The Comoros were settled late and from many directions at once, and that mix explains what they are today. The first to arrive, between the 8th and 13th centuries, were Austronesian navigators, sailors from Southeast Asia who colonised neighbouring Madagascar on the same voyages. They brought Asian crops with them (rice, bananas, taro) and left a genetic mark that can still be traced in the Comorian population, with an Austronesian contribution estimated at around 20 per cent.
Almost in parallel, from the end of the first millennium, Sabaki-speaking Bantu peoples arrived from the coast of East Africa, farmers and fishermen who joined the newcomers. That encounter gave rise to the cultural heart of the archipelago: the Comorians and their language, Shikomori (or Comorian), a Bantu language related to Swahili and full of Arabic loanwords. Archaeological sites such as Dembeni, on Mayotte, or Sima, on Anjouan, already show villages active in Indian Ocean trade between the 9th and 12th centuries, with imported Chinese and Persian ceramics.
Over the centuries a third layer settled on top of that African and Austronesian base: that of Arab and Persian merchants from the Gulf, who introduced Islam and the trading networks linking the islands with Arabia, Persia, India and the Swahili world. This was not a simple foreign colonisation but the slow fusion of three worlds (African, Asian and Arab) into a new people, island-dwelling and Muslim, open to the sea on every side.
By around the 10th century, Indian Ocean trade had already brought Islam to the islands, along with the elites who embodied it: the Shirazi. The name refers to the Persian city of Shiraz, and a famous legend tells of seven Shirazi brothers who set sail in seven ships and founded colonies on the Swahili coast, in northwestern Madagascar and in the Comoros. Historians debate whether they were real migrants from the Gulf or whether "Shirazi" was above all a prestige identity that local ruling families adopted to legitimise their power. What is certain is that, between the 15th and 16th centuries, Shirazi lineages and, later, Hadrami Arab families married into the island nobility and founded ruling dynasties on each island.
With them, the Comoros became fully part of the Swahili civilisation that stretched along the coast of East Africa, from Mogadishu to Sofala. Coral-stone towns appeared, with mosques, courtyard houses and carved doors, along with Arabic script and a refined urban life geared towards maritime trade. Sunni Islam took hold as everyone's religion (today more than 98 per cent of Comorians are Muslim) and shaped law, education and the calendar of festivals.
The Comorian culture that took shape in those centuries is still alive: the lavish weddings of the grand marriage (anda), the music and brotherhood rites with Sufi roots, the architecture of the medinas. The Comoros were not a poor periphery of the Swahili world but one of its prosperous links, a bridge between the African continent, Madagascar and the great Indian Ocean trade.
Rather than one great unified kingdom, the Comoros spent centuries split into a constellation of small sultanates that competed and fought among themselves. The French would later call this patchwork, especially on Grande Comore, the "sultanats batailleurs", the warring sultanates. At one point the island of Ngazidja was divided into eleven sultanates at once; the most powerful were Itsandra and Bambao, each with its own capital, palace and court of advisers. The sultans of Ngazidja actually held limited power, and alliances and rivalries between towns shifted constantly.
Anjouan took a different path. Around 1500 the sultanate of Ndzuani was founded there. It managed to unify the whole island and became the most powerful and commercial in the archipelago: its natural harbours at Domoni and Mutsamudu were vital stopovers for ships sailing between Africa, Madagascar, India and the Persian Gulf. Mohéli, the smallest, had its own story: its sultanate took shape late, in 1830, when the Malagasy prince Ramanetaka (who would take the name Abderemane) arrived from Madagascar and seized the island.
This fragmentation was both a strength and a weakness. A cultural strength, because each sultanate left medinas, citadels and mosques that today rank among the country's great treasures. A political weakness, because divided and feuding islands would be easy prey, first for the slave raids from Madagascar and then for the European powers carving up the Indian Ocean.
The prosperity of the Comoros came from the sea. Lying on the passage between Africa and Madagascar, and swept by the monsoons, the islands exported cloves, ambergris, tortoiseshell, rice and enslaved people, and imported textiles, weapons and manufactured goods. Anjouan in particular specialised in supplying water, food and fresh provisions to European ships on the India route; English captains knew it as Johanna, and many sailors remembered its hospitality.
In that world, slavery was a central reality that should be named without euphemism. The islands took part in the Indian Ocean slave trade as both market and bridge, and at the same time they were its victims. Between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, fleets of Malagasy warriors (Betsimisaraka and Sakalava) launched devastating slave raids on the Comoros: they attacked coastal villages, burned the medinas and carried off thousands of captives. Those raids emptied entire regions, forced towns to fortify themselves and left a deep trauma in the islands' memory.
