Wednesday 28 September 2016

By Albert Derrick


Bantu speakers migrated to Mozambique in the first millennium, and Arab and Swahili traders settled the region thereafter. It was explored by Vasco da Gama in 1498 and first colonized by Portugal in 1505. By 1510, the Portuguese had control of all of the former Arab sultanates on the east African coast. Portuguese colonial rule was repressive.

The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama was the first European to reach current-day Mozambique. When he arrived in 1498, the Maravi kingdom of the Mwene Matapa was in control of the central Zambezi Basin. Da Gama first landed in the Muslim island town of Moçambique, and by 1510 the Portuguese controlled trading from Sofala in present-day Mozambique north to Mogadishu in what is now Somalia.

One of the early leaders in the struggle for independence from Portuguese rule was the Democratic National Union of Mozambique (Udenamo), whose flag was adopted in November 1961. It had a diagonally divided field of green (for the country’s forested mountains and plains) and black (for the majority population). Its white central disk suggested the rivers and the Indian Ocean, and its central red star indicated the common blood of all struggling for liberation.

After independence from Portugal the flag of the main revolutionary army, the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO), was adopted as the flag of the new country for an interim period until the flag that is seen today was decided on.

For a short period after September 1974, the Frelimo flag flew side by side with the flag of Portugal throughout Mozambique. At the time of independence on June 25, 1975, a new flag was hoisted. This was, in turn, replaced in April 1983 by a modified version of the Frelimo party flag.

The flag of Mozambique is the only one in the world to feature a rifle, as it has an AK47 on it. A contest was held to design a new flag of Mozambique in September 1999 and 119 entries were received. A winner was picked, but a new Mozambique flag has never materialized. The Flag Company Inc specialized in flag designs offered a special edition of decals and flags to memorize the history of Mozambique flag for the future.




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