Seaweed
Seaweed or macroalgae refers to several species of macroscopic, marine algae. The term includes some types of Rhodophyta and Chlorophyta macroalgae. Marine algae species such as kelps provide essential nursery habitat for fisheries and other marine species and thus protect food sources. Understanding these roles provides guiding principles for conservation and sustainable use of seaweeds to take precedence over industrial exploitation. Mechanical dredging of kelp, for instance, destroys dependent fisheries. Seaweed are a rich source of multiple biologically active compounds including proteins and polysaccharides with promising uses in nutrition, biomedicine and other uses. "Seaweed" lacks a formal definition. A seaweed may belong to one of several groups of multicellular algae: the red algae, green algae, brown algae; as these three groups do not have a common multicellular ancestor, the seaweed are in a polyphyletic group. In addition, some tuft-forming bluegreen algae are sometimes considered to be seaweed.
Seaweed's appearance somewhat resembles non-arboreal terrestrial plants. Thallus: the algal body lamina or blade: a flattened structure, somewhat leaf-like sorus: a spore cluster on Fucus, air bladder: a flotation-assisting organ on the blade on kelp, float: a flotation-assisting organ between the lamina and stipe stipe: a stem-like structure, may be absent holdfast: a specialized basal structure providing attachment to a surface a rock or another alga haptera: a finger-like extension of the holdfast anchoring to a benthic substrateThe stipe and blade are collectively known as the frond. Two specific environmental requirements dominate seaweed ecology; these are the presence of light sufficient to drive photosynthesis. Another common requirement is a firm attachment point, although some genera such as Sargassum and Gracilaria have species that float freely; as a result, seaweed most inhabit the part of a sea, close to the shore and within that zone more on rocky shores than on sand or shingle.
Seaweed occupy a wide range of ecological niches. The highest elevation is only wetted by the tops of sea spray, the lowest is several meters deep. In some areas, littoral seaweed can extend several miles out to sea; the limiting factor in such cases is sunlight availability. The deepest living seaweed are some species of red algae. Others have adapted to live in tidal rock pools. In this habitat, seaweed must withstand changing temperature and salinity and occasional drying. Seaweed has a variety of purposes, for which it is foraged from the wild. At the beginning of 2011, Indonesia produced 3 million tonnes of seaweed and surpassed the Philippines as the world's largest seaweed producer. By 2011, the production was estimated to have reached 10 million tonnes. Seaweed is consumed by coastal people in East Asia, e.g. Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia, e.g. Brunei, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia, in South Africa, Peru, the Canadian Maritimes, South West England, Wales and Scotland. In Asia, nori, zicai are sheets of dried Porphyra used in soups, sushi wrap or onigiri.
Chondrus crispus is another red alga used in producing food additives, along with Kappaphycus and gigartinoid seaweed. Porphyra is a red alga used in Wales to make laverbread. Laverbread, made from the seaweed, sometimes with oat flour, is a popular dish there. In northern Belize, edible seaweed are mixed with milk, nutmeg and vanilla to make a common beverage affectionately called "dulce". Seaweed are harvested or cultivated for the extraction of alginate and carrageenan, gelatinous substances collectively known as hydrocolloids or phycocolloids. Hydrocolloids have attained commercial significance as food additives; the food industry exploits their gelling, water-retention and other physical properties. Agar is used in foods such as confectionery and poultry products and beverages and moulded foods. Carrageenan is used in salad dressings and sauces, dietetic foods, as a preservative in meat and fish products, dairy items and baked goods; the development of seaweed as an alternative and sustainable source of food and animal feed ingredients depends on the sustainability of the natural resource of raw biomass and on moving the process of feed development from laboratory to industrial scale.
Alginates are used in wound dressings, production of dental moulds. In microbiology research, agar – a plant-based jelly similar to gelatin and made from seaweed – is extensively used as culture medium. Carrageenans and agaroses, with other lesser-known macroalgal polysaccharides, have several important biological activities or applications in biomedicine. Research suggests that the Australian seaweed Delisea pulchra may interfere with bacterial colonization. Sulfated saccharides from both red and green algae have been known to inhibit some DNA and RNA enveloped viruses. Seaweed extract is used in some diet pills. Other seaweed pills exploit the same effect as gastric banding, expanding in the stomach to make the body feel more full; the strong photosynthesis of algae creates a large affinity for nutrients.
