Popular Comoros Books

Le Kafir Du Karthala by Mohamed Toihiri

A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth by Samantha Weinberg

Just before Christmas in 1938, the young woman curator of a small South African museum spotted a strange-looking fish on a trawler's deck. It was five feet long, with steel-blue scales, luminescent eyes and remarkable limb-like fins, unlike those of any fish she had ever seen. Determined to preserve her unusual find, she searched for days for a way to save it, but ended up Just before Christmas in 1938, the young woman curator of a small South African museum spotted a strange-looking fish on a trawler's deck. It was five feet long, with steel-blue scales, luminescent eyes and remarkable limb-like fins, unlike those of any fish she had ever seen. Determined to preserve her unusual find, she searched for days for a way to save it, but ended up with only the skin and a few bones. A charismatic amateur ichthyologist, J.L.B. Smith, saw a thumbnail sketch of the fish and was thunderstruck. He recognized it as a coelacanth (pronounced see-la-kanth), a creature known from fossils dating back 400 million years and thought to have died out with the dinosaurs. With its extraordinary limbs, the coelacanth was believed to be the first fish to crawl from the sea and evolve into reptiles, mammals and eventually mankind. The discovery was immediately dubbed the "greatest scientific find of the century." Smith devoted his life to the search for a complete specimen, a fourteen-year odyssey that culminated in a dramatic act of international piracy. As the fame of the coelacanth spread, so did rumors and obsessions. Nations fought over it, multimillion-dollar expeditions were launched, and submarines hand-built to find it. In 1998, the rumors and the truth came together in a gripping climax, which brought the coelacanth back into the international limelight. A Fish Caught in Time is the entrancing story of the most rare and precious fish in the world--our own great uncle forty million times removed.

The Bone Man of Benares: A Novel Based on a True Story by Terry Tarnoff

In 1971, Terry Tarnoff packed a bag, a guitar and sixteen harmonicas and headed out on an eight year journey that would take him into the jungles of Africa, the mountains of India and beyond. This account of his revelatory journey is a tumultuous love story, a spiritual odyssey, and a rollicking escapade all rolled up into one. Tarnoff is a fevered, risk-taking writer with In 1971, Terry Tarnoff packed a bag, a guitar and sixteen harmonicas and headed out on an eight year journey that would take him into the jungles of Africa, the mountains of India and beyond. This account of his revelatory journey is a tumultuous love story, a spiritual odyssey, and a rollicking escapade all rolled up into one. Tarnoff is a fevered, risk-taking writer with an uncanny ability to render place. The Bone Man of Benares is a lunatic bird of a book, flapping, singing, soaring, often all at the same time. It's a wild-hearted celebration of cross-cultural discovery, a laugh-out-loud, delirious adventure that traverses the chasm of time, speaking to readers young and old about the universal need for connection.

Tradition d'une lignée royale des comores by Ben Ali Damir , Georges Boulinier , Paul Ottino

L'île de Ngazidja (Grande Comore) est l'île la plus occidentale de l'Archipel des Comores. Auréolée d'une origine shirazi, la reliant à quelque Perse fabuleuse, une princesse, portée par les eaux de l'océan Indien, aurait débarqué dans cette île, il y a environ sept siècles. Cet ouvrage a pour but de faire revivre de l'intérieur, à partir des traditions qui ont survécu jusq L'île de Ngazidja (Grande Comore) est l'île la plus occidentale de l'Archipel des Comores. Auréolée d'une origine shirazi, la reliant à quelque Perse fabuleuse, une princesse, portée par les eaux de l'océan Indien, aurait débarqué dans cette île, il y a environ sept siècles. Cet ouvrage a pour but de faire revivre de l'intérieur, à partir des traditions qui ont survécu jusqu'à nos jours dans l'île, l'histoire, le rôle et le fonctionnement du lignage de type matrilinéaire (Inya) qui est issu de la princesse. Il montre, notamment, comment au sein d'un tel système social - portant la marque de l'Afrique bantu, et étonnamment combiné avec les valeurs de l'Islam, - peut s'exprimer l'ambition des hommes, sultans précaires, dont la gloire est le plus souvent nécessaire. Parmi les sources utilisés pour cette étude, figure une importante chronique de l'île, écrite en swahili à la fin du siècle dernier, qui est éditée pour la première fois dans cet ouvrage.

Contes comoriens de Ngazidja by Mohamed Ahmed-Chamanga , Ahmed Ali Mroimana

" Les contes sont des mensonges " nous disent nos conteurs. Ces histoires, créées par nos parents et les parents de nos parents, renvoient pourtant aussi à la vie quotidienne des gens et livrent parfois un curieux message de critique sociale, là où l'on attendait que morale bien pensante et conservatisme.

Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics by Alexander Frater

From one of the most celebrated travel writers at work today—a vibrantly observant, witty, utterly captivating account of a lifetime’s worth of travel between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Part memoir, part travelogue, all passionate appreciation, Tales from the Torrid Zone begins in Iririki, Alexander Frater’s birthplace. On this tiny island in the South Seas republ From one of the most celebrated travel writers at work today—a vibrantly observant, witty, utterly captivating account of a lifetime’s worth of travel between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Part memoir, part travelogue, all passionate appreciation, Tales from the Torrid Zone begins in Iririki, Alexander Frater’s birthplace. On this tiny island in the South Seas republic of Vanuatu, his grandfather, a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland, converted the inhabitants, his father ran the hospital and his mother built its first schoolhouse in their front garden. And it was on Iririki where, on the eve of his sixth birthday, Frater fell victim to “le coup de bamboo . . . a mild form of tropical madness for which, luckily, there is no cure,” and which has compelled him, again and again, to return to the “seeding, breeding, buzzing, barking, fluttering, squawking, germinating, growing” deep tropics. His travels take him to nearly all of the eighty-eight countries encompassed by this remarkable, steamy swath of the world. He delves deeply into the history and politics of each nation he visits, and into the lives of the inhabitants, and of the flora and fauna. He is, at once, tourist, explorer and adventurer, as fascinated with—and fascinating about—the quotidian as he is with the extraordinary. But certainly, he does not lack for the extraordinary: dining with the Queen of Tonga in a leper colony; making his way across tropical Africa—and two civil wars—in a forty-four-year-old flying boat; delivering a new church bell to a remote Oceanian island. From Fiji to Laos, Mexico to Peru, Senegal to Uganda, Taiwan to Indonesia, Frater gives us a richly described, wonderfully anecdotal, endlessly surprising picture of this diverse, feverish, languorously beautiful world—as much a state of mind as it is a geographical phenomenon.

La Grande Comore en 1898 by Sophie Blanchy , Henri Pobéguin (Photos)

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

The cosmopolites are literally "citizens of the world," from the Greek word kosmos, meaning "world," and polites, or "citizen." Garry Davis, aka World Citizen No. 1, and creator of the World Passport, was a former Broadway actor and World War II bomber pilot who renounced his American citizenship in 1948 as a form of protest against nationalism, sovereign borders, and war. The cosmopolites are literally "citizens of the world," from the Greek word kosmos, meaning "world," and polites, or "citizen." Garry Davis, aka World Citizen No. 1, and creator of the World Passport, was a former Broadway actor and World War II bomber pilot who renounced his American citizenship in 1948 as a form of protest against nationalism, sovereign borders, and war. Today there are cosmopolites of all stripes, rich or poor, intentional or unwitting, from 1-percenters who own five passports thanks to tax-havens to the Bidoon, the stateless people of countries like the United Arab Emirates. Journalist Atossa Abrahamian, herself a cosmopolite, travels around the globe to meet the people who have come to embody an increasingly fluid, borderless world. Along the way you are introduced to a colorful cast of characters, including passport-burning atheist hackers, the new Knights of Malta, California libertarian "seasteaders," who are residents of floating city-states, Bidoons, who have been forced to be citizens of the island nation Comoros, entrepreneurs in the business of buying and selling passports, cosmopolites who live on a luxury cruise ship called The World, and shady businessmen with ties to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.

Droit du sol by Charles Masson

Quatorze personnes ont péri et sept étaient toujours portées disparues vendredi soir, 24 heures après le naufrage, au large de Mayotte, d'une barque chargée de clandestins en provenance des Comores venus chercher fortune sur l'île française de l'Océan indien. Selon les témoignages des rescapés, le ''kwassa'', une barque de pêche traditionnelle, transportait 33 personnes, d Quatorze personnes ont péri et sept étaient toujours portées disparues vendredi soir, 24 heures après le naufrage, au large de Mayotte, d'une barque chargée de clandestins en provenance des Comores venus chercher fortune sur l'île française de l'Océan indien. Selon les témoignages des rescapés, le ''kwassa'', une barque de pêche traditionnelle, transportait 33 personnes, dont 7 enfants. Il a sans doute heurté un platier, c'est-à-dire un haut-fond de corail découvrant à marée basse. C'est un pêcheur qui a découvert le naufrage. Il a réussi à sauver huit personnes en les déposant sur une plage, avant de donner l'alerte à 01H05 locales vendredi. Le PC de l'action de l'Etat a aussitôt été activé pour suivre le déroulement des opérations. Toute la nuit, une vedette de la police de l'air et des frontières, une autre de la gendarmerie ainsi qu'un navire de la gendarmerie maritime ont participé aux recherches, renforcées par un ULM au lever du jour.Quatre naufragés supplémentaires ont ainsi pu être secourus. Un précédent naufrage de ''kwassa'', le 24 juillet, avait fait six morts et seize disparus à un kilomètre à peine des côtes.