Episode 13: The Comoros Islands-The Perfumed Islands

Come with me and explore The Perfumed Islands! That's what they call Comoros — a tiny nation of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean.  In this episode of Africa A to Z, we're sojourning through the volcanic islands that sit at the meeting point of African, Arab, Polynesian and Malagasy civilizations — where the world's largest bat flies overhead, a fossil fish thought extinct for millions of years still swims in the deep waters, and women inherit the land. Come explore The Comoros with me!

 #AfricaAtoZ #SankofaSojourns #Comoros #PerfumedIslands #AfricanaFramework #AfricanHistory #AfricanCulture #IndianOceanHistory #IslandNation #ShiraziPeople #Twarab #YlangYlang #Coelacanth #MatrilinealAfrica #AfricanWomen #BlackPodcast #AfricanPodcast #CulturalTravel #ExploreAfrica #KnowAfrica 

Come on Explorers!  Let's journey through Africa, one nation at a time!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

The Coeliconth is a prehistoric fish. It's a living fossil. It dates back 240 million years. At one time we thought it was extinct for nearly 66 million years until 1938, when a member of the Coelaconth family was caught in the Indian Ocean near the southern coast of Africa and it was alive. In 1952, a second species was caught near the island of Anjouan, so they named it Melania Anjuane. A number of others have been caught in that area, and they're still being fished today. The Coelicon's average is about five feet or one and a half meters in length and weighs about a hundred pounds and lives to be about a hundred years old. These massive fish carry their young for about five years. Talk about a long pregnancy. Now later it was discovered that these fish were well known to the islanders, and these islanders ate the flesh once they dried it and salted it, and they used the scales as an abrasive. Where is this island, this anjouan? No, it's not on Pandora, and you're not in Avatar. You're in the Comoros Islands. Let's explore. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn at Sankofa Sojourns. And if you're in Nubia with a K, I'm Sankofa Sojourner. And travel with us. We'll be sojourning to Africa Town in Mobile, Alabama in November. So for more information, go to Sankofa Sojourns.com. And we'll be doing some more sojourns in the New York, New Jersey area this summer as well. So sojourn with us. Go to Sankofa Sojourns.com, join the mailing list, and get the details. Explorers, on this journey, we're going island hopping to an archipelago. Let's visit East Africa with all its complexity and beauty. Let's visit Comaros. That means, hello, how are you? You may also be greeted with Asalamu alaykum which is Arabic for peace be upon you. And if you're greeted by one of those people, those people would be the Comorians. And the motto of the nation is Unite, Solidarite, Development. Unity, Solidarity, and Development. That's their motto. That's their goal. Their official name in English is Union of the Comoros. In French it's Union de Comor. In Arabic, it's Al Itihad al Cumori. And in Chikumori it's Udzima wa Kumori. They're nicknamed the Comoros or the Perfumed Islands. Now they got the name the Perfumed Islands because they have a lot of fragrant plants, scenic beauty, and lots of spices. Think clove, vanilla, and yilang yilang. These things have defined this country's identity for centuries. Now you notice I gave you lots of different names for the country because this country has three official languages Shikomori or Comorian, French, and Arabic. So now let's get the Jeopardy facts and figures out of the way. The capital city is Moroni, and it's located on the big island, Grand Comor, or Ngazija. It has all those names. The Comoros is the third smallest country in Africa at 2,235 square kilometers or roughly 863 square miles. So that's about the size of Jacksonville, Florida. So we're gonna decolonize. We can use the formula and do the math. You'll take the kilometers squared and divide it by 2.59 to find out how many square miles that is. The currency is the Comorian franc or the KMF, if you're looking it up to know what the exchange rate is. The median age is 20.7 years old, so that means half the population is over 20 and half is under 20. And the population is about 944,388 people. So less than 1 million people live on the Comoros. It's in East Africa. This might be the first country we're visiting in East Africa. Its neighbors are Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, and the Seychelles. It's located in the Indian Ocean. And the Comoros is made up of four main big islands and hundreds of tiny scattered islets. It's an archipelago, which we learned, right? That's a group of volcanic islands. You can go back to episode 9 on Cabo Verde to hear more about archipelago. And shout out to Cabo Verde and Vozinha in the World Cup, right? Wow. An amazing journey. Conversation for another day. But there are four islands, but only three make up the country. So the three islands of the Camoros are Grand Comor or Ngazija, Moheli or Mwali, and Anjuan or Ndzwani. So the fourth island, Mayot or Mahore, that's not part of the country. We'll get into that later. But if you put all the islands together, it's about half the size of Rhode Island. So that's how small this island nation is. So a bit about the land. Gazija or Grand