Réunion
Réunion is an overseas department and region of France and an island in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar and 175 km southwest of Mauritius. As of January 2019, it had a population of 866,506; the island has been inhabited since the 16th century, when people from France and Madagascar settled there. Slavery was abolished on 20 December 1848, when the French Second Republic abolished slavery in the French colonies; however on indentured workers were brought to Réunion from South India, among other places. The island became an overseas department of France in 1946; as in France, the official language is French. In addition, the majority of the region's population speaks Réunion Creole. Administratively, Réunion is one of the overseas departments of France. Like the other four overseas departments, it is one of the 18 regions of France, with the modified status of overseas region, an integral part of the republic with the same status as Metropolitan France. Réunion is an outermost region of the European Union and, as an overseas department of France, part of the Eurozone.
Not much is known of Réunion's history prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century. Arab traders were familiar with it by the name Dina Morgabin; the island is featured on a map from 1153 AD by Al Sharif el-Edrisi. The island might have been visited by Swahili or Austronesian sailors on their journey to the west from the Malay Archipelago to Madagascar; the first European discovery of the area was made around 1507 by Portuguese explorer Diogo Fernandes Pereira, but the specifics are unclear. The uninhabited island might have been first sighted by the expedition led by Dom Pedro Mascarenhas, who gave his name to the island group around Réunion, the Mascarenes. Réunion itself was dubbed Santa Apolónia after a favourite saint, which suggests that the date of the Portuguese discovery could have been 9 February, her saint day. Diogo Lopes de Sequeira is said to have landed on the islands of Réunion and Rodrigues in 1509. By the early 1600s, nominal Portuguese rule had left Santa Apolónia untouched.
The island was occupied by France and administered from Port Louis, Mauritius. Although the first French claims date from 1638, when François Cauche and Salomon Goubert visited in June 1638, the island was claimed by Jacques Pronis of France in 1642, when he deported a dozen French mutineers to the island from Madagascar; the convicts were returned to France several years and in 1649, the island was named Île Bourbon after the French royal House of Bourbon. Colonisation started in 1665. "Île de la Réunion" was the name given to the island in 1793 by a decree of the Convention Nationale with the fall of the House of Bourbon in France, the name commemorates the union of revolutionaries from Marseille with the National Guard in Paris, which took place on 10 August 1792. In 1801, the island was renamed "Île Bonaparte", after First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte. During the Napoleonic Wars, the island was invaded by a Royal Navy squadron led by Commodore Josias Rowley in 1810, who used the old name of "Bourbon".
When it was restored to France by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the island retained the name of "Bourbon" until the fall of the restored Bourbons during the French Revolution of 1848, when the island was once again given the name "Île de la Réunion". From the 17th to 19th centuries, French colonisation, supplemented by importing Africans and Indians as workers, contributed to ethnic diversity in the population. From 1690, most of the non-Europeans were enslaved; the colony abolished slavery on 20 December 1848. Afterwards, many of the foreign workers came as indentured workers; the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 reduced the importance of the island as a stopover on the East Indies trade route. During the Second World War, Réunion was under the authority of the Vichy regime until 30 November 1942, when Free French forces took over the island with the destroyer Léopard. Réunion became a département d'outre-mer of France on 19 March 1946. INSEE assigned to Réunion the department code 974, the region code 04 when regional councils were created in 1982 in France, including in existing overseas departments which became overseas regions.
Over about two decades in the late 20th century, 1,630 children from Réunion were relocated to rural areas of metropolitan France to Creuse, ostensibly for education and work opportunities. That program was led by influential Gaullist politician Michel Debré, an MP for Réunion at the time. Many of these children were disadvantaged by the families with whom they were placed. Known as the Children of Creuse and their fate came to light in 2002 when one of them, Jean-Jacques Martial, filed suit against the French state for kidnapping and deportation of a minor. Other similar lawsuits were filed over the following years, but all were dismissed by French courts and by the European Court of Human Rights in 2011. In 2005 and 2006, Réunion was hit by a crippling epidemic of chikungunya, a disease spread by mosquitoes. According to the BBC News, 255,000 people on Réunion had contracted the disease as of 26 April 2006; the neighbouring islands of Mauritius and Madagascar suffered epidemics of this disease during the same year.
