Comoros
Capital: Moroni · East Africa & Horn
Indian Ocean 'islands of the moon' where Swahili, Arab, Malagasy and African currents produced sultanates, grand marriages and scented plantations.
Ethnic communities
- ComoriansSwahili-related island society organized around the ãda grand marriage
More communities of Comoros
- Ngazidja communities · Grande Comore's anda great-marriage society
- Ndzuwani communities · Anjouan's perfume-plantation valleys
- Mwali communities · Mohéli's fisher-farmer villages
- Shirazi lineages · Persian-linked founding families of the sultanates
- Sharifian houses · Prophet-descended lineages of religious rank
- Makua-descended folk · African-mainland heritage communities
- Malagasy-descended folk · Cross-channel kin of the great island
- Fisher lineages · Galawa outrigger masters of the reefs
- Matrilineal great houses · Property and marriage flow through women
- Sufi brotherhoods · Shadhili and Qadiri zikr communities
- Indian merchant families · Gujarati trading houses of the ports
- Mayotte-linked Bushi folk · Kin communities across the disputed channel
Languages
Major languages: Shikomori (Comorian), Arabic, French
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu, Sabaki)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Sultanates of Ndzuwani (Anjouan), Bambao and others
Heritage sites
- • Medina of Moroni
- • Old Friday Mosque
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Comoros
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberation1937–1978
Ali Soilihi
Revolutionary government
Attempted a sweeping social revolution, abolishing costly customary marriage expenses and burning the state archives to break with the old order. Overthrown and killed by mercenaries.
- Sportb. 1993
Faïz Selemani
Football
Captain and creative force of the Comoros team that reached the Africa Cup of Nations knockout rounds at its first attempt in 2022.
- Music & the artsb. 1957
Salim Ali Amir
Music
The Comoros' best known singer and composer, whose work blends twarab with Comorian social commentary.
Deep-dive community profiles
Anjouanais of Mayotte
The migrants from seventy kilometres away — Comorians from Anjouan who cross to Mayotte in small boats for work, schooling and hospitals, who build much of what stands there, and who are deported in their tens of thousands each year.
Open deep profile →Comorians and Mahorais of Réunion
The island's Muslim minority from the archipelago to the north — Comorian and Mahorais families who came for work and schooling, built mosques in a Catholic department, and occupy an uneasy position between French citizenship and foreign origin.
Open deep profile →Comorians of Zanzibar
The islanders from the south — Comorian families who settled Zanzibar as scholars, clerks and traders under the sultanate, held a position between Arab and mainlander, and were caught badly by the revolution that abolished both.
Open deep profile →Makoa of Mayotte
Descendants of Makua people carried from northern Mozambique into the Comoros as slaves, freed by French decree in 1846, and still identifiable by name, by drum and by where in a village their families live.
Open deep profile →Sharifs of the Comoros
Lineages claiming descent from the Prophet through the Hadrami sayyids, who supplied the archipelago's sultans and its judges, whose scholarship linked the islands to Yemen and Zanzibar, and whose standing survived the abolition of the sultanates by a century.
Open deep profile →Shirazi
A claim of descent rather than a tribe — the Swahili coast's tradition of Persian founding ancestors from Shiraz, used for a thousand years to assert antiquity and rank, and made in the twentieth century into a political identity that carried Zanzibar into revolution.
Open deep profile →Swahili
The Indian Ocean's African civilization — a chain of stone towns from Lamu to Kilwa where Bantu Africa met Arabia, Persia and India across two millennia of monsoon trade, giving the continent its most widely spoken language and a literary tradition centuries deep.
Open deep profile →Wamakua of the Comoros
The descendants of the enslaved — Mozambicans brought to the Comoros in the nineteenth century whose Makua origin is still named, whose sambe drumming is heard at every celebration, and who occupy the bottom of an island social order that officially no longer exists.
Open deep profile →Wamwali (Mohéli)
The smallest and greenest Comorian island — fifty thousand people, a queen who ruled in the 1840s as a child, the archipelago's only marine park, and the beaches where green turtles nest in numbers found almost nowhere else in the region.
Open deep profile →Wandzuwani (Anjouan)
The people of the steep green island — the most densely populated land in the Indian Ocean, ylang-ylang distillers and clove growers, whose sultans once supplied East India Company ships and whose separatist revolt in 1997 nearly broke the Comorian union.
Open deep profile →Wangazidja (Grande Comore)
The people of the largest Comorian island — matrilineal in property and patrilineal in office, organised by age grades, and defined by the grand mariage, a ceremony of such expense that it confers, once completed, the right to speak in public affairs for life.
Open deep profile →