“Hale!” “Halele!”
Long ago, when Ngazidja did not yet have sultans, the goat was queen of the villages. She lived among the first inhabitants, in the time of the bedja chiefs: she grazed wherever she liked, she was left the best grass, and when she bleated, people said the rain was coming.
One day, a dhow came ashore. Strangers in long robes stepped off it and set down on the sand a bird no one had ever seen: a cockerel. He had a comb as red as fire and feathers of every colour, and at dawn he crowed so clearly that the whole village woke up. “He is the one who calls us to morning prayer!” the people marvelled.
The cockerel walked along the shore, scratched at the earth and stopped beneath a great tree. “Let us build here,” said the strangers. And the villagers, charmed by his bearing, built their houses where the cockerel had stopped.
When the goat came back from the hills, she recognised nothing. Her place near the houses, her grass and her honour had been taken from her. She bleated to claim what was hers: she was driven off with stones. “Go away! The cockerel is the master now.”
The goat understood that the cockerel had stolen her rank. Ever since that day, she has been stubborn: she obeys no one, pulls at her rope, gets into gardens and pilfers what she is no longer given. And when she is chased away, she stares at people with her yellow eyes, as if she remembered a time when she was the one who was respected.
Whoever is driven from their place never forgets it.
What we know about it
This tale can be read as an allegory. The goat would stand for the old order of the bedja chiefs and of Bantu customs; the cockerel, who came from the sea and is linked to the call to prayer, for the new order of the lineages that arrived from the Swahili coast and of the sultanates. Historians do indeed describe a Grande Comore organised first into village communities (mafe) and into bedja and fani chiefdoms, before so-called Shirazi lineages founded the sultanates there.
This story was reported to us as an allegorical tale from Ngazidja. We have not found it in the published collections we have been able to consult: we give it with reservations, in our own words. Read also: The princesses from the sea.
Further reading
- Voices of the archipelago Damir Ben Ali, Georges Boulinier et Paul Ottino, Traditions d'une lignée royale des Comores : l'Inya Fwambaya de Ngazidja, 1985. L'Harmattan.
- Outside view Iain Walker, Islands in a Cosmopolitan Sea: A History of the Comoros, 2019. Hurst (London); Oxford University Press (New York).