grew. Maintaining a policy of striking a strategic balance with Portuguese interests, Mzila, on 27 January 1882, accompanied by two columns of troops, visited Lourenço Marques, to pledge his allegiance and to offer his explanations of the attacks on Sofala and Inhambane. He was received, with all appropriate honors, by the governor, who offered him oxen, rice, and spirits. Soon after, in the middle of that year, Mzila asked for a Portuguese flag so that he could fly it over his camp. Formal relations with Mzila The following year, in 1883, Portugal decided to appoint an ambassador to the court of Mzila. The assignment fell to António Maria Cardoso, a man experienced in the region, who was dispatched immediately to the place where Mzila was sojourning, in the neighborhood of Bulawayo, in what is now Zimbabwe. After a long wait to get permission to approach the camp and to be received, António Maria Cardoso managed to secure an audience with Mzila and was well received. The same happened to the captain of artillery, Joaquim Carlos Paiva de Andrada, who went to Manica that year to speak to Mzila. However, despite the apparently satisfactory relationship with the natives, pressure was rising among the European powers to require that a colonizing power demonstrate its ability to effectively exploit and administer its domains in order to justify the possession of territories in Africa. At this time, given the increasing involvement of other European powers in Africa, Portugal decided to strengthen its presence on that continent by organizing major expeditions of exploration, especially those of Roberto Ivens and Hermenegildo Capelo, aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of an occupation of the interior of Africa. Of course, Mzila didn’t know that he had entered the last year of his life. Neither did he realize that, thousands of kilometers away, white European diplomats were gathering at the Berlin Conference, where they intended to devise a scheme for sharing Africa among the European powers. When he died in late August 1884, the Europeans were meeting to set rules that would determine the future of Gaza. The succession During the reign of Mzila, Mundagaz, his son, the future Ngungunhane, was gradually gaining importance, becoming one of the leading figures of his court. When his father died, Mundagaz was not the legitimate heir of Mzila, a position held by his half-brother, Mafemane, whose mother was the principal wife (nkosicaze). So,