The Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (hereafter AHM) holds mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century documentation. Most of the documents available were generated by organs of the public (colonial) administration. There are very few fragmentary private papers (collected as “espólios”) and a few collections of documents originated by companies and associations (e.g., Notícias, Moçacor, ATCM, BNU).

In the 1890s, when the administrative capital of Mozambique was still on the Island of Moçambique, António Enes ordered all documents prior to the liberal revolution of 1833-34 to be sent to Lisbon. As a result most of the correspondence between the island of Moçambique and the colonial districts for the period ca. 1750-1830 (correspondence and registers and copies of outgoing correspondence in bound books) was sent to Lisbon where it can be consulted in the original in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarine Most of these now exist on microfilm in the AHM as well. In the 1930s the colonial intellectuals of Mozambique working in different government services founded a scientific society. The colonial administration added to this a cultural publication (Moçambique, Documentário Trimestral, 1935-1960), and also in 1934 the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, which was set up step by step between 1938 and 1940. Originally, this was part of the Library of the Department of Statistics (Costa 1987:4). From 1943 to 1963 it was headed by Lt. Caetano Montez and collected nineteenth- and a few early twentieth-century documents and any archival material tranferred by their originating institutions and partly indexed them.