or Mozambique had official status and were not attempts to bring the area between Angola and Mozambique under Portuguese control. Even Lacerda's expedition was largely commercial in purpose, although it was later declared by the Lisbon Geographical Society to have established claim to the area it covered.
Elsewhere After Brazilian independence and the loss of most Asian territories, Portuguese colonial expansion focused on Africa. In the late 1860s Lisbon had no effective presence in the area between Angola and Mozambique, and little presence in many areas lying within the present-day borders of those countries. By the second half of the 19th century, various European powers developed an increasing interest in Africa. The first challenge to Portugal's territorial claims came from the area around Delagoa Bay. The
Boers who founded the
South African Republic were concerned British occupation of the bay would threaten their independence, and to prevent this they claimed their own outlet to the Indian Ocean at Delagoa Bay in 1868. Although Portugal and the Transvaal reached agreement in 1869 on a border under which all of Delagoa Bay remained Portuguese, Britain then lodged a claim to the bay's southern part. This claim was rejected in 1875 after
arbitration by French
President MacMahon, which upheld the 1869 borders. A further significant issue arose in the areas south and west of
Lake Nyasa (now also known as Lake Malawi), which
David Livingstone reached in the 1850s. In the 1860s and 1870s
Anglicans and Presbyterians established several missions in the
Shire Highlands, including a mission and small trading settlement founded at
Blantyre in 1876. In 1878 businessmen linked to the Presbyterian missions established the
African Lakes Company, which aimed to set up a trading venture that would work in close co-operation with the missions to combat the slave trade by introducing legitimate trade and to develop European influence in the area. Later, another challenge came from the foundation of a German colony at
Angra Pequena (present-day
Lüderitz) in Namibia in 1883. Although there was no Portuguese presence this far south Portugal claimed the Namibian coast, being the first European nation to have visited it. ==Portuguese exploration and early negotiation attempts==