Comore is dominated by one of the world's largest active volcanoes. Yes, Mount Kartala. It's a big active volcano. It's about 2,300 meters high, which is about a mile and a half high. Mount Kartala last erupted in 2007. The other two islands do have mountains, but no volcanic activity. In the water surrounding the islands lives the famous Coelacanth. Tamaros is also home to Livingston's fruit bat, the world's largest bat, with a wingspan exceeding four feet, named after David Livingston. That Scottish explorer, that doctor, remember, who sailed to Africa. He explored there from the 1840s and 1850s. These bats lived in the montan forest above 200 meters in elevation on Mueli and above 500 meters on Anjouan. So these bats live up high. Now the destruction of these different habitats is a major threat to the bat population. So there's only 1300 of these living stone fruit bats live in the wild in the comarose forests. Storms are a threat for them, hunting, and as they struggle to adapt to their new habitats, both the living stone bat and the coeliconth fish are critically endangered and they need our protection. Now the climate is maritime tropical because it's a little below the equator. So there are only two seasons really there: a wet season from October to April, where the air is moist and it's heavy rainfall, and a dry season from May to September. Speaking of dry, I've got a little cold or something. So let me take a sip of my tea. So that's eucalyptus, moringa, cancalibar, licorice root, a little bit of everything. We try it all. So during both the wet season and the dry season, the highs are usually in the 70s in Fahrenheit. So that's approximately 25-26 degrees Celsius. Now the hottest month is in March, where it gets up to the mid 80s, so about 29 Celsius. So the weather seems to be pretty temperate. Now remember, you're gonna decolonize. You don't have to use Fahrenheit, you can use Celsius. You just take the Fahrenheit temperature, subtract 32, then multiply whatever's left by 59ths. Or you take the Celsius temperature, multiply it by 1.8, and then add 32 to get to the Fahrenheit temperature. We can do different things. We can learn and we can change. The best time to visit is the dry season, May through September. That's when the rainfall is minimal, the temperatures are really comfortable, and the seas are really calm, so you can just highland hop. Comoros is a republic. Now, under the 2001 constitution, the islands of Grand Comor, Moëly, and Anjouin form the Union of Comoros. Executive power is vested in a president who's both the head of the state and the head of the government. He's assisted by three vice presidents, each one representing one of the three islands, and the laws are made by the Assembly of the Union, and all the elected officials can serve five-year terms. The president can serve up to two five-year terms. So now between 1975 and 2013, Comoros has experienced at least eight coups or coup attempts. Many of them have shared one central figure. They became independent, and then months or so later, there was a coup. Three years later, there was another coup. Two more coups in 89, another coup in 95, all stoked by this French mercenary named Bob Denal. Now Denal, that's not even his real name. They called him the wolf of the Indian Ocean. So think Congo, Yemen, Morocco, Kurdistan, Angola, Gabon, Nigeria, Banin, Rwanda, you name it. If there was unrest, you would find Bob Dinar somewhere in there. He trained rebels and he also trained government forces. He didn't care which side he was on. He was on the side of the money. He would marry local women, get ensconced into the community, and stay until he was either bored or broke. Either was a reason for Denar to bounce and go off to where he could find more unrest because for him the unrest was a paycheck. He was financially backed later by his friends, Africa's most hated nation, apartheid South Africa. He was eventually booted out of the Comoros. But for many years, he was their unofficial leader. France wouldn't even take him back at first, so he went to South Africa, where he tried to stage a combat coup in Camoros. Then France intervened. They took him into custody, they took him back to France to face justice. Eventually he was convicted, but he served no time because he had quote unquote Alzheimer's disease. I'm not buying it. Look up Vinny the Chin Giganti and let me know if you think Denard was kind of pulling the chin. Denard died unremorseful on October 13th, 2007. Unfortunately, you can't discuss the current political climate in the Comoros without discussing their evil architect because the stuff that Denard stirred up way back in the beginnings is still rippling through the country today. The Fambani Accords of 2001, now Fombani is a city in one of the islands, introduced a federal arrangement granting each island significant autonomy and established a rotating presidency that rotated to a different island every five years. In 2018, there was a constitutional referendum that put an end to the rotating presidency and extended the presidential term limits and made it the two consecutive five-year terms that we have today. President Azali Asumani was re-elected in January 2024 with 63% of the vote. However, the opposition boycotted this election because they said it was fraudulent. So since then, democratic space, so