“Hale!” “Halele!”
Before the sultans, say the elders, Ngazidja belonged to its first clans. Each village had its chiefs, the mafe, then the bedja, who shared out the land, settled quarrels and led the ceremonies. And land did not pass from father to son: it passed down through women, so that no family would ever find itself without a roof or a field.
In those days, in the land that would become Bambao, there reigned a woman whom tradition calls Queen Mbedja. She was respected for her wisdom, and people came from far away to bring her their disputes over boundaries and wells.
One day, ships from overseas dropped anchor off the coast. The warriors wanted to drive them back; the queen stopped them. “Let us first see who they are.” She received the seafarers, listened to their tales of distant ports and of the religion they were bringing, and watched their leaders for a long time.
Then she made her decision. The newcomers could settle, marry the daughters of the land and build their towns. But the land would remain with those who had always held it, and it would go on passing down through women. And so the alliance was sealed between the nobility of the land and the lineages that came from the sea.
From these unions, it is said, were born the families that founded the island's sultanates. The custom of the bedja never quite disappeared: even today, on Ngazidja, family houses and land pass down through women.
What we know about it
The story condenses what historians describe of ancient Grande Comore: village communities (mafe), bedja and fani chiefdoms, then the arrival of so-called Shirazi lineages from the Swahili coast, who founded the sultanates by allying themselves with local families. At certain periods the island was divided into eleven sultanates, whose rulers vied for the title of ntibe, which conferred pre-eminence over the island. The passing down of family houses and land through women, in a matrilineal and matrilocal Muslim society, remains at the heart of life on Ngazidja.
The figure of “Queen Mbedja” was reported to us through this tradition, but we have not found her in the sources consulted: the word bedja is first and foremost a chief's title. The best-known version of this alliance is that of the princesses from the sea, wives of the bedja Fe Pirusa, from whom the royal lineage of the Inya Fwambaya is said to descend.
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.
- Voices of the archipelago Prince Saïd Hussein (Saïd Housseini), Histoire et sociologie de Ngazidja (manuscrit de 1934). introduction, translation and notes by Damir Ben Ali, Études Océan Indien, Inalco.
- Voices of the archipelago Sultan Chouzour, Le pouvoir de l'honneur. Tradition et contestation en Grande Comore, 1994. L'Harmattan.
- Outside view Iain Walker, Islands in a Cosmopolitan Sea: A History of the Comoros, 2019. Hurst (London); Oxford University Press (New York).