StapleMozambique
Xima
also Ncima
Maize meal cooked stiff and eaten with fish, greens or matapa. The base of the Mozambican plate from Maputo to the Rovuma.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes
Tswa (Vatswa)
Farmers and cashew growers of Inhambane's interior, the westernmost of the Tsonga-related peoples, whose men worked South Africa's gold mines for a century and whose remittances built the province.
Identity
Population: Estimated 1 to 1.5 million
Location: Inhambane province and southern Sofala in Mozambique, inland from the coast around Homoíne, Panda and Massinga, with communities in Zimbabwe
Language: Tswa (Xitswa)
Language family: Niger-Congo → Bantu (S51, Tswa-Ronga)
Traditional governance: Chiefdoms and lineage heads historically; Mozambican district administration with recognised community authorities.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Tswa of Homoíne and Panda
The interior farming communities.
Tswa of Massinga and Morrumbene
Communities toward the coast and the cashew belt.
Tswa of Zimbabwe
Communities in the south-east lowveld, largely from labour migration.
Culture
Clothing: Capulana for women; contemporary dress; the healers' and diviners' beads and skins.
Food: Xima maize porridge with matapa, cashew nuts and the cashew liquor distilled from the fruit, coconut, groundnut, fish from the coast, and the ncuu brewed for ancestral occasions.
Ceremonies: Ancestral offerings with beer and snuff; healing and divination; funerals with extended mourning and a formal end-of-mourning rite; the returning miners' homecomings, which were themselves social occasions.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal with lobolo in cattle and cash; the mine wage was for decades the principal means by which a young man could assemble it.
Initiation rites: Boys' circumcision in some communities; girls' instruction under senior women; the first journey to the mines functioned for generations as the effective passage to adulthood.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Mozambique and Zimbabwe, at national rather than community level — 16 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Mozambique
8 dishes
StapleMozambique
Mucapata
also Mung bean rice, Arroz com feijão verde
Rice cooked with mung beans and coconut milk, a northern Mozambican dish showing the Indian Ocean's long reach into the Swahili coast's cooking.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
National dishMozambique
Matapa
Pounded cassava leaves cooked with coconut milk, groundnut and crab or prawn, Mozambique's national dish. The pounding is done in a wooden mortar and takes an hour.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 45 minutes
Street foodMozambique
Frango Piri-Piri
Chicken spatchcocked, marinated in bird's eye chilli, garlic and lime and grilled over charcoal, then basted repeatedly. Mozambique's best-known export to the world's high streets.
Serves 4 · 1 hour, plus overnight marinating
Festival & feastMozambique
Caril de Camarão
Prawn curry in coconut milk with cashew, from a coast that supplies both. Made for Sundays and celebrations and served with rice.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Regional specialityMozambique
Badjias
Fritters of ground cowpeas or split peas with onion and chilli, fried and sold in cones on Maputo's streets. An Indian Ocean arrival that became Mozambican.
Serves Makes 24 · 40 minutes, plus 4 hours soaking
Regional specialityMozambique
Galinha à Zambeziana
also Zambezia chicken
Chicken grilled with a coconut, lime and piri-piri baste from Quelimane and the Zambezia coast — richer and less fiercely hot than the southern piri-piri chicken.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes, plus 2 hours marinating
Drink & sweetMozambique
Sura
Coconut palm wine tapped along the northern coast, drunk sweet the same morning or sour by evening. Sold from bottles at the roadside in Nampula and Cabo Delgado.
Serves Varies · Tapped daily
Zimbabwe
8 dishes
StapleZimbabwe
Sadza
White maize meal cooked stiff, eaten twice a day with relish. Zimbabweans measure a meal by whether sadza was on the plate.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes
StapleZimbabwe
Muriwo une Dovi
also Greens in peanut butter
Collard or pumpkin greens stewed with peanut butter until thick and nutty, the Zimbabwean relish eaten with sadza more often than any other.
Serves 6 · 40 minutes
National dishZimbabwe
Sadza ne Nyama
Sadza with beef stewed in tomato and onion, the country's default meal and its national dish. Simple, and judged on the depth of the gravy.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
Street foodZimbabwe
Maputi
Popped maize kernels, salted or sugared, sold in plastic bags at bus stops and outside schools. Harder and nuttier than popcorn, made from field maize.
Serves 6 · 20 minutes
Festival & feastZimbabwe
Mabhonzo eMombe
Oxtail or beef bones stewed for hours until the meat falls away and the gravy thickens on its own gelatine. Cooked for family occasions and Christmas.
