The history of the Comoros

The Comoros are a chain of volcanic islands at the northern mouth of the Mozambique Channel, between the African mainland and Madagascar. Settled late, around the eighth century, by seafarers from both Africa and South-East Asia, they became Muslim early and grew into a cluster of small sultanates within the Swahili trading world of the western Indian Ocean. France took the islands in stages between 1841 and 1912. Three of them declared independence in 1975, while the fourth, Mayotte, chose to remain French, a split the Comorian state has never accepted. The young country then lived through some twenty coups and attempted coups, several led by a French mercenary, before a federal settlement in 2001 brought a measure of stability.

The four main islands, Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Mwali (Mohéli), Ndzwani (Anjouan) and Maore (Mayotte), rose from the sea floor as volcanoes, Mayotte the oldest and Grande Comore the youngest; its Mount Karthala is still one of the world's most active volcanoes. Before people arrived, the islands' only native land mammals were bats.

Human settlement began in the second half of the first millennium CE. The earliest known sites, on Mayotte, date to around the eighth century. Plant remains from early villages such as Sima on Anjouan show that the first farmers grew Asian rice, mung beans and cotton, crops brought by Austronesian sailors from island South-East Asia, the same people who settled Madagascar at around this time. Bantu-speaking people from the East African coast arrived from the beginning as well, and their language became the basis of Comorian, a close relative of Swahili. Genetic studies show that Comorians today descend from African, South-East Asian and Middle Eastern ancestors who mixed from the first millennium onwards.

Archaeologists call the period from the ninth to the twelfth centuries the Dembeni phase, after a site on Mayotte. Its villages traded across the ocean: excavations have found Chinese and Persian ceramics, glass and large amounts of rock crystal from Madagascar, which was in demand in the Islamic world. Through the merchants of the Abbasid Caliphate and later the Fatimid Caliphate, the islands were drawn into a trade network that stretched from the Persian Gulf to Zanzibar and the gold port of Sofala.

A Comorian legend tells that in the time of Muhammad the islanders sent an envoy, Mtswa-Mwindza, to Mecca, who arrived after the Prophet's death but returned to found a mosque at Ntsaweni on Ngazidja. Archaeology suggests a later and more gradual conversion: burials facing Mecca appear by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and by the end of the medieval period almost the whole population was Muslim. Islam of the Shafi'i school has remained the religion of nearly all Comorians.

From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries trade with Madagascar and the Swahili towns of the coast, such as Kilwa and Mombasa, brought growth, new villages and stone towns. By the fifteenth century ruling families who traced their descent to Shiraz in Persia, like the elites of the Swahili coast, had founded sultanates and built mosques and palaces of coral stone, and from the sixteenth century families from the Hadhramaut in southern Arabia reinforced these dynasties through marriage and religious learning. Ndzwani was usually ruled by a single sultan, who at times claimed authority over Mwali and Mayotte, while Ngazidja was divided among as many as a dozen rival sultanates whose rulers competed for the title of paramount sultan. The old stone towns of the sultanates, such as Moroni, Itsandra and Iconi on Ngazidja, grew up in this era, and some of their mosques and quarters date back to the twelfth century. Society was strongly hierarchical, with noble lineages, free commoners and a large enslaved population.

Portuguese ships visited from 1503, after Vasco da Gama's opening of the sea route to India, and for much of the sixteenth century the islands sold provisions to the Portuguese fort on Mozambique Island. From around 1600 English and Dutch ships bound for the Indies stopped at Ndzwani, which the English called Johanna, to take on water, meat and fruit. The islands also served as a market in the trade in enslaved people, sending captives to Arabia and the Persian Gulf and later to the French sugar islands of the Mascarenes. As Oman built its power on the East African coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, eventually ruling from Zanzibar, its influence reached the Comoros, though the islands stayed under their own sultans.

From the 1790s to the 1810s, Malagasy raiders, mostly Sakalava and Betsimisaraka from Madagascar, attacked the islands in large fleets of outrigger canoes, killing and enslaving thousands, destroying crops and leaving Mwali and Mayotte nearly empty. The islands were repopulated partly with enslaved people brought from the mainland; by 1865 perhaps 40 per cent of the population was enslaved.

