Makhuwa

The Makhuwa, or Makua, are the dominant Bantu people of northern Mozambique, living north of the Zambezi to Lake Malawi and southern Tanzania. Oral traditions call the mountain of Namuli their first home, and scholars consider them settled in the region by around 1000.

Farmers and skilled iron smelters who forged axes and spears in community hearths, they traded ivory and metalwork for cloth and salt with Swahili and Gujarati merchants long before the Portuguese met them in the early 1500s. Their supreme god Muluku headed a religion of ancestor and nature spirits, while only the coastal trading communities adopted Sunni Islam.

From the eighteenth century the Muslim Yao to their north raided them for slaves destined for Zanzibar, and from 1749 the Makhuwa waged a long war of attrition against the coastal Arab sultans, the Portuguese and their African allies.