Writing the history of the Comoros

A history handed down first by word of mouth

Most of Comorian memory has been handed down orally: genealogies of lineages and royal families, founding stories of villages, songs and poems, tales. These traditions tell how Comorians themselves picture their past. They also serve to justify rights: titles, precedence, land, rank in the customary order.

For the historian, they are sources in their own right, but they must be read with care. A tradition can compress several centuries into a few generations, link a family to a prestigious ancestor or keep the victors' version. Since 1979, the National Centre for Documentation and Scientific Research (CNDRS), founded in Moroni at the initiative of the anthropologist Damir Ben Ali, has been collecting and preserving these voices.

The writings of the archipelago

From the 16th century, scholars wrote down in Arabic script texts in Arabic, Swahili or Comorian. These manuscripts mainly preserve genealogies of clans and sultans, which are very complex. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, several authors from the archipelago wrote genuine chronicles:

• the Swahili chronicle of Saïd Bakari (1898);
• the chronicle of Anjouan by Saïd Ahmed Zaki, a former cadi of the island (1927);
• the history of Ngazidja by Prince Saïd Hussein (1934).

These texts mix written memory, oral traditions and their authors' points of view, often from noble lineages. Several have been edited and translated by Comorian and foreign researchers: Mohamed Ahmed-Chamanga, Noël J. Gueunier, Claude Allibert, Damir Ben Ali.

Views from elsewhere

Outside sources provide dates and details found nowhere else: treatises by the Arab pilot Ibn Mâjid (late 15th century), the Kilwa chronicle from the Swahili coast, Portuguese, English, Dutch or French logbooks, accounts by officers and officials such as Alfred Gevrey's Essai sur les Comores (1870), then the archives of the colonial administration.

But each looks with their own interests in mind. Sailors who stay a few days see only the coast, the water and the supplies. Administrators justify the conquest. Almost all ignore women, peasants and slaves. These texts must therefore be set against local traditions and writings.

What the soil and the genes tell us

Archaeology provides dates independent of the stories. In a study published in 1984, the team of the American Henry T. Wright described the first villages of the archipelago and defined the “Dembéni phase” (9th–10th century). In Mayotte, the sites of Dembéni, the Bagamoyo necropolis and Acoua have been studied for forty years.

More recent methods complete this picture. In 2016, the study of charred seeds from Sima, on Anjouan, revealed rice, mung beans and cotton from Asia as early as the 8th–10th centuries. In 2018, a genetic study showed that the Comoros are the oldest known meeting place between African and Austronesian populations along the whole Swahili coast.

Comparing sources: the example of Islamisation

According to tradition, Islam reached Ntsaweni in the Prophet's lifetime, thanks to Mtswa Mwindza, who went to Arabia and then returned to convert his people. In 2010, an archaeological test excavation in the mosque of Ntsaweni by Ibrahim Moustakim and Félix Chami was at first presented as the discovery of a 7th-century mosque. Radiocarbon dating finally placed the excavated levels in the 11th–12th centuries, like the oldest excavated mosques of Sima and Domoni.

A history with many voices

Since independence, Comorian historians and anthropologists (Damir Ben Ali, Sultan Chouzour, Mahmoud Ibrahime, Moussa Saïd Ahmed, Ali Madi Djoumoi…) have been writing history from the inside, alongside foreign researchers such as Jean Martin, Malyn Newitt, Pierre Vérin, Claude Allibert or Iain Walker. Some subjects remain debated or sensitive: slavery and its memory, colonial violence, the separation of Mayotte, the coups d'état.

In this section, we present the facts established by the sources, we point out uncertainties and we give a voice to the different points of view. Each article lists its main references, gathered in the bibliography.