France, which had lost Mauritius to Britain in 1814, wanted a harbour in the region. In 1841 Andriantsoly, a Sakalava prince from Madagascar who had made himself ruler of Mayotte, ceded the island to France, which abolished slavery there soon afterwards and tried to turn it into a sugar colony. The other islands followed over the next decades amid rivalry with Britain and Germany and wars between sultans. In 1886 the sultan of Mwali and Sultan Said Ali of Bambao on Ngazidja, who sought French backing for his claim to the whole island, accepted French protection, and Ndzwani did the same. In 1908 the four islands were combined as a dependency of the French colony of Madagascar, and in 1912 the last sultans gave up their remaining powers.

Colonial rule ended legal slavery but did little for the islands' development. French companies took much of the best land for plantations of vanilla, cloves, ylang-ylang and copra, food crops were neglected, and services were concentrated on Madagascar, to which many Comorians emigrated. British troops occupied the islands from 1942 to 1946 during the Second World War. In 1946 the Comoros became a French overseas territory separate from Madagascar, and the capital later moved from Dzaoudzi on Mayotte to Moroni.

In a referendum in December 1974 the three western islands voted overwhelmingly for independence, but Mayotte, where many resented the dominance of the politicians of Ngazidja and saw France as a protector, voted about 64 per cent to remain French. When France proposed counting the results island by island, the Comorian parliament declared unilateral independence on 6 July 1975 under President Ahmed Abdallah. Mayotte confirmed its choice in a further referendum in 1976. The Comoros joined the United Nations in November 1975 as a state comprising all four islands, and the UN General Assembly has repeatedly backed its claim to Mayotte, but France kept the island, which became a French overseas department on 31 March 2011 after a referendum in 2009 and part of the European Union's territory in 2014.

Less than a month after independence Abdallah was overthrown. In January 1976 Ali Soilihi took power and launched a radical programme of revolution, attacking the power of the old notables and religious customs, which alienated much of the population. In May 1978 the French mercenary Bob Denard landed with a small force, overthrew Soilihi, who was killed weeks later, and restored Abdallah. For the next eleven years Denard commanded the presidential guard, financed largely by apartheid South Africa, which used the islands to get around sanctions and to monitor its neighbours, and he was widely seen as the real power in what was renamed the Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros. In November 1989 Abdallah was shot dead in circumstances that implicated Denard's men, and French and South African pressure forced the mercenaries out.

Under Said Mohamed Djohar, the islands held their first contested elections, but in September 1995 Denard returned and seized power again, until French troops landed and arrested him in October. In 1997 Ndzwani and Mwali declared their secession and asked to return to French rule; France refused, and a federal attempt to retake Ndzwani by force failed. In April 1999 the army chief, Colonel Azali Assoumani, took power in what was counted as the eighteenth coup or attempted coup since independence.

Mediation by the Organisation of African Unity and later the African Union produced the Fomboni Accords of 2001, which renamed the country the Union of the Comoros, gave each island its own president and wide autonomy, and rotated the union presidency among the islands. Azali won the 2002 election and in 2006 handed power peacefully to Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, a cleric from Ndzwani, the first peaceful transfer of power through the ballot box. When Ndzwani's island president, Mohamed Bacar, refused to step down, Comorian and African Union troops landed in March 2008 and ended his rule. Ikililou Dhoinine, from Mwali, became president in 2011.

Azali returned to the presidency through the 2016 election. A 2018 referendum, boycotted by the opposition, extended presidential terms and weakened the rotation system, and he won further elections in 2019 and January 2024 that his opponents called fraudulent. Sambi was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2022 over the sale of Comorian passports. The Comoros chaired the African Union in 2023, and in July 2026 the medinas of the historic sultanates, four on Ngazidja and two on Ndzwani, became its first World Heritage site. Remittances from Comorians in France and dangerous small-boat crossings to Mayotte remain central to life on the islands.