“Hale!” “Halele!”
Opposite Nioumachoua, on the south coast of Mwali, the sea is dotted with islets. One of them is called Chissioua Ouénéfou. Its beaches are white, its trees give shade, and turtles come there to nest. It looks like a little paradise.
Yet its name tells another story. Ouénéfou is the islet of the wenefu, the lepers. In the past, when the disease struck someone, they were taken there, across the water. They lived there apart, with the other sick people, waiting for a cure… or for the end.
The sick were not entirely forgotten there. Beneath the trees, you can still see the ruins of dwellings and of a small mosque: even at the end of the world, people prayed together. And it is said that the sun, the white sand and the seawater were part of the remedies.
In the Comoros, leprosy was long a dreaded disease that people spoke of in hushed tones. Patients were isolated far from the villages, on islets or in the heights. On Mwali, it was Ouénéfou.
Today, the islet is part of Mohéli National Park. Turtles still nest there, and visitors come for the sea and the sand. But the ruins are there, beneath the trees, to remember the wenefu.
Places keep the memory of those who were kept apart.
What we know about it
Chissioua Ouénéfou is one of the islets of Nioumachoua, in the heart of Mohéli National Park. Its name refers to leprosy: the islet served as a place of isolation and care for people with leprosy, like the leprosarium of Mtsamboro in Mayotte (which still had 263 patients in 1954) or Mount Ikoni on Grande Comore. Ruins of dwellings and of a mosque survive there.
In 2025, the Comorian doctor and writer Mohamed Ahmed Bacar Rezida put forward a bold hypothesis in Masiwa: certain traits attributed to the djinns of tradition — feared, invisible beings, banished far from humans — might preserve a distorted memory of leprosy and of the isolation of the sick. It is only a hypothesis, but it invites us to reread stories such as The passenger with ox's hooves or The time of the djinns in a new light.
Further reading
- Voices of the archipelago Mohamed Ahmed Bacar Rezida, Mythes et réalités aux Comores : et si nos ancêtres les djinns étaient des lépreux ?, 2025. Masiwa.