Slavery in the Comoros

Part of a series on
Forced labour and slavery
Contemporary Child Labour Child soldiers Conscription Debt Forced marriage Bride buying Child marriage Wife selling Forced prostitution Human trafficking Involuntary servitude Peonage Penal labour Contemporary Africa 21st-century jihadism Sexual slavery Wage slavery
Historical Antiquity Egypt Babylonia Greece Rome Medieval Europe Ancillae Black Sea slave trade Byzantine Empire Kholop Prague slave trade Serfs History In Russia Emancipation Thrall Genoese slave trade Venetian slave trade Balkan slave trade Muslim world Slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate Slavery in al-Andalus ‎ Baqt Contract of manumission Bukhara slave trade Crimean slave trade Khazar slave trade Khivan slave trade Ottoman Empire Avret Pazarları Barbary Coast slave trade pirates Sack of Baltimore Slave raid of Suðuroy Turkish Abductions Concubinage history Ma malakat aymanukum Avret Pazarları Harem Abbasid harem Ottoman Imperial Harem Safavid imperial harem Qajar harem Jarya/Cariye Odalisque Qiyan Umm al-walad Circassian slave trade Saqaliba Slavery in the Rashidun Caliphate Slavery in the Umayyad Caliphate Slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate Volga Bulgarian slave trade 21st century Atlantic slave trade Bristol Brazil Database Dutch Middle Passage Nantes New France Panyarring Spanish Empire Slave Coast Thirteen colonies Topics and practice Conscription Ghilman Mamluk Devshirme Blackbirding Coolie Corvée labour Field slaves in the United States Treatment House slaves Saqaliba Slave market Slave raiding Child soldiers White slavery Naval Galley slave Impressment Pirates Shanghaiing Slave ship
By country or region Sub-Saharan Africa Contemporary Africa Trans-Saharan slave trade Red Sea slave trade Indian Ocean slave trade Zanzibar slave trade Angola Chad Comoros Ethiopia Mali Mauritania Niger Nigeria Seychelles Somalia Somali slave trade South Africa Sudan Zanzibar North and South America Pre-Columbian America Aztec Americas indigenous U.S. Natives United States Field slaves female Contemporary maps partus prison labour Slave codes Treatment interregional Human trafficking The Bahamas Canada Caribbean Barbados British Virgin Islands Trinidad Code Noir Latin America Brazil Lei Áurea Colombia Cuba Haiti revolt Restavek (Encomienda) Puerto Rico East, Southeast, and South Asia Human trafficking in Southeast Asia Bhutan Brunei China Booi Aha Laogai penal system India Debt bondage Chukri System Indonesia Japan comfort women Korea Kwalliso Malaysia Maldives Slavery in the Mongol Empire Thailand Yankee princess Vietnam Australia and Oceania Australia Human trafficking Blackbirding Slave raiding in Easter Island Human trafficking in Papua New Guinea Blackbirding in Polynesia Europe and North Asia Sex trafficking in Europe United Kingdom Penal Labour Slavery Denmark Dutch Republic Germany in World War II Malta Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia Spain Sweden North Africa and West Asia Afghanistan Algeria Bahrain Egypt Human trafficking in the Middle East Iran Iraq Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Libya Morocco Oman Palestine Saudi Arabia Syria Tunisia Qatar Yemen United Arab Emirates
Religion Bible Christianity Catholicism Mormonism Islam Judaism Baháʼí Faith
Opposition and resistance Abolitionism U.K. U.S. Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference 1889–90 Temporary Slavery Commission 1926 Slavery Convention Committee of Experts on Slavery Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery Abolitionists Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention Anti-Slavery International Blockade of Africa U.K. U.S. Colonization Liberia Sierra Leone Compensated emancipation Freedman Manumission Freedom suit Slave Power Underground Railroad songs Slave rebellion Slave Trade Acts International law Third Servile War 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution Timeline of abolition of slavery and serfdom Abolition of slave trade in Persian gulf [fa]
Related Common law Indentured servitude Forced labour Fugitive slaves laws convention Great Dismal Swamp maroons List of slaves owners last survivors of American slavery List of slavery-related memorials and museums Slave marriages in the United States Slave narrative films songs Slave name Slave catcher Slave patrol Slave Route Project breeding court cases Washington Jefferson J.Q. Adams Lincoln Emancipation Proclamation 40 acres Freedmen's Bureau Iron bit Emancipation Day
v t e

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Swedish. (February 2024) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Swedish article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 215 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Swedish Wikipedia article at [[:sv:Slaveri på Komorerna]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|sv|Slaveri på Komorerna}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Slavery existed in the Comoros until 1904. The Comoros was as a player in the Indian Ocean slave trade, where slaves from the Swahili coast of Eastern Africa were trafficked across the Indian Ocean to Oman in the Arabian Peninsula, and was one of the major players of the trade alongside the Zanzibar slave trade.

Slavery are noted to have existed in the Comoros as long as the history of the islands is documented, and was possibly introduced by the Arab slave trade.

After the 1820s, the Comoros slave trade expanded to a major part of the Indian Ocean slave trade, which was very lucrative and became one of the main incomes for the islands until the end of the 19th-century.

The Arabian dhow slaveships, was normally rented or a part of a commercial enterprice, with an Arab and Swaihili crew, partially or fully enslaved, in which the profit was shared between the owner, the captain and the crew (the enslaved crew members having to give half of their salary to their enslaver).^[1]

Along with Zanzibar, the Comoros exported slaves to Oman on the Arabian Peninsula.^[2]

The Comoros became a middle stop of the slave trade between the Swahili coast of Eastern Africa to French Réunion when slavery was abolished on Réunion and replaced by the engagé-system of indentured labor (1848–1864), when slaves were shipped to the Comoros, and then from the Comoros to Réunion as free indentured workers.^[3] The Comoros bought slaves from Portuguese Mozambique or the Arab slave traders of the Swahili coast, such as the Zanzibar slave trade, Ouitangonha, Angoche or Kilwa, who exported numerous makua-slaves to the Comoros.^[4] On the Comoros, the mainland slaves were kept for a year, after which they were exported to Réunion, officially as free indentured worker from the Comoros.^[5]

The Comoros also exported slaves to Madagascar until at least the 1860s.^[6]

In order to avoid the British Anti Slavery Patrol Fleet on the Indian Ocean, the slave ships from Zanzibar as well as from the Comoros used false papers from French Mayotte in the Comoros to give a false destination for their trip and avoid British confiscation.^[7]

In the 16th-century, the Comoros became a harbor for European (Portuguese and Dutch) ships, which anchored to buy food supplies on their way between Madagascar and India, and to meet the food trade demand the Comorans produced more food by the labor of slaves imported from Madagascar and Portuguese Mozambique.^[8]

During the major Comoros slave trade of the 19th-century, the already existing slavery on the Comoros expanded to major proportions, until 40 percent of the population were slaves in the 1860s.^[9]

The slaves lived in slave quarters in the stone cities and in slave villages on the countryside. Male slaves were trained to be craftsmen to maintain the stone cities and agricultural laborers, and female slaves were used as house slaves or concubines (sex slaves).^[10]

The Comoros became a French protectorate in 1841 but was not a French colony and thereby not subjected to French law, which ment slavery was not automatically abolished when France abolished slavery in 1848.^[11] An exception was the island of Mayotte, which did become a French colony and slavery was indeed abolished in the 1840s.

Slavery was finally abolished in 1904.^[12] The former slaves however kept living in their former homes, and kept working with the same tasks for the same people and in practice continued to live as they did during slavery as late as the 1970s.^[13]