Europe had appeared much earlier. The Portuguese sighted the archipelago around 1505 on their way to India, and in 1529 the French Parmentier brothers visited; the English and Dutch called in later. But for centuries no power settled permanently: the Comoros remained an archipelago of sultanates, prosperous and vulnerable, until the weakness sown by internal wars and raids opened the door to French conquest.
The colonisation of the Comoros began with a single island. In 1841, Sultan Andriantsoly (Andrian Souli), a prince of Malagasy origin ruling a Mayotte weakened by wars and raids, ceded his island to France in exchange for military protection and a lifelong pension. With that treaty Mayotte became a French possession, and for the first time its fate parted from that of the other three islands: a split that, two centuries later, would still shape the archipelago's politics.
The rest followed in 1886. After a military campaign on Grande Comore, where French forces defeated Sultan Said Ali near Moroni, France declared protectorates over Ngazidja, Ndzuani and Mwali. The once-feared sultans were reduced to ceremonial figures, and around 1909-1912 the last of them abdicated. The key figure of those years was Léon Humblot, a French naturalist and businessman appointed resident on Grande Comore, who amassed enormous power: between the colonial administration and his own plantation company, he came to control much of the island as if it were his personal fiefdom.
In 1908 the four islands were administratively attached to the colony of Madagascar, with Dzaoudzi, on Mayotte, as their capital. The Comoros thus stopped being a set of sovereign sultanates and became a distant, neglected colonial appendage, governed from Antananarivo and seen above all as a source of tropical crops for the French market.
Under French rule the Comoros acquired the nickname that still defines them: the Perfume Islands. Humblot's company and other French sociétés turned the most fertile land into large plantations of export crops: vanilla, cloves, cocoa, copra and, above all, ylang-ylang, a tree with yellow flowers and a heady scent whose essential oil is distilled for fine perfumery. The Comoros became one of the world's largest producers of ylang-ylang essence, an ingredient in legendary perfumes, and their small artisanal distilleries filled the islands' air with a sweet, unmistakable aroma.
Behind the romance of the name lay a brutally extractive economy. The best land ended up in the hands of the colonial companies, and the Comorian population was pushed into working for miserable wages or confined to the poorest plots. Food crops were neglected in favour of cash crops, so a fertile archipelago came to depend on importing much of its food, a vulnerability that persists to this day. The colony was run with minimal investment in schools, roads or health.
Its political status changed slowly. Occupied by the British during the Second World War, the Comoros were administratively separated from Madagascar in 1946 and became a French overseas territory, with representation in the National Assembly. A 1958 referendum confirmed the link with France, and in 1961 the islands gained internal autonomy, with Moroni as capital. But the call for independence kept growing, fuelled by poverty, emigration and the example of African decolonisation.
In December 1974 France held a self-determination referendum in the Comoros. Across the archipelago as a whole, an overwhelming majority voted for independence, but the results were counted island by island, and on Mayotte (partly Christian and Catholic, with elites tied to France) the vote to remain French prevailed. Relying on that detail, Paris manoeuvred to detach Mayotte from the process.
On 6 July 1975 the Comorian parliament cut the knot: it unilaterally proclaimed the independence of all four islands, with Ahmed Abdallah as the first president. The United Nations admitted the Comoros as a member state on the basis of its full colonial borders, that is, including Mayotte, and numerous resolutions have since reaffirmed Comorian sovereignty over the island. France, however, kept effective control of Mayotte, and in later referendums its inhabitants confirmed again and again their wish to stay tied to Paris; in 2011 Mayotte became France's 101st department.
That is how the dispute was born that still defines relations between the Comoros and France: for the Comoros and the UN, Mayotte is an occupied Comorian island; for France and most Mahorais, it is French territory in its own right. The issue is anything but abstract. Every year, thousands of Comorians cross the stretch of sea between Anjouan and Mayotte in fragile boats called kwassa-kwassa, trying to reach French territory, on one of the deadliest migration routes in the world. From day one, independence left a wound that has never closed.
Few countries have such a turbulent post-colonial history. The Comoros have suffered more than twenty coups or coup attempts since 1975, and many bear the signature of the same man: the French mercenary Bob Denard. Barely a month after independence, in August 1975, Denard overthrew President Ahmed Abdallah and replaced him with Ali Soilih, a revolutionary who imposed a radical, anticlerical socialist regime that scandalised Muslim society. In 1978 Denard came back, this time with support from Rhodesia and South Africa. He overthrew and killed Ali Soilih and put Abdallah back in power, then ruled over his presidential guard for eleven years as the real strongman behind the scenes.
