History of Mozambique 10 years of sporadic warfare and Portugal's return to democracy through a leftist military coup in Lisbon, which replaced Portugal's Estado Novo regime with a military junta (the Carnation Revolution of April 1974), FRELIMO took control of the territory. Within a year, most of the 250,000 Portuguese in Mozambique had left—some expelled by the government of the nearly independent territory, some fleeing in fear—and Mozambique became independent from Portugal on 25 June 1975. A law had been passed on the initiative of the then relatively unknown Armando Guebuza of the FRELIMO party ordering the Portuguese to leave the country in
History of the Jews in Mozambique History of the Jews in Mozambique The history of the Jews in Mozambique, until 1975, was closely connected with the history of Judaism through the former Portuguese empire, particularly those elements of it operating on the coastlines of the Indian Ocean. By the time the first Portuguese ships entered this ocean in the late 15th century, Jewish merchants and persons connected with sea work had lived on, and next to, this ocean for many centuries. As a European presence deepened by the late 19th century in the Portuguese East African colonial capital then called "Lourenço Marques", a cluster of Jews