History of Mozambique History of Mozambique Mozambique was a Portuguese colony, overseas province and later a member state of Portugal. It gained independence from Portugal in 1975. In 2007 Julio Mercader, of the University of Calgary, recovered dozens of 100,000-year-old stone tools from a deep limestone cave near Lake Niassa in Mozambique showing that wild sorghum, the ancestor of the chief cereal consumed today in sub-Saharan Africa for flours, breads, porridges and alcoholic beverages, was being consumed by "Homo sapiens" along with African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges and the African "potato." This is the earliest direct evidence of
HIV/AIDS in Mozambique according to 2001 statistics, 82 percent of HIV/AIDS expenditures were contributed to Mozambique via external sources, meaning that the government of Mozambique funded less than 20 percent of HIV/AIDS expenses themselves. In doing so, however, private institutions and foreign aid had great influence over public health policy. Further, HIV rates within the country have highlighted disparities in financial independence—with women, who, on average earn 18% of a man's salary, much more likely to turn to high-risk behaviors such as sex work to fund living expenses and education. As a result of the economic burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Mozambique's aid