Sofala

Sofala, at present known as Nova Sofala, used to be the chief seaport of the Monomotapa Kingdom, whose capital was at Mount Fura. It is located on the Sofala Bank in Sofala Province of Mozambique. It was founded by African and Indian Ocean traders linked to the Global Monsoon Complex, including Swahili and Somali merchants and seafarers.

One of the oldest harbours documented in Southern Africa, medieval Sofala was erected on the edge of a wide estuary formed by the Buzi River (called Rio de Sofala in older maps). Sofala was founded about the year 700 and was part of a long line of trading centres stretching from Kismayu, incorporating Mombasa, Malindi, and Zanzibar. Sofala played host to assorted African trading communities, Swahili, Arab, and Persian traders, among others who frequented the coast. Complex trade routes from the coast entered deep into the hinterland from where most tradeable goods, including ivory, were sourced.

The Buzi River connected Sofala to the internal market town of Manica, and from there to the goldfields of Great Zimbabwe. Sometime in the 10th century, Sofala emerged as a small trading post and was incorporated into the greater global monsoon complex. In the 1180s, Sultan Suleiman Hassan of Kilwa (in present-day Tanzania) seized control of Sofala, and brought Sofala into the Kilwa Sultanate and the Swahili cultural sphere. The Swahili strengthened its trading capacity by having, among other things, river-going dhows ply the Buzi and Save rivers to ferry the gold extracted in the hinterlands to the coast.

Sofala's subsequent position as the principal entrepot of the Monomatapa gold trade prompted Portuguese chronicler Thomé Lopes to identify Sofala with the biblical Ophir and its ancient rulers with the dynasty of the Queen of Sheba. Alternately, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Augustus Henry Keane argued that Sofala was the Biblical Tarshish. Since the early 1900s, both notions have been discarded. The name Sofala is most probably derived from the Arabic for 'lowlands', a reference to the flat coastlands and low-lying islands and sandbanks that characterize the region.

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