In 1989 President Abdallah was shot dead in circumstances that were never cleared up, in an episode that pointed to Denard himself; French pressure finally forced the mercenary out. But Denard would return once more in 1995, in a last coup (Operation Kaskari) against President Said Mohamed Djohar, which France put down by landing troops in Operation Azalée. Between one coup and the next, instability was chronic, the economy was sinking and politics was splintering.
The worst moment came in 1997, when Anjouan and Mohéli, fed up with Grande Comore's centralism and with poverty, declared secession. Anjouan even voted for independence in a referendum, by more than 99 per cent, and asked (unsuccessfully) to rejoin France on the Mayotte model. The government's attempt to retake the island by force sparked an armed conflict. The way out came through the Organisation of African Unity: the 2001 Fomboni Agreement refounded the country as the Union of the Comoros. Its new Constitution granted each island broad autonomy, with its own president and government, and set up a Union presidency rotating among the three islands.
That, broadly speaking, is the country today. Colonel Azali Assoumani, who had seized power in a coup in 1999, consolidated his position under the new system and has dominated Comorian politics for much of the 21st century. He has been re-elected in polls disputed by the opposition, after amending the Constitution in 2018 to extend his time in office, and in 2023 the Comoros even chaired the African Union. A young, poor and fragile nation, dependent on remittances from its huge diaspora and still marked by the claim to Mayotte, the Comoros nonetheless remain a corner of serene beauty in the heart of the Indian Ocean: three islands of volcanoes, coral medinas and ylang-ylang fields that still perfume the air.
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Anjouan —Ndzuani or Nzwani in Shikomori, and Johanna to English sailors— had a different history from fragmented Grande Comore. Around the year 1500, high-ranking Hadhrami Arab families married into the local nobility and founded the Sultanate of Ndzuani, which unified the whole island and became the most powerful and commercial in the Comoros, at times extending its influence over Mohéli and Mayotte.
Its strength came from the sea. The natural harbours of Domoni and Mutsamudu were prime stopovers for ships sailing between Africa, Madagascar, India and the Persian Gulf, and Anjouan specialised in supplying them with water, rice and provisions. The island had three successive capitals that mark its history: Sima, from the 8th to the 13th century; Domoni, from the 13th to the 18th; and finally Mutsamudu, from the 18th century to the present day.
That prosperity also made it a target for the Malagasy slave raids of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which forced its towns to be fortified. Anjouan, the most mountainous and green of the islands, thus holds an extraordinary density of history: medinas, citadels and centuries-old mosques that make it an open-air museum of Swahili civilisation.
Mutsamudu is the capital of Anjouan and the country's second city. According to tradition, it was founded in 1482 by Sultan Mohamed bin Sultan Hassan as a Swahili port on the island's northwest coast, linked to the migration of Shirazi families from Kilwa, in present-day Tanzania, who mixed with the local Bantu population.
Its old town is a maze-like medina of narrow alleys, coral-stone houses and carved doors, among which the Ujumbe stands out, an 18th-century Swahili stone house. Above the harbour rises the citadel (la Citadelle), a fortress built in the 18th century to defend the town from pirates and rival sultanates, whose walls and cannons still dominate the bay.
In 1997, Mutsamudu was the epicentre of Anjouan separatism: the arrest of the secessionist leader sparked riots in the town, and from here Anjouan declared its independence and voted, in a referendum, to break away from the Comoros and even rejoin France. That crisis, resolved by the 2001 Fomboni Accord, left Mutsamudu as a symbol of the tensions between the islands and the central government in Moroni.
On Anjouan's east coast survives Domoni, one of the most important historic towns in the country. It was the capital of the Sultanate of Ndzuani between the 13th and 18th centuries, before power passed to Mutsamudu, and it keeps one of the best-preserved old medinas in the Comoros: a walled town of Shirazi origin, with centuries-old mosques, coral houses and narrow lanes that breathe centuries of Indian Ocean trade.
Domoni is also a place of recent political memory: it was the hometown of Ahmed Abdallah Abderemane, the first president of the independent Comoros, overthrown and reinstated several times by coups and finally assassinated in 1989. His mausoleum is in Domoni, and the town has been tied for ever to the turbulent history of independence.
