“Hale!” “Halele!”
In the beginning, so they say, there were neither villages nor canoes on these four islands. There was the fire of the volcanoes, the forest, the sea… and the djinns.
It was in the time of King Souleymane, the one the Books call Solomon. God had given him a power no man ever had: he commanded the wind, understood the language of the birds and kept the djinns in his service. His ships sailed every sea, and his sailors knew the most distant routes.
But among the djinns, some were wicked. They sowed discord, stole and mocked the king's orders. Souleymane looked for a place far enough away that they could harm no one. His sailors told him of islands lost in the middle of the ocean, south of the known world, where a mountain of fire burned. The king had the rebel djinns taken there and shut them in.
And so the djinns became the first inhabitants of the archipelago. They took possession of the craters, the caves, the springs and the great trees, and that is why, even today, people do not approach certain places without greeting their invisible masters.
Some storytellers go further. When the first seafarers came to settle on the islands with men from the coast of Africa, they say, the djinns devoured the men. So the seafarers came back with women; the djinns married them, and from these unions the peoples of the islands were born. That is why, they add with a laugh, there is always a little djinn in every Comorian.
The invisible world is as old as the islands: it is respected, never defied.
What we know about it
This origin myth exists in several versions. It links the archipelago to King Solomon, a major figure in the Koran and in traditions across the Muslim world, and explains the place of djinns in daily life: many sacred places (ziara) are associated with them.
Archaeology tells another story: the islands were settled from the 8th century onwards by Africans and seafarers from Asia (see First settlers). A Comorian cultural review has suggested reading these tales as the distorted memory of sick people, perhaps people with leprosy, banished to the islands: an unverifiable hypothesis, but one that shows these myths still give food for thought.
Further reading
- Voices of the archipelago Salim Hatubou, Contes et légendes des Comores ou Genèse d'un pays bantu, 2004. reissued as Aux origines du monde : contes et légendes des Comores, Flies France, 2015.
- Voices of the archipelago Mohamed Ahmed-Chamanga (textes recueillis et traduits par), Rois, femmes et djinns : contes de l'île d'Anjouan, 1988. Centre de recherche Océan Indien (Paris).
- Outside view Iain Walker, Islands in a Cosmopolitan Sea: A History of the Comoros, 2019. Hurst (London); Oxford University Press (New York).