A few cases appeared in mainland France, carried by people travelling by airline. The French government of Dominique de Villepin sent an emergency aid package worth €36 million and deployed about 500 troops in an effort to eradicate mo
Tourism
Tourism is travel for pleasure or business. Tourism may be international, or within the traveller's country; the World Tourism Organization defines tourism more in terms which go "beyond the common perception of tourism as being limited to holiday activity only", as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure and not less than 24 hours and other purposes". Tourism can be domestic or international, international tourism has both incoming and outgoing implications on a country's balance of payments. Tourism suffered as a result of a strong economic slowdown of the late-2000s recession, between the second half of 2008 and the end of 2009, the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza virus, but recovered. International tourism receipts grew to US$1.03 trillion in 2005, corresponding to an increase in real terms of 3.8% from 2010. International tourist arrivals surpassed the milestone of 1 billion tourists globally for the first time in 2012, emerging markets such as China and Brazil had increased their spending over the previous decade.
The ITB Berlin is the world's leading tourism trade fair. Global tourism accounts for ca. 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The word tourist was used in 1772 and tourism in 1811, it is formed from the word tour, derived from Old English turian, from Old French torner, from Latin tornare. Tourism has become an important source of income for many regions and entire countries; the Manila Declaration on World Tourism of 1980 recognized its importance as "an activity essential to the life of nations because of its direct effects on the social, cultural and economic sectors of national societies and on their international relations."Tourism brings large amounts of income into a local economy in the form of payment for goods and services needed by tourists, accounting as of 2011 for 30% of the world's trade in services, for 6% of overall exports of goods and services. It generates opportunities for employment in the service sector of the economy associated with tourism; the hospitality industries which benefit from tourism include transportation services.
This is in addition to goods bought by tourists, including souvenirs. On the flip-side, tourism can degrade sour relationships between host and guest. In 1936, the League of Nations defined a foreign tourist as "someone traveling abroad for at least twenty-four hours", its successor, the United Nations, amended this definition in 1945, by including a maximum stay of six months. In 1941, Hunziker and Kraft defined tourism as "the sum of the phenomena and relationships arising from the travel and stay of non-residents, insofar as they do not lead to permanent residence and are not connected with any earning activity." In 1976, the Tourism Society of England's definition was: "Tourism is the temporary, short-term movement of people to destinations outside the places where they live and work and their activities during the stay at each destination. It includes movements for all purposes." In 1981, the International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism defined tourism in terms of particular activities chosen and undertaken outside the home.
In 1994, the United Nations identified three forms of tourism in its Recommendations on Tourism Statistics: Domestic tourism, involving residents of the given country traveling only within this country Inbound tourism, involving non-residents traveling in the given country Outbound tourism, involving residents traveling in another countryThe terms tourism and travel are sometimes used interchangeably. In this context, travel implies a more purposeful journey; the terms tourism and tourist are sometimes used pejoratively, to imply a shallow interest in the cultures or locations visited. By contrast, traveler is used as a sign of distinction; the sociology of tourism has studied the cultural values underpinning these distinctions and their implications for class relations. International tourist arrivals reached 1.035 billion in 2012, up from over 996 million in 2011, 952 million in 2010. In 2011 and 2012, international travel demand continued to recover from the losses resulting from the late-2000s recession, where tourism suffered a strong slowdown from the second half of 2008 through the end of 2009.