to speak, has really narrowed. A lot of opposition leaders have been getting arrested, journalists are being harassed, and there's a lot of self-censorship by the people themselves. They're just not saying what they're seeing because I guess they don't want to face the consequences. So with the legacy of corruption, deceit, and just what they would say political machinations, there's no wonder they struggle with stability on the Comoros. It makes me wonder: are they harboring a new wolf of the Indian Ocean? Now the islands were settled around about the 6th century. And it's lots of different theories on who the first settlers were. Some think it was settled by Austronesian-speaking people, melanated people from Polynesia, maybe from Madagascar. Some think they came from the East Indies, so maybe the Philippines, maybe Timor, Malaysia. Then around the 10th century, the Shirazi started coming. The Shirazi were a group of Sunni Muslim traders from East Africa who said that they're descendants of Persians, and they started migrating, and they really had a larger migration in the 15th century because trade was really picking up between East Africa, Arabia, and India. We'll get into the East African slave trade in another episode because that is an episode unto itself. But when I say trade was increasing, it wasn't just spices. By the early 17th century, Africans became Comoros' biggest export. They established themselves as the dominant group and developed the islands into a major Indian Ocean trading center and an Islamic territory. So this was the Shirazi. By the 15th century, chiefdoms had evolved into sultanates because, as I said, people were descendants of Persians and Arabs, so they brought different ways of being to the area. So you had these sultans and what they called the era of the battling sultans, and that went on for four centuries. Four centuries of just sultans trying to be on top, being number one. In the 16th century, Persians and Arabs settled on the island, maybe in response to the Portuguese invasion of the city of Kilwa in Tanzania, because Kilwa was one of the biggest trading posts in the area. And remember what the biggest thing to trade in the area was. Us. The Commodos was shaped by both African, Asian, and Islamic influence. Then came the Europeans. The Commodos provided a resting place for pirates. So you may have heard of Captain Kidd. I learned of other pirate names that I just never heard of before, but apparently if you were big in piracy, you hunkered down on the Comados from time to time. And you had Malagasy pirates coming over also from Madagascar, because the islands provided a perfect place to lay in the cut and wait to hijack ships trying to round the Cape of Good Hope. So there was no surprise when Bob Dinard showed up, right? The Corsair of Comados. Corsair is just a fancy name for a pirate. There are a few different ethnic groups in the Comados. The Comorian people are a blend of Bantu, Arab, and Malay-Indonesian peoples. Intermarriage really blurred all the distinctions between all these different groups over centuries. Now the islands have a legacy of slavery. Madagascar raiding the islands, Arab traders bringing enslaved Africans to the East Coast from as far west as Guinea and Senegal. All of that is woven into the ethnic composition of Africa and of the Komoros. The Makoa people are what you call the direct descendants of those enslaved Africans, and they carry that history in their identity today. The predominant ethnic group is Malagasi, and that comprises the Antolote people, the Oymataha people, the Sakalava people, and also some of the Makoa people, because they're mixed in with the Malagasy. Now, I found it fascinating when I looked up the word Makoa that it's also a Hawaiian word, and it means bold or fearless ones. Because remember, those melanated Polynesians who came to those islands. So there's a lot of influences there. Now, something I also uncovered when I was looking up the different ethnicities is that they consider the kafr to be an ethnicity. And I said, this feels bad. This feels like a bad word. And when I looked into it, it is. It's a racial slur. You may have heard it if you have followed or learned anything about South African history in Arabic, also. This is not a nice thing to call someone a kafr. This is how they describe African and Malagasy people. Like if you're mixed African, Malagasy descent. So we're not using that slur. And we're not going to allow that to be listed as an ethnic group because it's not. And it's not a name that anyone wants to be called. It's like using the N-word. We are freeing our minds and we're changing the language. They have some groups that are distinguishably ethnic. The Arabs, the people who descended from those Shirazi settlers, the Africans who came before the Shirazi, the Makoa, those descendants of the enslaved Africans brought by the Arabs. These are all people, different ethnic groups that we can look at. And within them, there's other groups. And within them, there are other groups, as we discussed a few minutes ago. And when you hear the names, for me, some of the names sound distinctly Asian. So it's just very fascinating to me the culture of the Commodos. Other ethnicities are what they would call Afro-Arabs. It's still 14% French on the island as well. You have your Ismaili Indians, so