Between defensive walls raised against Malagasy raids, old mosques and the memory of sultans and presidents, Domoni sums up Anjouan's long journey: from a prosperous Swahili sultanate to a stage for the political storms of the Republic.
Anjouan is the most mountainous and lush of the Comoros, and its rugged terrain is covered in rainforest, plantations and waterfalls. In its interior rises Mont Ntringui, at 1,595 metres the island's highest peak, now protected by a national park: its rainforest slopes hold unique biodiversity and offer hikes among wild spices, with views of the sea. Waterfalls such as the Tatinga falls, surrounded by lush vegetation, are classic outings on this green island.
That fertility made Anjouan a heart of the colonial perfume economy. In areas such as Bambao, in the centre of the island, lie the ylang-ylang plantations and small-scale distilleries, where the essential oil of its yellow flowers —the base of legendary perfumes— is still extracted with traditional methods, filling the whole area with a sweet scent. Alongside ylang-ylang thrive cloves and vanilla, the other big cash crops of the Comoros.
Behind that beauty lies land under pressure: Anjouan is the most densely populated island and one of the poorest, and the clearing of its slopes for farming threatens its forests and water sources. Many of the fragile kwassa-kwassa boats that try to reach nearby French Mayotte also set off from here. The greenest, most fragrant island of the Comoros is also the one that best sums up its contrasts and its hardships.
Grande Comore, Ngazidja in Shikomori, is the largest and most populous of the islands, and the one that gives the country its name and its capital. It is also the youngest geologically: almost all of it is the work of the Karthala volcano, with vast black lava flows, porous soils that swallow the rain and coasts of volcanic rock alternating with beaches of pale and ochre sand.
For centuries Ngazidja was the perfect example of the "sultanats batailleurs": at one point it was divided into eleven sultanates that competed and fought among themselves. The most powerful were Itsandra and Bambao, each with its own capital and palace. Unlike neighbouring Anjouan, unified under a single sultanate, Ngazidja lived through a political fragmentation that made it both culturally very rich and militarily weak.
That history of rival kingdoms is written into the landscape: coral-stone medinas, old mosques, and ruined palaces and citadels scattered across the island. It was here, near Moroni, that French forces defeated Sultan Said Ali in 1886 and sealed the protectorate; and it was here that Léon Humblot built his plantation empire. Within a few kilometres, Ngazidja holds almost the whole of Comorian history.
Moroni, the capital, began as a small coastal sultanate and is today the political and spiritual heart of the country. Its name is said to mean "in the heart of the fire", a reference to Karthala, which towers over it. The soul of the city is its Vieille Ville, a maze of narrow lanes, courtyard houses and carved wooden doors that runs down to a small harbour of dhows, the sailing boats that have crossed the Indian Ocean for centuries.
Its jewel is the Ancienne Mosquée du Vendredi, the Old Friday Mosque, which dates back to 1427, making it one of the oldest mosques in the region. Looking out over the sea with its white minaret, it is the symbol of Moroni and a living testament to the Muslim faith that arrived with the Shirazi and that almost all Comorians follow.
Modest for a national capital, with just a few tens of thousands of inhabitants, Moroni keeps a charm frozen in time, between the bustle of its market, the call of the muezzin and the scent of cloves and ylang-ylang. From here the Union of the Comoros is governed, and from here it pursues its never-abandoned claim to the island of Mayotte.
Before Moroni concentrated power, other towns on Ngazidja served as the seat of a sultanate, and their ruins still stand. A few kilometres south of the capital, Iconi was the capital of the powerful sultanate of Bambao, two centuries before Itsandra's heyday. Here stand the ruins of the sultans' palace and a citadel on cliffs above the sea, a place heavy with memory: tradition recalls that, during the Malagasy slave raids, women of Iconi threw themselves from the cliffs rather than be captured.
North of Moroni, Itsandra was the island's other great centre of power. Its medina, whose origins go back to the 14th century, is considered one of the cradles of Swahili culture in the Comoros. Next to the village are the ruins of a historic fort and a quiet beach, and its sunsets over the Indian Ocean are among the most celebrated in the archipelago.
These two places sum up the political history of Ngazidja: a chessboard of sultanates fighting over the sea and the harvests, leaving palaces, walls and mosques behind them. Walking through Iconi and Itsandra means reading, in stone, the history of the warring sultanates of Grande Comore.
