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Recent literature indicates that (northern) Mozambique, with its perceived relative land availability and accessibility, and growing foreign interest by large-scale land investors, is a potential frontier area. This paper examines frontier emergence in the northern province of Niassa. We focus on the actors that drive frontier emergence, i.e. the companies and farmers that invest and set up commercial land-use activities, to understand why they invest in Niassa and how they are doing that. The work presented here is based on qualitative data drawn from interviews conducted since February 2017 in Maputo and Niassa, and on-site observations during visits to company offices, plantations, farms and factories. Over 42 in-depth interviews have been conducted with large-scale transnational agricultural and forestry companies, medium-scale Mozambican and foreign commercial farmers and some other relevant actors. We analyse the emerging frontier of Niassa from a historical perspective through the lens of waves and legacies. We examine how successive waves of actors since the colonial period have attempted to open a frontier yet repeatedly failed and left, or did not really succeed in their commercial activities, for a variety of reasons such as war and the lack of access to markets. We show how even though waves come and go, they do leave sediments – legacies – that over time add up to form the conditions for a frontier to emerge. We then discuss how this idea of legacies takes shape in practice by zooming in on the newest of the investment waves. This wave differs from the previous ones in the sense that the actors didn’t really come from elsewhere but were already in Niassa. This wave thus actually emerged from within the region, illustrating that with the build-up of conditions for frontier emergence, endogenous, self-reinforcing processes start to take the upper hand vis-à-vis externally-driven waves.