The Comoros are an island state missing an island in politics

The Comoros lie in the Mozambique Channel, between the African mainland and Madagascar. The state in Moroni governs a volcanic archipelago. Its constitution names an island it does not administer. That missing island is the political shape of the country.

Moroni lies on Grande Comore, on Ngazidja. The Union also includes Anjouan, Nzwani, and Mohéli, Mwali. Mayotte, Mahoré, is a French department. The area of the Comoros is 1,862 square kilometres, the population 882,847. That is the land of the Union, not the whole archipelago spoken of in Moroni. The capital looks onto a sea lane of the western Indian Ocean. The state is small on land and, in constitutional politics, larger than what it controls.

Ngazidja, Nzwani, Mwali

Grande Comore carries the capital and Karthala, an active volcano. Its presence does not turn the island into scenery. It makes it a place with a risk of its own. Anjouan lies to the east and has strained the Union more than once, when the island set itself against Moroni. Mohéli has challenged the capital less often. The islands are volcanic. They are seen as one archipelago, and yet each has developed a politics of its own.

There is no land border with another state. The neighbour is the water, and beyond the water lie Mozambique and Madagascar. For an island state in this position the sea is not the edge of ordinary life. It is the setting in which fishing, smuggling and the passage to Mayotte take place. The map of belonging and the map of boats are not the same. Moroni can pass a constitution. It cannot pass every crossing.

Mayotte remains the open question

In 1975 independence from France was declared. A consultation of the population had produced different answers from island to island. The islands of today's Union became independent. Mayotte stayed under French administration and is today a department of France, on the outer edge of the European Union. The archipelago was therefore not released from the colonial order in one movement. The islands' answers split the map, and Moroni has not accepted that split as the end of the matter.

The constitution of the Union counts Mayotte among the Comoros. France treats Mayotte as a department of its own. Both sentences are official. They cannot be the same map. The quarrel is not a curiosity for a guidebook. It is the constitutional identity of a small state. Mayotte did not leave a union it had already belonged to. It remained French at the passage into independence, and Moroni continues to write it into the country.

The archipelago is older than the border that cuts one island away from it.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Arabic, French, Comorian

The constitution names Arabic, French and Comorian as official languages. Comorian, Shikomori, is a Bantu language close to Swahili, with an Arabic element, and it is the language of the islands, different from one island to another. French carries a large part of the administration and the relation to the former colonial power. Arabic is the language of religion and of a written prestige. The office is multilingual. The street speaks Comorian.

The same constitution names Islam as the religion of the state. That is a sentence in the basic law, not only an observation of ordinary life. The currency is the Comorian franc, issued by the central bank of the Comoros and pegged to the euro. The peg runs through an agreement with France. The money, too, shows that independence ordered the relation to the former metropole and did not erase it. Mayotte, where the euro circulates, lies in the same chain of islands and outside Moroni's authority.

The Comoros fit on a small area and do not fit into a single belonging. Moroni governs the islands of the Union and continues to write Mayotte into the constitution.