some Pakistani, some Afghan are there, some South African people are there. You'll find Chinese people, Dutch people, British, Portuguese, lots of different people there. But the population is mainly African, Arab Malagasy descent. Nobody really has the big overwhelming majority. Kamaros is home to at least 19 different languages because the most widely spoken language is Comorian or Shikomori, right? And that's spoken by 96% of the people. But it varies from island to island. You're also going to hear Swahili influences, Arabic influences in Shikomori, because remember, these islands were settled by different people. So on Grand Comor or Gazija, you're going to speak Shin Gazija. On Muali or Moheli, you're going to speak Shimuali. On Anjuan or Nzwani, you're going to speak what? That's right, Shinzwani. And in Mayot or Mahore, you're going to speak Shimaore. Now doesn't that sound like Maori to you? Like I just feel there's just a lot of crossing, cross pollination. There's been a there's some things here. To unpack with these people in Comoros and their beginnings. Now, these languages, the Comorian languages, are written in the Arabic alphabet, are written using the Arabic alphabet. Now, Swahili and Malagasi are also spoken in some communities. Arabic is spoken, but mainly just in religious context. But lots of people are just multilingual. Being a polyglot in the Comoros is common. People switch back and forth languages as needed. Younger people, they prefer French. It's just easier to stick to one language, I guess, and it's probably the language where you make the money. So their preference for speaking French is threatening the survival of the indigenous Camorian languages. You have to speak your language if you want them to continue to grow, and you have to pass it on to your children. Now, as far as religion, the Commodos is 98% Muslim. There's a handful of Catholics, a handful of Protestants, and about 1% of people who subscribe to indigenous beliefs, believing that things in nature have a soul or a spirit and communing with that. But there's lots of syncretism as well, because people live on an island and you kind of do what's done on your island. So there's a lot of things that get mixed up into different religions. And some people believe that there was some early Jewish influence in the Comoros because of some of the food habits that were there, because of some of the social customs that are there. Some people say there may have been some early Jewish visitors to the Comoros. Now, agriculture is their main industry. More than 80% of the people work in farming and growing something. Comaros is the world's largest producer of yelangulang. Now, yelangulang is a crucial essential oil. Now I'm just gonna just a real quick sidebar. It's excellent for relieving inflammation. It's great for even lowering your blood pressure. But you'll find your langulang also smells amazing. So it's going to be in so many products that you use. Yelangulang comes mainly from the commodos. Now, fishing is also a big part of their economy. It's an island nation. They have a fish that lives for a hundred years there, the Coelacanth, right? So fishing is a big part of what they do and how they make their money. But about 20 to 25% of the nation's income comes from what they would call remittances. So remittances are just money that you give, right? So remittances means, in this sort of case, money being sent home to Comorians, from Comorians that have left the Comoros. So mostly the money comes home from France, because that's generally where people would migrate to. I've never met anyone from the Comoros. So they migrate to France and then they send money home to the people in the Comoros, to their families. Now, who are the colonizers? Well, let's see. Because they didn't get colonized for quite some time, maybe because of their location, I'm not sure. But in 1527, Portuguese cartographer Diego Ribero first charted Comoros on a map. So once you're on a map, what happens? Explorers want to come find you. Because remember, I said they have vanilla, they have yellang yellang, they have spices there. So by 1591, the British had found their way to Grand Comor, but the Arab, Indian, and African influence remained the strongest ones on the islands until the French showed up. In the late 1700s, the Sakhalava people, remember we listed them as one of the ethnic groups. The Sakhalava people of Madagascar started raiding Comoros looking for people to enslave. So they wanted to jump into this East African slave trade. And they basically depopulated the island of Mahore. Mahore is Mayat, and that's the closest island to Madagascar. So those raids continued until the Merina people of Madagascar conquered the Sakalava and they put an end to this slave raids and slave trade. The Sakalava and the Betsy Misaraka, they left Madagascar and they settled on Mahore and Muali. You can only imagine what it was like for them because they settled an island that they had depopulated from slave raiding. So it's just wild, the things that people do. So in 1841, the Malagasy ruler of Mahore or Mayat decided that if they didn't give in to France, England would be at their door, and they felt like England would be much worse to be colonized and taken over by. Because they watched what happened in Madagascar already. They decided we're going to