After a 5% increase in the first half of 2008, growth in international tourist arrivals moved into negative territory in the second half of 2008, ended up only 2% for the year, compared to a 7% increase in 2007. The negative trend intensified during 2009, exacerbated in some countries due to the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza virus, resulting in a worldwide decline of 4.2% in 2009 to 880 million international tourists arrivals, a 5.7% decline in international tourism receipts. The World Tourism Organization reports the following ten destinations as the most visited in terms of the number of international travelers in 2017. International tourism receipts grew to US$1.26 Trillion in 2015, corresponding to an increase in real terms of 4.4% from 2014. The World Tourism Organization reports the following entities as the top ten tourism earners for the year 2015: The World Tourism Organizati
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
Sea cucumber
Sea cucumbers are echinoderms from the class Holothuroidea. They are marine animals with a leathery skin and an elongated body containing a single, branched gonad. Sea cucumbers are found on the sea floor worldwide; the number of holothurian species worldwide is about 1,717 with the greatest number being in the Asia Pacific region. Many of these are gathered for human consumption and some species are cultivated in aquaculture systems; the harvested product is variously referred to as namako, bêche-de-mer or balate. Sea cucumbers serve a useful role in the marine ecosystem as they help recycle nutrients, breaking down detritus and other organic matter after which bacteria can continue the degradation process. Like all echinoderms, sea cucumbers have an endoskeleton just below the skin, calcified structures that are reduced to isolated microscopic ossicles joined by connective tissue. In some species these can sometimes be enlarged to flattened plates. In pelagic species such as Pelagothuria natatrix, the skeleton is absent and there is no calcareous ring.
The sea cucumbers are named after their resemblance to the fruit of the cucumber plant. Most sea cucumbers, as their name suggests, have a soft and cylindrical body, more or less lengthened, rounded off and fat in the extremities, without solid appendages, their shape ranges from spherical for "sea apples" to serpent-like for Apodida or the classic sausage-shape, while others resemble caterpillars. The mouth is surrounded by tentacles. Holothurians measure between 10 and 30 centimetres long, with extremes of some millimetres for Rhabdomolgus ruber and up to more than 3 metres for Synapta maculata; the largest American species, Holothuria floridana, which abounds just below low-water mark on the Florida reefs, has a volume of well over 500 cubic centimeters, 25–30 cm long. Most possess five rows of tube feet; the podia on the dorsal surface have no locomotive role, are transformed into papillae. At one of the extremities opens a rounded mouth surrounded with a crown of tentacles which can be complex in some species.
Holothurians do not look like other echinoderms at first glance, because of their tubular body, without visible skeleton nor hard appendixes. Furthermore, the fivefold symmetry, classical for echinoderms, although preserved structurally, is doubled here by a bilateral symmetry which makes them look like chordates. However, a central symmetry is still visible in some species through five'radii', which extend from the mouth to the anus, on which the tube feet are attached. There is thus no "oral" or "aboral" face as for sea stars and other echinoderms, but the animal stands on one of its sides, this face is called trivium, while the dorsal face is named bivium. A remarkable feature of these animals is the "catch" collagen; this can be loosened and tightened at will, if the animal wants to squeeze through a small gap, it can liquefy its body and pour into the space. To keep itself safe in these crevices and cracks, the sea cucumber will hook up all its collagen fibers to make its body firm again.
The most common way to separate the subclasses is by looking at their oral tentacles. Order Apodida have a slender and elongate body lacking tube feet, with up to 25 simple or pinnate oral tentacles. Aspidochirotida are the most common sea cucumbers encountered, with a strong body and 10–30 leaf like or shield like oral tentacles. Dendrochirotida are filter-feeders, with 8 -- 30 branched oral tentacles. Sea cucumbers are 10 to 30 cm in length, although the smallest known species are just 3 mm long, the largest can reach 3 meters; the body ranges from spherical to worm-like, lacks the arms found in many other echinoderms, such as starfish. The anterior end of the animal, containing the mouth, corresponds to the oral pole of other echinoderms, while the posterior end, containing the anus, corresponds to the aboral pole. Thus, compared with other echinoderms, sea cucumbers can be said to be lying on their side; the body of a holothurian is cylindrical. It is radially symmetrical along its longitudinal axis, has weak bilateral symmetry transversely with a dorsal and a ventral surface.
