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Nyassa Company. Information
The Niassa Company or Nyassa Chartered Company (Portuguese: Companhia do Niassa) was a royal company in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, then known as Portuguese East Africa, that had the concession of the lands that include the present provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa between 1891 and 1929. In the late 19th century, Portugal's dominance of Mozambique was threatened by the expansionist colonial ambitions of Great Britain and Germany. Although the borders of Mozambique had nominally been fixed by the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, Portugal lacked the capital to exert effective control or exploitation of the territory. To help overcome this, in 1891 the Portuguese government authorised three private companies by royal charter to manage portions of Mozambique: the Mozambique Company, the Zambezi Company and the Niassa Company. The Niassa Company was given a concession which covered the current provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa, from the Ruvuma River to the Lúrio River and the Indian Ocean to Lake Niassa, a territory which covered more than 160,000 square km. The terms of the concession were the same as for the Mozambique Company, except for a term of only 35 years. The official charter by the Portuguese government in March 1893. Between 1897 and 1908, three financial groups successively controlled the Niassa Company. The first was the "Ibo Syndicate" which raised enough funds to establish an administrative center in the village of Ibo in 1897. In 1899 the "Ibo Syndicate" became the "Ibo Investment Trust", which raised a small army provided by the Portuguese colonial administration, consisting of 300 Portuguese soldiers and 2800 "sepoys". From 1900-1902, the Company was successfully able to occupy the inland regions of the concession, including Metangula on the banks of Lake Niassa. In 1913-14, a German banking consortium bought a majority of the shares of the Niassa Company, aiming at a partition of Mozambique between Germany and Great Britain. With the outbreak of World War I, the British government confiscated German equities and handed them over to an English financial group led by Owen Philipps, chairman of the Union-Castle Line, which did much business in Portuguese East Africa, but which found the concession to be more of a liability.[4] During the war, the Niassa Company's territory was the scene of several resistance operations by the local chiefs aided by the Germans (including in the Kionga Triangle). To resist this invasion, more than 300 kilometers of roads were opened. This also meant the effective occupation of the Mueda Plateau, which was occupied by the heavily-armed Makonde people. The Niassa Company only managed to suppress the Makonde by the early 1920s, and the tribe later became the backbone of the FRELIMO movement in the 1960s and 1970s against continued Portuguese colonial rule. Although the Niassa Company created administrative structures, in the form of districts regulated by agents, the company existed for the profit of its shareholders and was not interested in the development of the territory other to that end. Although one of its main obligations was to create light houses along the Mozambican Coast, the Niassa Company fell short of this goal.[1] On 27 October 1929 the Portuguese government refused to grant an extension of the concession, and the Niassa Company was abolished.[2] Currency : Portuguese ecsudo.