give in to France. Because the Sultan Wars, remember I told you about those the Sultan Wars, all these different Sultanates who fought for 400 years. So there was just a lot of unrest on all the islands. No one was happy. The people didn't want to be taken over, but they also didn't want to continue to live under threat of war and slave raids and just all of the unrest. It started with one, he invited them in, right? The leader of Mayotte, because he had seen what happened in Madagascar. So you have to let them in. I haven't said it in a while, but it's still true. You gotta invite them in. Watch sinners if you don't know what I'm talking about. And the French were eager to come in because they were trying to stay ahead of the English. They didn't want to let the English have the hold on the region either. So the French came on in to the islands. Slavery ended. That was part of it. That was part of the French takeover, was the end of the enslavement. So that was good, and the population started to grow again, and eventually they started to increase because remember, as I said, they were being depopulated by slave raiders. But the French were the French. We know what they did on their other colonies. You're growing things, you need people to grow the things that you want to sell, and you don't want to pay those people because that will cut into your profits. So they call that forced labor. We call that enslavement. And the profits they made from selling those precious spices that they so desperately needed and other natural resources. Well, those profits were used to benefit France. They were not reinvested in the infrastructure to improve anything on the islands. So lots of Comorians migrated to France's nearby island, Madagascar. Now the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 cut the Comoros off from a lot of commerce. And then the Berlin Conference happened, right? And so in 1884, France got the Comoros. Now the Shirazi, those Persian-descended people, were the elite already. They were those sultans, and so they were the elite on the island. And we know how the French operate. They're going to take the lighter-skinned people, they're going to take anybody who might have been considered above everyone else, and they're going to put them even higher up on a pedestal. So the Shirazi got all the key positions and the civil servant jobs, and they were the ones who were running the islands, not the Makoa people. After World War II, the island really wasn't situated for independence. Because you remember, if you listen to other episodes, around after World War II is when countries started nationalizing. They weren't really there yet in the Comoros. Because as I said, they were kind of cut off from a lot of the commerce and they didn't have the infrastructure because nothing had been really invested in them. In 1946, they became an administrative department instead of a colony. So we know what that means. We're not going to support you at all anymore. But we still own you and we're still going to take from you. In 1947, the Comoros severed administrative ties with Madagascar. In 1952, they established their own regime. So it took them a little bit longer to start nationalizing, but they did. And in 1957, they elected what they call the governing council. They had a national referendum, you know what that is, when everyone votes on an issue, and they voted to remain connected to France. Political consciousness was rising, though, in the Comoros, and those who were aware they resented the French and the way they were neglecting the islands and they wanted to become independent. People were energized by the things that they were witnessing. This is not far from Mozambique. This is part of the Mozambique Channel on the African mainland, which we'll get into later. So the people were seeing dramatic things going on. Tanganyika had gained its independence from Great Britain. Zanzibar also became independent in 1963, and then they also overthrew their ruling Arab elite. Think the Shirazi, but over in Zanzibar. So these two newly formed independent nations merged to form the nation of Tanzania. So there was just a lot going on in the area. There was just a lot of excitement and a lot of growth and change. So people were getting stirred up. Now politics in the 60s on the Comoros was dominated by social and economic elite, largely those Shirazi people. They were conservative, they were pro-French because the French had put them up on a pedestal and secured them as the elite ruling class. So now during Comoros' period of self-government, when they were in overseas department, they had two main conservative political groupings. The Green Party or Parti Vert, and they later became known as the Union Democratique des Comores, or the UDC, or the Comoros Democratic Union. And then they had the Parti Blanc, the White Party. And then they later came back as the Rassemblement Democratique du Peuple Comorien, so the RDPC, the Democratic Assembly of the Comoran people. Dr. Shaid Mohammed Shekh, who was the president of the Parti Ver and President of the Governing Council, and the most important political leader in the islands in the 60s. The Parti Blanc under Prince Said Ibrahim provided the opposition. They endorsed a more progressive program that included land reform, loosening the monopoly on Camoran cash