The whole of Grande Comore lives in the shadow of Karthala, one of the largest active volcanoes in the world. At 2,361 metres, it is the highest point in the Comoros, and its caldera is one of the widest craters on the planet. It is still active —it had major eruptions in recent decades, in 2005 and 2006— and climbing to its rim, on a demanding one- or two-day hike through high-altitude forest and ash desert, is the archipelago's great adventure.
The volcano shaped much of the island's landscape. In the north, Lac Salé is a saltwater crater lake of an intense turquoise-green, set between flows of black lava at the edge of the sea, one of the country's most famous natural sights. On the east coast, coves such as Chomoni beach combine pale sand with dark volcanic rock and coconut palms, in some of the most photogenic and secluded corners of the Comoros.
That volcanic nature is a blessing and a threat at the same time. The lava gave the island fertile soils for ylang-ylang and spices, but its porosity makes fresh water scarce, and Karthala's eruptions periodically remind everyone that Ngazidja is, quite literally, a living mountain risen from the Indian Ocean.
Mohéli —Mwali in Shikomori— is the smallest, least populated and most pristine of the three islands of the Union. Its forested hills, almost deserted beaches and reef islets make it a refuge of untouched nature, far removed from the bustle of Grande Comore or densely packed Anjouan.
Its sultanate was the last to emerge in the archipelago. In 1830, a Malagasy prince named Ramanetaka —who would take the Muslim name Abderemane— arrived from Madagascar fleeing the wars of the Merina court and took control of the island, founding the Sultanate of Mwali. The island, a crossroads of Indian Ocean routes, had for centuries welcomed Bantu, Swahili, Malagasy, Shirazi and European traders, and according to tradition even had famous sultanates ruled by women.
That history of mixing and isolation shaped Mohéli's character: a remote, slow-paced place that modern life and tourism barely touch. Its capital, Fomboni, is a quiet, sleepy town that serves as the gateway to the wildest island of the Comoros.
Fomboni, Mohéli's modest capital, holds an unexpectedly large place in the recent history of the Comoros. It was here, in February 2001, that the Fomboni Accord was signed, the agreement that ended the separatist crisis that began in 1997, when Anjouan and Mohéli itself had declared their secession from the country.
That accord, sponsored by the Organisation of African Unity, refounded the state as the Union of the Comoros. The new Constitution granted each island —Grande Comore, Anjouan and Mohéli— broad self-government, with its own president and government, and set up a rotating presidency of the Union that would pass between the three islands. It was the formula that kept together a country that had been on the brink of breaking apart.
It was no coincidence that the agreement bore Fomboni's name: little Mohéli, the weakest island, had felt Moroni's centralism especially strongly, and its role in the reconciliation gave it symbolic weight. Ever since, Fomboni has been synonymous with the delicate balance on which the Union of the Comoros rests.
Mohéli's greatest treasure lies underwater and on its beaches. In 2000, the Mohéli Marine Park was created in the southern half of the island, the country's first protected area and one of the pioneers of marine conservation in the entire western Indian Ocean. It grew out of a community management model, with local villages involved in looking after their own resources.
The park protects one of the largest green turtle (Chelonia mydas) nesting sites in the Indian Ocean: every night, on beaches such as Itsamia, turtles come out of the sea to lay their eggs in the sand, a natural spectacle that has become the island's emblem. Its warm waters are also home to humpback whales —which come to breed between July and October—, dolphins, the occasional dugong and living coral reefs, among the richest in the region.
For two decades Mohéli was the country's only national park; only in recent years have the Comoros begun creating new protected areas following its example. Fragile and biodiverse, Mohéli Marine Park is the best proof that the future of these islands is as tied to the sea as their whole history has been.
Off Mohéli's south coast stretches the string of Nioumachoua islets, small islands of sand and reef that are part of the marine park. They are home to colonies of flying foxes —large fruit bats— and some of the best diving and snorkelling spots in the whole archipelago, in an almost untouched setting of crystal-clear water.
Inland, a short walk through untouched nature leads to Lake Dziani Boundouni, a crater lake with greenish, sulphur-rich water, a refuge for waterbirds and surrounded by vegetation. It is one of those scenes that sum up Mohéli: a volcanic, silent and wild landscape, far from any mass tourism development.
Together with the rainforest on its hills and the turtle beaches of the south, these spots make Mohéli the natural jewel of the Comoros. It is the archipelago's most ecological side, a place where the fragility of these Indian Ocean islands —threatened by deforestation, poverty and climate change— sits alongside a beauty that is only beginning to be appreciated.
Hardly anything that happened to Comoros happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
