histoire

History

Geographic Location

The Comoros archipelago lies in the Mozambique Channel, between the East African coast and the northwestern coast of Madagascar.

It is made up of four islands: Grande Comore, or Ngazidja, the westernmost; Mohéli, or Mwali; Anjouan, or Ndzwani; and finally Mayotte, or Maore, the easternmost — set like stepping stones between the African continent and the great island of Madagascar.

The inhabitants of the Comorian archipelago are Muslim, following Sunni Islam of the Shafi'i school. Islam is one of the core values of Comorian culture. Across all four islands, and despite differences in political and administrative status, personal law is governed by sharia, administered by cadis sitting in every town and district. Mayotte remains a French overseas territory, while the other three islands have, since 1975, formed the Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros (today's Union of the Comoros).

The history of Comorian social institutions developed as successive layers of family and social organization settled one atop another over time. The Comoros were first part of a matrilineal cultural sphere that spanned Bantu Africa, opening onto the eastern coast. Populations of Bantu and even pre-Bantu origin formed the earliest layers of the Comorian population.

The archipelago later found itself along the path of the developing Swahili civilization — coastal, mercantile, and Islamized — which drew its dynamism from intense maritime trade. Islamized Arab-Persian populations, whose bloodlines mixed through more or less lengthy settlement in trading posts along the African coast, introduced Islam to the archipelago and spread a new legal model for marriage and family organization.

Population Composition

Islam was layered onto the earlier forms of social organization and introduced new social orders, such as the category of sharifs.

Today, one can observe a mix of matrilineal and patrilineal traits across the various domains of Comorian social organization: descent, inheritance of property, succession to titles, residence patterns, and the holding of authority.

The population's diverse composition also accounts for the differences in family organization observable among distinct social classes.

Settlements are grouped into towns and villages that form hierarchical human and social entities, each with its own history. Comorians still live largely from agriculture and fishing. Symbolically, the human community of the village is set apart from the world of the bush and the sea — spaces to which traditional beliefs assign inhabitants from the invisible world, spirits or djinns, with whom human beings can sometimes enter into contact.

Every town or village is built and laid out according to the logic and values of a social space, one in which the various families take their place and in which individuals belong to clearly distinct male and female spheres of society.

Kinship

Across all four islands, post-marital residence is uxori-matrilocal: the husband moves in with his wife (uxorilocal residence), children are born into their mother's home, and they in turn marry and settle uxorilocally when their own time comes. This holds true regardless of a family's geographic origin or social standing. This matrilocality comes with complementary features concerning the transmission of certain property: 'feminine' immovable assets — the family house and cultivable land — as well as movable property such as jewelry and certain household items, all pass from mother to daughter.

Kinship functions as a system of social mapping expressed through terminology, which in turn dictates modes of conduct — avoidance, respect, or joking — appropriate to each type of relative (Segalen 1981: 59).

In Comorian classificatory kinship terminology, a father and his brothers are all called 'father', and a mother and her sisters are all called 'mother'. Applied with an extension that follows the activation of kinship ties, this principle 'makes it possible to recognize a large number of people as relatives and to sort them into a relatively limited number of categories. Within a single category, a distinction is drawn between close relatives and distant ones' (Radcliffe-Brown 1953: 10).

In everyday life, most social relationships are thus immediately framed in terms of kinship, and social organization within the village is governed by kinship groups.