crops, because remember, the French were still there and they owned the land. They still had a plantation society. The white party, the Parti Blanc, wanted to loosen that up. They wanted to get some of the money into the hands of the Comoran people. The second most powerful member of the Parti vert, the Green Party, was Ahmed Abdallah. He was a wealthy plantation owner and a representative on the French National Assembly. When Dr. Said Sheikh died in 1970, he succeeded him. So well into the 1960s, these two established parties were mainly concerned with maintaining harmonious relationships with France while trying to get economic planning help and infrastructure development. This is what they were trying to do. This was the consensus with both parties, and politically active Comorans often based their allegiance on personal feelings. It was like either you love the doctor or you love the prince. And that's how you made your decisions in politics. They founded another movement, the National Liberation Movement of Comoros, or the Mouvement de la Liberation Nationale de Comores, Molinaco for short. We love a good acronym. And they founded Molinaco in 1962 and they actively promoted the cause of Camoran independence abroad. Now in 1967, they started to promote Cameroon independence on the islands, but they had to do it undercover. In 1968, a new party was formed, mostly by students and young people. The Socialist Party of Camoros. In French, that's Parti Socialiste de Comores, so that's Pasoco. So you got Molinaco and you got Pasoco. Abdallah of the Parti vert was conservative, and he saw independence as a regrettable necessity. Those are his words. Because nobody was really satisfied with the French support, but the young people were being alienated. They were feeling like nobody's hearing them, and the youth are the future of the nation. So he realized we're gonna have to get our independence in order for us to have the young people participate in the system and not just try to blow it up. Now, because there was violent suppression of a student demonstration in 1968, and then as I said, Dr. Sheff died in 1970. So all of this added fuel to the fire of the order that was already burning down. In 1972, leaders of the Green Party, now by then it was the UDC, and the White Party, by now it was the RDPC, both agreed to pursue independence together while trying to maintain good relations with the French. So you had a coalition of conservative and moderate parties, and that was at the forefront of the independence effort. Parti pour l'évolution de Comoros. Party for the Evolution of Camaros. So they were in the forefront of the independence effort, and they left out all of these three parties left out Pasaco. Remember, those were the young people, mostly students, because they said they were too violent and too radical. But they did allow the Molinaco Party into the coalition. So during 1973 and 1974, the local government negotiated with France and issued a common declaration on June 15, 1973. Their declaration of independence from France. A referendum was held on December 22nd, 1974, and the voters supported independence by a 95% majority, except the people of Mahore or Mayat. They chose to remain a French department by a margin of about 65% of the people on the island. So Comoros proclaimed their independence from France on July 6th, 1975, with Ahmed Abdallah Abderaman as their first president. The island of Mahur or Mayotte remained a part of France. They were afraid that they would be marginalized by the Muslim majority. So now you have three main islands of Commodos. You have Ngazija, Mmwali, and Nzuani. And that's it. But again, you still have your tiny islets. The Commodos continue to claim Mayotte. They say it's theirs and they should come back to them. The African Union agrees, the United Nations agrees. France disagrees, and the people of Mayotte disagree. France has repeatedly vetoed the UN Security Council resolutions that would have given Commodos sovereignty over Mayotte. So they became independent July 6, 1975. August 3rd, 1975, a coalition of six political parties known as the United National Front overthrew the Abdallah government with the aid of foreign mercenaries. Remember the wolf of the Indian Ocean? Him. After the coup, a three-man directorate took control. So one of the three was appointed Minister of Defense and Minister of Justice and then made head of state. France had already recognized the independence of the Comoros. They said, okay, we'll keep my Mayotte. But all active relations and no all aid programs, everything between France and the Commodos ended. So they couldn't look to France for any sort of military support in all this coup activity. So they were ill-prepared for independence and they were rife with outside agitation. They were wide open for someone like Bob Denard. Remember the movie in Star Trek where he says, come on! That's how I feel about Denard. I feel like Denard! Anyway, Comoros has had a rocky history, but they are there. They're still fighting for sovereignty over their lost sister Mahore and all of her lost children. And we'll see what happens in Comoros' future. As for ways of knowing, education is sort of free, it's kind of compulsory, but it's not really accessible to everyone. So if you go to school at all, primary school is six years, and then you go to