Mozambique: Dhow Sails, Marrabenta Music and the Oldest Island City in Africa
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Ilha de Mozambique — Mozambique Island — is a small coral island connected to the mainland by a bridge and containing a UNESCO World Heritage site: a Portuguese colonial settlement founded in 1507 that served for centuries as the capital of Portuguese East Africa. The island is tiny — 3 kilometres long, less than half a kilometre wide — but densely layered with history: the oldest European building in the Southern Hemisphere stands here, alongside Swahili coral houses, mosques, and a fort built in 1558 that is still intact. The island is one of the oldest continuously inhabited urban settlements in sub-Saharan Africa.
Marrabenta is Mozambique's national music — a genre born in the suburbs of Maputo in the 1940s, built on guitar rhythms derived from traditional music, with Portuguese melodic influences and lyrics about urban life. It became the soundtrack of Mozambican independence in 1975 and has remained the music that defines the national cultural identity. The beat is light, swaying, deceptively joyful for a country that experienced sixteen years of civil war after independence.
Mozambique's coastline stretches 2,500 kilometres along the Indian Ocean, with coral reefs, mangroves, and the warm Mozambique Channel that makes it one of the world's finest diving destinations. The Bazaruto Archipelago contains the last viable population of dugong in East Africa — the marine mammal that some historians believe inspired mermaid myths among sailors who saw them surfacing in coastal waters. The connection between the mythological and the real, on this coast, is closer than most places.
