Angoche

Angoche was a Swahili Muslim polity on islands off the coast of present-day northern Mozambique. The islands had been inhabited since around 500.

Oral tradition placed its founding in the late fifteenth century, when refugees from Kilwa installed Xosa as sultan. Angoche traded ivory, gold and slaves, but Portuguese Zambezi factories in the 1530s and Marave control inland cut its caravan routes. The old town was abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere. A visitor found the sultanate expanding in 1752; from the 1830s ivory, rubber and slave trading brought renewed wealth.