lower secondary school, which you might call middle school in America, and that's three years, and then you could go to three years of upper secondary school or what we would call high school in America. Most of the children in Commodos do, however, attend religious schools. So the literacy rate is 75.8% overall, even with education not being accessible to everyone, because in the Quranic schools, you learn your literacy there. In 2003, the nation's first university was established, the University of Comoros in Moroni, in the capital city. And they also have two technical schools and a teacher training college for post-secondary study. Education is growing in the Comoros. Now, the National Center for Research and Scientific Documentation in Moroni makes studies in the human and natural sciences and houses archives. They have a museum, they have a library. Now remember, you have the coelicant fish. That's not the only extraordinary thing that lives in the waters on the Comoros. So these the waters of the Comoros contain some of the most scientifically significant discoveries of the 20th century in the marine world. So this tiny nation also participates in the Paris Climate Accords on biological diversity because they understand the impact of the environment on their tiny world. The United States pulled out of the climate accords, just so you know. We're not part of it as of January 27, 2026, after nearly 10 years of being a part of the Paris Climate Accords. But we're gonna go to food. Camorian cuisine is a mixture of African, Arab, and French influences. Their staples include pilau, which is rice, a fragrant, spicy rice dish, mataba, which is a dish made of spinach and coconut milk, and samusa, a fried pastry filled with meat or vegetables. I've had samoosa made for me by someone from Rwanda. It was delicious. And if you've had any sort of a patty of any kind filled with meat or vegetables, you get the idea. And it's just a matter of what goes into the spice and into the filling, and what do we make the dough out of? Rice is the main staple and the largest import. Comorose cuisine uses the island's tropical fruit, the fresh fish surrounding the island, and all the spices, the fragrant spices, cloves, vanilla, you know, those spices that sent explorers around the world and put a lot of people in chains because of the search for spice. Traditional arts include woodcarving, weaving, embroidery, silversmithing, goldsmithing, and basket making. Now you'll see designs that feature geometric patterns, and you'll see a lot of Arabic influence, a lot of African influence in the patterns. Folk song and dance are central to community life because the Comorian languages are not written languages, remember, they they write in Arabic, their language. Folk songs and storytelling is how things get passed along. Now, music is imported from Zanzibar. And there's something called Twarab. That's very popular, Zanzibarian, the most influential musical genre on the islands. And it's very popular as something called the Khan Mahiaj or the Ada or Anda or Harusi. Because there are many ways to say the same thing. You also have your theater works. So comedy, tragedy, history is all woven into the theater. And so it helps people learn about the society. And a lot of times it's critical. It's critical of Camoran society and things that are going on in the nation. Now, at the core of Camoran society, you value honoring elders, preserving community, and maintaining your national solidarity. Now the extended family plays a central role in everyday life because you have to support one another in times of need. And on the island of Ngazija, land is owned jointly and passed down matrilineally through women. Now this is a pre-Islamic African governance tradition that survived centuries and centuries of Islamic influence, colonial influence, this handing down of property to the women of the family. Now we're going to come back to the Khan Maharia or the Ada or Anda or Harusi. This is a two-week-long wedding celebration. It can cost anywhere from 20 to 30,000 US. They say some of these andas cost 50,000 euros. There's elaborate gift exchanges. You feed the entire village. There's music, there's dance, there's the indigenous art form. So this is where your silversmithing is going to come into play. Your goldsmithing for making the jewelry, your folk singing and your dancing. All of this is part of the Ada celebration. And it's a celebration that goes across generations. And as I said, it goes on for two weeks. Now the average everyday person has a regular small religious ceremony. But if you have the means, you'll have this ada, this grah machiaj. And if you don't have the means, you will save up. Sometimes at your ada, you have been married long enough to have adult children, be at your wedding. But this is how important a rite of passage it is in society to have this ceremony. So people will have it well after they've been married. Because it changes, because the anda changes your social standing for both members of the couple. They even dress differently. There's different sashes and things that they get to wear that you cannot wear if you're not one of the people who has had this ceremony. In the masjid, you even sit in a different section once you've had your anda. The man becomes an elder in the community. The woman becomes a mother