Serves 6 · 4 hours
Regional specialityZimbabwe
Madora
Mopane worms, dried and then fried with onion and tomato. High in protein, harvested from mopane woodland in season and a significant rural income.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
Regional specialityZimbabwe
Matemba
also Dried bream, Small dried fish
Small sun-dried fish from Lake Kariba, fried with onion and tomato into a salty relish. The cheapest protein in Zimbabwe and one of the best-loved.
Serves 4 · 35 minutes
Drink & sweetZimbabwe
Maheu
Fermented maize drink, thick, sour and lightly sweet, sold in cartons nationwide and made at home from leftover sadza.
Serves Makes 3 litres · 1 to 2 days
Stories & Oral Literature
The Mine ContractLabour history
From the 1890s southern Mozambique supplied the Witwatersrand gold mines with recruited labour under formal agreements between Portugal and South Africa, in which Portugal received a share of the miners' wages in gold and a guarantee of rail traffic through Lourenço Marques. At peak, over a hundred thousand Mozambicans were on the mines at any time, drawn heavily from Inhambane and Gaza. The system built the province's houses and paid its bridewealth, and it also took its men away for eighteen months at a time and returned a proportion of them with silicosis.
The Cashew BeltEconomic history
Inhambane and Nampula made Mozambique the world's largest cashew producer at independence, with a processing industry employing tens of thousands. Structural adjustment in the 1990s required the liberalisation of raw nut exports; the processing factories closed, the raw crop went to India, and rural incomes fell. The Mozambican cashew case became one of the most cited examples in the international debate over conditionality, and the industry has since been partly rebuilt.
HomoíneConflict history
On 18 July 1987 Renamo forces attacked the town of Homoíne in Tswa country and killed over 400 civilians, including patients in the hospital — one of the worst single massacres of the Mozambican civil war. The war killed perhaps a million people between 1977 and 1992 and displaced five million, and Inhambane's interior was among the areas worst affected. The 1992 peace held, and the province's landmine clearance was completed in 2015.
Proverbs
“The man who goes to the mine leaves his shadow at the door.”
On eighteen-month contracts.
“The cashew feeds the year and the factory fed the town.”
On what closed in the 1990s.
“Peace was signed and the ground still had to be cleared.”
On landmines after 1992.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Nkulukumba as the high god; the ancestors as the working powers, addressed with beer and snuff; named trees, pools and graves carrying observance.
Beliefs: Ancestral veneration; bone divination and nyanga healing; possession complexes including forms associated with the mines and with the war dead; Catholic, Methodist and Zionist Christianity widespread.
Ancestors: Ancestors are addressed at the homestead and at graves; the proper burial of the war dead and of men who died on the mines has been a sustained concern.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Nkulukumba
The remote high god
Ancestral spirits
Addressed with beer and snuff in family rites
Possessing spirits
Named spirits addressed in healing, including those associated with the war and with migration
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Dispersed homesteads among cashew and coconut trees, each of several buildings within a reed fence, connected by sandy paths.
Building techniques: Reed and pole walling with thatch, now block and iron sheet; the remittance-built concrete houses that mark a mining family; reed granaries; cashew processing by hand.
Village layout: A homestead of houses and granaries within a reed fence, with cashew and coconut around and fields beyond.
Artifacts
Mine recruitment records
Historical record
Documentation of a century of Mozambican labour on the Witwatersrand.
Divining bones
Ritual object
The set cast and read by a diviner in the Tsonga-Tswa tradition.
Cashew processing tools
Craft
The hand equipment of a crop that made Mozambique the world's largest producer.
Homoíne memorial
Memorial
Marking the 1987 massacre, among the worst of the civil war.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Tswa-Ronga speaking communities settle the Inhambane interior.
1890s–1970s
Formal labour recruitment sends Mozambican men to the Witwatersrand gold mines in large numbers.
1975–1992
Independence and civil war; the Homoíne massacre in 1987; mass displacement across Inhambane.
1990s
Cashew liberalisation closes the processing industry; rural incomes fall sharply.
2015–present
Mozambique is declared free of known landmines; tourism and partial cashew recovery reshape the province.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- First, Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and PeasantWorldCat
- Instituto Nacional de Estatística, MozambiqueGovernment of Mozambique
Premium & scholarly sources
- Ethnologue: TswaSIL International