Sena

The Sena are the Bantu people of the middle Zambezi valley, in the Sofala and Zambezia lowlands of Mozambique, between the Shona to the south and the Nyanja-Chewa peoples to the north. They were middlemen in the river's gold and ivory traffic when the Portuguese reached the coast after 1498; in 1514 Antonio Fernandez reported rich goldfields in their country.

From the 1530s Portuguese traders, missionaries and garrisons settled along the river. The fair founded by Vicente Pegado in 1531 on a Muslim village grew into the town of Sena, from which the people later took their name.

After Francisco Barreto's expedition of 1569 to 1575 the Portuguese controlled the valley's mines and trade. Ivory exports boomed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by 1800 the slave trade had carried more than fifty thousand captives out of Mozambique.