On this page 6 sections
An archipelago at the heart of the slave-trading networks
The Comoros were unusual in being both a place of transit and a place of exploitation for slaves. Captives from East Africa, especially northern Mozambique, and from Madagascar were bought there, sold on to Arabia, Zanzibar or the French islands (Bourbon, today's Réunion, and Île de France, today's Mauritius), or put to work locally.
In the 19th century, when Britain was fighting the slave trade, coastal shipping between the islands and the port of Mayotte still allowed dhows to evade surveillance.
Slavery in Comorian society
In the sultanates, slaves worked in the fields, in houses and in the ports. Their status passed to their children. In the islands, the word makua, the name of a people of northern Mozambique, came to mean slaves and their descendants.
After abolition, this origin long remained a stigma, and the subject is still delicate in the archipelago. Comorian and foreign researchers study it today, and the Departmental Archives of Mayotte are collecting oral testimonies about this memory.
The time of the raids (around 1790–1820)
At the end of the 18th century, fleets of several dozen canoes setting out from the east and north-west coasts of Madagascar, manned by Betsimisaraka and Sakalava, regularly attacked the archipelago. They mainly captured women and children, who were sold as slaves, notably to the plantations of the Mascarenes.
Anjouan, the richest island, was the first target, but no island was spared: Mohéli and Mayotte were partly depopulated. Towns surrounded themselves with ramparts, as at Ntsaweni or Iconi, and citadels, as at Mutsamudu. Jean Martin speaks of a deep economic and political crisis that weakened the sultanates for a long time.
Abolitions at different times
Slavery ended on very different dates depending on the island:
- Mayotte, by then French, abolished it by the royal ordinance of 9 December 1846, applied in 1847, a year before the other French colonies.
- On Anjouan, an 1882 treaty banned the slave trade and set 1889 as the date for freeing the slaves; the owners rebelled as early as 1884. In 1891, on the death of Sultan Abdallah III, slaves and peasants from the island's uplands rose up and abolition was proclaimed.
- On Mohéli, a revolt of Makua slaves led to abolition in 1902.
- On Grande Comore, slavery was abolished on 29 February 1904.
After slavery, indentured labour
Abolition did not put an end to forced labour. To supply workers to the plantations, recruiters practised “prior redemption”: captives bought in Africa were declared free on paper, then shipped as indentured labourers under contract. During the colonial period, the poll tax and labour requisitions prolonged this coercion.
A memory to rebuild
The history of slavery in the Comoros was long little told, by noble traditions and colonial history alike. It touches on questions that are still sensitive: the origins of families, rank in custom, access to land. Research, oral archives and public debate are now helping to bring it out of silence.
To understand the raids from the inhabitants' point of view, read the tale The women of Iconi.
Main references
- Outside view Jean Martin, Comores : quatre îles entre pirates et planteurs (2 tomes), 1983 – 1984. L'Harmattan.
- Outside view Iain Walker, Islands in a Cosmopolitan Sea: A History of the Comoros, 2019. Hurst (London); Oxford University Press (New York).
- Outside view Claude Allibert, Mayotte, plaque tournante et microcosme de l'océan Indien occidental : son histoire avant 1841, 1984. Anthropos.
- Outside view Malyn Newitt, The Comoro Islands: Struggle against Dependency in the Indian Ocean, 1984. Westview Press.
- Outside view Alfred Gevrey, Essai sur les Comores, 1870. Pondicherry, A. Saligny.
