Comoros

An Indian Ocean archipelago of Swahili-Muslim sultanates, drawn into the spice and slave trades, colonised by France, and independent since 1975 amid coups, secessions and an unresolved dispute over Mayotte.

The Comoros are a volcanic archipelago in the northern Mozambique Channel, between the East African coast and Madagascar. Settled from around the eighth century CE by Austronesian seafarers and Bantu-speaking peoples from the African mainland, the islands were woven into the trade networks of the Swahili coast and the wider Indian Ocean; the Dembeni-phase site shows long-distance commerce with the Abbasid and Fatimid worlds by the ninth to twelfth centuries. Islam took deep root and remains the defining feature of Comorian life. From roughly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muslim sultanates of Swahili culture—legitimised through Arab, Persian (Shirazi) and Hadhrami genealogies—rose on the three islands of Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Ndzuwani (Anjouan) and Mwali (Mohéli), trading in slaves, rice and spices. France took Mayotte in 1841 and placed the other three islands under protectorate in 1886; the archipelago was formally made a French possession in 1908 and long administered through Madagascar, becoming an overseas territory in 1947 and gaining internal autonomy in 1961. In a referendum on 22 December 1974 the three western islands voted overwhelmingly for independence while Mayotte voted to remain French; Ahmed Abdallah declared independence on 6 July 1975. The decades that followed brought extraordinary instability, with some twenty coups or attempted coups, several involving the French mercenary Bob Denard. Anjouan and Mohéli attempted to secede in 1997, and a 2001 Union constitution introduced a federal structure with a presidency rotating among the islands. France administers Mayotte, which the Comoros and the UN General Assembly regard as Comorian territory.