As in other Echinozoans, there are five ambulacra separated by five ambulacral grooves, the interambulacra. The ambulacral grooves bear four rows of tube feet but these are diminished in size or absent in some holothurians on the dorsal surface; the two dorsal ambulacra make up the bivium. At the anterior end, the mouth is surrounded by a ring of tentacles which are retractable into the mouth; these may be simple, branched or arborescent. They are known as the introvert and posterior to them there is an internal ring of large calcareous ossicles. Attached to this are five bands of muscle running internally longitudinally along the ambulacra. There are circular muscles, contraction of which cause the animal to elongate and the introvert to extend. Anterior to the ossicles lie further muscles; the body wall consists of an epidermis and a dermis and contains smaller c
Seychelles
Seychelles the Republic of Seychelles, is an archipelago country in the Indian Ocean. The capital of the 115-island country, lies 1,500 kilometres east of mainland East Africa. Other nearby island countries and territories include Comoros, Madagascar, Réunion and Mauritius to the south. With a population of 94,228, it has the smallest population of any sovereign African country. Seychelles is a member of the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, the Commonwealth of Nations, the United Nations. After proclamation of independence from the United Kingdom in 1976, Seychelles has developed from a agricultural society to a market-based diversified economy, with agriculture being supplanted by rising service and public sectors as well as tourism. From 1976 until 2015, nominal GDP output has increased nearly sevenfold and the purchasing power parity nearly sixteenfold. In late 2010s, the President Danny Faure and the National Assembly presented plans to encourage foreign investment in order to further upgrade these sectors.
Today, Seychelles boasts the highest nominal excluding the French regions. It is one of only a handful of countries in Africa with a high Human Development Index. Despite the country's newfound economic prosperity, poverty remains widespread due to a high level of economic inequality, one of the highest in the world, unequal wealth distribution among the populace which vastly favors the upper and ruling class; the Seychelles were uninhabited throughout most of recorded history. Some scholars assume that Austronesian seafarers and Maldivian and Arab traders were the first to visit the uninhabited Seychelles; this assumption is based on the discovery of tombs, visible until 1910. The earliest recorded sighting by Europeans took place on 15 March 1503, recorded by Thomé Lopes aboard "Rui Mendes de Brito" part of the fleet of the Portuguese Admiral Vasco da Gama. Da Gama's ships passed close to an elevated island Silhouette Island and the following day Desroches Island; the earliest recorded landing was in January 1609, by the crew of the "Ascension" under Captain Alexander Sharpeigh during the fourth voyage of the British East India Company.
A transit point for trade between Africa and Asia, the islands were said to be used by pirates until the French began to take control starting in 1756 when a Stone of Possession was laid on Mahé by Captain Nicholas Morphey. The islands were named after Louis XV's Minister of Finance; the British frigate "Orpheus" commanded by Captain Henry Newcome arrived at Mahé on 16 May 1794. Terms of capitulation were drawn up and the next day Seychelles was surrendered to Britain. Jean Baptiste Quéau de Quincy, the French administrator of Seychelles during the years of war with the United Kingdom, declined to resist when armed enemy warships arrived. Instead, he negotiated the status of capitulation to Britain which gave the settlers a privileged position of neutrality. Britain assumed full control upon the surrender of Mauritius in 1810, formalised in 1814 at the Treaty of Paris. Seychelles became a crown colony separate from Mauritius in 1903. Elections were held in 1966 and 1970. Independence was granted in 1976 as a republic within the Commonwealth.
In the 1970s Seychelles was "the place to be seen, a playground for film stars and the international jet set". In 1977, a coup d'état by France Albert René ousted the first president of the republic, James Mancham. René discouraged over-dependence on tourism and declared that he wanted "to keep the Seychelles for the Seychellois"; the 1979 constitution declared a socialist one-party state, which lasted until 1991. In the 1980s there were a series of coup attempts against President René, some of which were supported by South Africa. In 1981, Mike Hoare led a team of 43 South African mercenaries masquerading as holidaying rugby players in the 1981 Seychelles coup d'état attempt. There was a gun battle at the airport, most of the mercenaries escaped in a hijacked Air India plane; the leader of this hijacking was German mercenary D. Clodo, a former member of the Rhodesian SAS. Clodo stood trial in South Africa as well as in his home country Germany for air-piracy. In 1986, an attempted coup led by the Seychelles Minister of Defence, Ogilvy Berlouis, caused President René to request assistance from India.