of the community. And she even can move into her own house, which she will own. This is all just because of going through that rite of passage, the Ka Mahayage. This is a whole episode all by itself. It's just fascinating and beautiful. If you have time, just Google it and you'll see the people in the beautiful clothes that they're wearing, and you can learn about this. And children. Children are considered a divine blessing, and they're always held. You carry your children. Your parents carry you, adults in the family will carry you, your brothers, your sisters, you will treasure that baby and carry it around. Comorians are exceptionally warm and welcoming. There are people whose hospitality shows their deep communal values, and that's at the heart of their culture. Many of the traditional Comorian dances, when you see them, have clear Asian and Polynesian influences. There was one dance that I watched on YouTube, and it was beautiful. And the women were all wearing red and white, and I believe that's what you wear. It depends on the island that you're from as well, right? So I think that's from the women of Ngazija. So they had on their red and their white, and there was another woman who was singing, and she was singing in definitely, it sounded like Arabic tones, but not Arabic words, and they were dancing in a line together, and it looked so much like hula. Like they were doing hula dance. And then I saw another dance of men, and they were like the bounce, the energy in it, it was definitely reminding me of Punjabi dance. If you've ever seen, you know, the Punjabi men when they all are in a circle and dancing, andor Thai, it also had influences of the Thai dance. It just reminds me of so much. And then underneath it all, there was this African influence. So the dance kind of marries all the traditions and all the influences in the Camoros. So folklore is how they pass down the stories. Because we know it was not a written language, so there's not a lot of written literature. It's hard to find, but it's there, it does exist. They do have writers, Camoran writers. But oral tradition and myths, that's what travels through the generations. That's what carries the memory of the Camoran people. So it may be a long and pricey trip, and you may have to pay 50 euros to get a visa. But a visit to Camoros begins when you land at Prince Saeed Ibrahim International Airport in the capital city of Moroni. Now, if you like beaches, if you want to hike mountains, if you would love to see it what an active volcano looks like. If you like seafood and kind people, maybe you'll give them a visit. So I want to thank you for your time and attention. I want to thank the people of Komoros as well. That's in Shingazija. So as we wrap up, I want to ask you to like, follow, and share this podcast. We're now in 38 countries and still on six continents, but welcome, Bratislava, Slovakia, Nwakchat, Mauritania, Montgomery, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida. Thank you to our loyal explorers in the U.S. and in the UK for not missing an episode in Tower Hamlet, London, in England or Dublin, Ohio. I'm shouting out my New York City massive in Jersey as well. And you know what? Shout out to Union, New Jersey for also never missing an episode. I was going through the stats and I realized, oh, that's the same place. So shout out to you as well. Shout out to Atlanta. I see y'all down there. Hey, fam, in Atlanta. Shout out to North Brunswick, Bridgewater, Jersey City, and Westfield. I'm just in my Jersey right now. And shout out to my listeners all around the world. You have no idea how much I appreciate you. The Explorers Club is growing. Keep sharing the podcast. Keep inviting other people to listen. Share an episode to someone that you think they would enjoy. I know during the World Cup I was sharing the Cabo Verde episode because I was like, we were all in love with Cabo Verde, this little team that could, this tiny archipelago nation that came and set the World Cup upside down, and we all agreed. Vozinha is the star of the World Cup. Came from a tiny African nation. Share, share, share. The next episode up is Congo, Republic of Congo, remember? So Congo-Brazzaville. Before I let you go, I'd ask you to join me in some Ujayi breathing. So I always thought of Ujayi breathing because I thought of waters of Camaros. I thought of the Coelicant fish swimming in those waters. And Ujayi breathing for me always reminds me of the ocean. So we're going to deeply breathe in through your nose. Now when you breathe out through your mouth, pretend you're fogging up a mirror so you go ha. So you feel that feeling in your throat when you ha. Remember that. Now close your mouth. And you're going to breathe in and out through your nose, but you're still, when you breathe out, gonna make that ha feeling, but with your mouth closed. So let's take a deep breath in through the nose. And out through the nose. In through the nose. Out through the nose. We're feeling calm, we're feeling centered, we're feeling ready to take on anything. Even any wolf that might be at our door. La la unonu. That's how we say farewell. And before we do, think about this. Like America and that other African archipelago nation, Cabo Verde, the Comoros has a legacy of enslavement. Can they move forward without reconciling their painful past? Can anybody?