Climate change experts predict the number of nuisance-biting arthropods in England will increase but there is currently no known surveillance system in place to monitor or assess the public health impact of arthropod bites. This retrospective ecological study utilized arthropod bites requiring healthcare from five national real-time syndromic surveillance systems monitoring general practitioner (GP) consultations (in-hours and out-of-hours), emergency department (ED) attendances and telephone calls to remote advice services to determine baseline incidence in England between 2000 and 2013 and to assess the association between arthropod bites and temperature. During summer months (weeks 20–40) we estimated that arthropod bites contribute a weekly median of ~4000 GP consultations, 750 calls to remote advice services, 700 ED and 1300 GP out-of-hours attendances. In all systems, incidence was highest during summer months compared to the rest of the year. Arthropod bites were positively associated with temperature with incidence rate ratios (IRRs) that ranged between systems from 1·03 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1·01–1·06] to 1·14 (95% CI 1·11–1·16). Using syndromic surveillance systems we have established and described baseline incidence of arthropod bites and this can now be monitored routinely in real time to assess the impact of extreme weather events and climate change.

The Massingire acquired an identity separate from that of the other Maganja peoples under the leadership of a family of Indian origin called Vas dos Anjos. During the 1870s they became involved in a series of wars with the Makololo chiefs of the Shire, and the raids carried out by the Makololo on Portuguese territory threatened to implicate the Scottish mission in the Shire Highlands. In 1882 the Portuguese annexed Massingire after the deposition of the Vas dos Anjos chief, and in 1884 the whole area rose in rebellion supported by dissident elements on the prazos of the lower Zambezi. The Portuguese thought that the Makololo were responsible for the rising and that they had been aided by the Church of Scotland mission. The Massingire had, in fact, made many attempts to obtain official or unofficial British protection, and it is possible that they may have thought that their connections with the British would grant them the same sort of immunity as that enjoyed by the Makololo. When the frontiers were finally drawn in 1891, Massingire was divided, the larger part falling to the Portuguese.

The fortunes of Angoche revived with the growth of the slave trade, and during the 1840s it became the chief slaving port of the Moçambique coast. Numerous attacks were made on it by British and Portuguese expeditions, and the town was finally seized in 1861 by the Portuguese adventurer da Silva. The Muslims who fled from Portuguese occupation were led first by Mussa Quanto, and then, after his death in 1877, by Ussene and Farelay. They were able to confine the Portuguese to a few coastal garrisons, continue the slave trade until the end of the century, and gradually build up an anti-Portuguese ‘front’ amongst the Macua peoples of the hinterland. Farelay was not overthrown and the Macua country was not occupied by the Portuguese until 1910.

From the sixteenth century until the coming of the Salazar regime, Portuguese control in the Zambezi basin rested on the prazos da coroa—grants of crown land. Portuguese acquisition of land and jurisdiction began with the establishment of the trading fairs in Mashonaland in the second half of the sixteenth century. Private titles first became common in the seventeenth century, when individual conquistadores, who had obtained concessions from chiefs in return for their help in local wars, sought official titles for their land from the Portuguese crown. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Crown tried to modify the terms of these grants and alter the character of the institution of the prazos. The prazo-holders successfully resisted these encroachments because their power rested on their followings of African slaves and clients, and on their control of local administration and their family alliances. In the nineteenth century their dependence on their African followings, coupled with increasing inter-marriage, greatly accentuated the African characteristics of the prazos. The most important of the prazo holders became the chiefs of newly emerging African peoples, and adopted the customs and beliefs associated with chieftainship. At the same time the disordered state of the Zambezi following the Ngoni invasions and the growth of the slave-trade eliminated the weaker families and concentrated power effectively in the hands of four major family groupings. The wars waged by the Portuguese government against these families lasted from the 1840s till teh end of the century. In spite of many victories, the internal feuds among the prazo families and the establishment of British administration in Central Africa brought about the end of their dominance. The prazos themselves survived into the twentieth century as units of fiscal and administrative policy.

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

This article seeks to re-examine the contemporary evidence about the early history of the Maravi chieftaincies of northern Zambesia. It challenges the view that the Maravi were long established in Zambesia and became aggressive and expansionist in the late sixteenth century when the Portuguese interfered with the ivory trade. Instead it suggests that these chieftaincies were only formed in the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century by a number of different groups who migrated into the region north of the Zambezi and who conquered the existing population. Some of these intrusive groups crossed the Zambezi and attacked the wealthy Karanga states to the south, but these invasions were frustrated by the Portuguese who blocked all attempts to settle south of the river. Defeated in their efforts, the Maravi chiefs turned aside to invade the Mozambique lowlands. It was one of these incursions that in the 1580s gave rise to the legend of the marauding, cannibal Zimba.

The establishment of settled Maravi states occurred only as a result of the rise of Muzura in the first half of the seventeenth century. He defeated his rivals with Portuguese aid but was, in his turn, frustrated in his attempts to interfere in Karangaland, and in the end was badly defeated by the Portuguese in 1632. Thereafter he concentrated his activity on developing the ivory trade with the Portuguese on the Zambezi and in Mozambique Island, while the region south of the Zambezi became subject to Portuguese warlords and the trade monopoly of the captain of Mozambique.

In the nineteenth century the Portuguese government became engaged in a long struggle with the most powerful of the landowning families of the Zambezi—the famous prazo holders. Beginning as a domestic affair brought about by the weakness of the administration, the wars eventually developed into a struggle for the survival of even the vestiges of Portuguese rule on the Zambezi. The Portuguese government mounted nine expeditions before it was finally successful in 1888. The prazo holders, for their part, gathered round them the tribes and families broken up by the wars and by the raids of the Landim and Ngoni, and their resistance became, by the end, a general struggle of the African peoples of the lower Zambezi, not so much for independence, as against any alteration in the way of life of the ‘Rivers’—against westernization. Most of the fighting centred round the stronghold of Massangano at the junction of the Luenha and Zambezi rivers a few miles below Tete. The ‘aringa’ at Massangano was destroyed finally in 1888 but there are still extensive remains of it and of other sites connected with the Zambezi wars. The expedition reported in this paper made a plan of the ‘aringa’ of Massangano and was able to show the continuity in building tradition between the Portuguese ‘fairs’ built in Mashonaland in the seventeenth century, the Swahili east-coast sites and the nineteenth-century building in the Zambezi valley. The expedition was also intended to form some estimate of the potential of the virtually unworked fields of Moçambique archaeology and tradition, and by making two detailed studies to attract other workers to the same area.