African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 363
Four green volcanic islands, lying between Mozambique and Madagascar, make up
the Comoros archipelago: Anjouan (Nzwani), Grande Comore (Ngazidja), Mohéli
(Mwali), and Mayotte (Maoré, a “territorial collectivity” of France). The population
numbers about half a million people of African extraction, whose forebears intermarried
with Malagasy, Arabs, and Persians. The culture is a unique combination of African and
Islamic traditions, which are transmitted to the young by grandparents and Quranic
teachers. In this archipelago, to which repeated coups d’état and uprisings (1989, 1992,
1995, and 1997) have failed to bring prosperity, unemployment is high, and prices of
staples continually rise. Tourism is negligible despite an agreeable climate, beautiful
beaches, and robust dance traditions. All the islands, especially the underpopulated
Mohéli, have breathtaking agricultural potential.
The folklore of the Comoros blends African traditions with an ideological stress on
Islam. It includes heroic recitations by royal reciters, legends of Quranic figures and
djinns (spirits), and oral history connecting the islands to King Solomon. Place legends
feature the active volcano Karthala on Grande Comore, whose 1977 eruption buried most
of the village of Singani. One major narrative genre is the hadisi (from Arabic hadith,
“the words of and about the Prophet”), which includes historical legends and sacred
narratives secularized. The subgenre wana hadisi, “anecdote,” combines humor with an
initiatory function, for instance, to impart sexual education to a woman about to be
married. The other major narrative genre, sometimes scorned as childish, is hale, a lie or
fiction told at evening. In purportedly historical stories, the two genres overlap,
paralleling similar genres in East Africa and Madagascar. Proverbs have much force;
riddles show more influence of modern times than the other genres.
Folktales have been extensively collected on Mayotte by Noël Gueunier and Sophie
Blanchy. Michael Lambek has analyzed spirit narratives in Mayotte. Mohéli and Anjouan
await careful research, particularly on the practices surrounding the central Comoran
custom of grand manage (the big marriage).
The Seychelles archipelago is located north-northeast of Madagascar in the Indian
Ocean. Settlement and creolization began in the late eighteenth century, with the
importation by European planters of African slaves to work their cotton plantations. A
century later, nearly all of the 20,000 Seychellois were of African descent. Around that
time, Indian merchants immigrated from Bombay, Gujarat, and Kutch, and a few Chinese
also settled there. Today the 68,932 people of Seychelles, a mixture of Asians, Africans,
and Europeans who speak both English and kreol, recognize no ethnic division and
constitute a true creole society. Their African and Malagasy cultural patterns give their
islands a cultural profile quite distinct from that of Reunion or Mauritius. Tourism is a
key source of revenue.
As in East Africa, separate spheres for men and women harbor separate kinds of the
folklore. Women’s activities are concentrated in the household, men’s, at places of work
and recreation. “Thus, from an early stage, men’s recreational and social activities take
place away from the household, on the football field, at a dance, at the toddy seller’s on
the road. They come home to eat and sleep but not to socialize” (Benedict 1982, 263).
Weddings and dances are both occasions for communication and subjects for folklore.
Traditional music exists side by side with imported “world music” on cassette. In dance,
the traditional moutia coexists with the Mauritian séga and other regional forms.