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Moroni, Comoros

Capital of Comoros

  • 6 min read
  • 7 chapters
Harbour at Moroni
Woodlouse · CC BY-SA 2.0

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History

The early history of Moroni is uncertain. The earliest written evidence for settlement in the Comoros Islands comes no earlier than the 7th century, possibly by Arab navigations and Bantu-speaking agriculturalists, while ceramic finds from the 7th to 10th century demonstrate that the Islands were part of the developing Swahili civilization, but when Moroni itself was first settled is not known.

By the middle of the second millennium, however, Moroni was a well-established town, engaged in trade networks throughout the Indian Ocean, and the Badjanani mosque, built in 1427, is a testament to the city's wealth, contemporary with the golden ages of other Swahili cities. Together with neighbouring port and royal capital Ikoni, Moroni was one of two centres of economic and political power of the kingdom of Bambao. Nevertheless, until the end of the nineteenth century, it was just one of many large towns on the island, and it wasn't until the Sultan of Bambao, Said Ali ibn Said Omar, negotiated a treaty of Protectorate with France in 1886 that his town became the seat of the colonial administration.

Moroni grew slowly through the twentieth century for, although it was now the capital of Ngazidja, it was not the seat of the territorial administration, which was located at Dzaoudzi on Mayotte, and in 1958 its population was still only 6,545. However, in that same year the decision was taken to move the capital of the archipelago from Dzaoudzi to Moroni, and the town slowly grew to become the largest in the country.

An agreement on broad autonomy to the three islands was refused by the Anjouan representatives which resulted in an eruption of violence affecting Moroni in April 1999, during which Colonel Azali Assoumani assumed power in a coup d'état. In December 2003, the Moroni Agreement on Transition Agreements was signed by the island presidents of the Union of Comoros. In the run-up to the 2006 elections, the government-owned Radio Ngazidja and private station Moroni FM were raided by armed assailants and forced off the air temporarily. In 2010, the U.S. Navy's Seabees constructed Hamramba School in Moroni as a humanitarian project, in partnership with the local military and Comoros' federal government; construction methods included mixing concrete by hand before using buckets and wheelbarrows to move the concrete to the school site.

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