The sea is the best highway along the edge of Mozambique, and some of the watercraft sailing among the islands here carry fishermen from local villages. Some carry Tanzanian fishermen, seeking richer waters. Some carry Somalians and other boat people making their precarious way down the coast to South Africa.
Farther out in the channel are commercial fishermen from all over the world, and farther north—just south of the Tanzanian border, not far from the Quirimbas Archipelago—are the ships that inevitably cluster around a major petroleum strike.
This storied coast has lived through conquest, revolution, civil war, typhoons, and poverty. Now it finds itself adjacent to one of the richest oil and gas discoveries in Africa, trillions of cubic feet of gas, all of it upstream, so to speak, of the biological riches that make this coast so distinctive.