In Operation Flowers are Blooming, the Indian naval vessel INS Vindhyagiri arrived in Port Victoria to help avert the coup. The first draft of a new constitution failed to receive the requisite 60% of voters in 1992, but an amended version was approved in 1993. In January 2013, Seychelles declared a state of emergency; the Seychelles president, head of state and head of government, is elected by popular vote for a five-year term of office. The cabinet is presided over and appointed by the president, subject to the approval of a majority of the legislature; the unicameral Seychellois parliament, the National Assembly or Assemblée Nationale, consists of 34 members, 25 of whom are elected directly by popular vote, while the remaining nine seats are appointed proportionally according to the percentage of votes received by each party. All members serve five-year terms; the Supreme Court of Seychelles, created in 1903, is the highest trial court in Seychelles and the first court of appeal from all the lower courts and tribunals.
The highest court of law
Comoros
The Comoros the Union of the Comoros, is an island country in the Indian Ocean located at the northern end of the Mozambique Channel off the eastern coast of Africa between northeastern Mozambique, the French region of Mayotte, northwestern Madagascar. The capital and largest city in Comoros is Moroni; the religion of the majority of the population is Sunni Islam. At 1,660 km2, excluding the contested island of Mayotte, the Comoros is the fourth-smallest African nation by area; the population, excluding Mayotte, is estimated at 795,601. As a nation formed at a crossroads of different civilisations, the archipelago is noted for its diverse culture and history; the archipelago was first inhabited by Bantu speakers who came from East Africa, supplemented by Arab and Austronesian immigration. The sovereign state is an archipelago consisting of three major islands and numerous smaller islands, all in the volcanic Comoro Islands; the major islands are known by their French names: northwestern-most Grande Comore, Mohéli, Anjouan.
In addition, the country has a claim on a fourth major island, southeastern-most Mayotte, though Mayotte voted against independence from France in 1974, has never been administered by an independent Comoros government, continues to be administered by France. France has vetoed United Nations Security Council resolutions that would affirm Comorian sovereignty over the island. In addition, Mayotte became an overseas department and a region of France in 2011 following a referendum passed overwhelmingly, it became part of the French colonial empire in the end of 19th century before becoming independent in 1975. Since declaring independence, the country has experienced more than 20 coups d'état or attempted coups, with various heads of state assassinated. Along with this constant political instability, the population of the Comoros lives with the worst income inequality of any nation, with a Gini coefficient over 60%, while ranking in the worst quartile on the Human Development Index; as of 2008 about half the population lived below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day.
The French insular region of Mayotte, the more prosperous territory in the Mozambique Channel, is the major destination for Comorian illegal migrants who flee their country. The Comoros is a member state of the African Union, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Arab League and the Indian Ocean Commission. Other countries near the Comoros are the Seychelles to the northeast, its capital is Moroni, on Grande Comore. The Union of the Comoros has three official languages—Comorian and French; the name "Comoros" derives from the Arabic word قمر qamar. The first human inhabitants of the Comoro Islands are thought to have been Austronesian settlers travelling by boat from islands in Southeast Asia; these people arrived no than the sixth century AD, the date of the earliest known archaeological site, found on Nzwani, although settlement beginning as early as the first century has been postulated. The islands of the Comoros were populated by a succession of peoples from the coast of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, the Malay Archipelago, Madagascar.
Bantu-speaking settlers reached the islands as a part of the greater Bantu expansion that took place in Africa throughout the first millennium. According to pre-Islamic mythology, a jinni dropped a jewel; this became the Karthala volcano. Development of the Comoros is divided into phases; the earliest reliably recorded phase is the Dembeni phase, during which each island maintained a single, central village. From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, trade with the island of Madagascar and merchants from the Middle East flourished, smaller villages emerged, existing towns expanded. Many Comorians can trace their genealogies to ancestors from Yemen Hadhramaut, Oman. According to legend, in 632, upon hearing of Islam, islanders are said to have dispatched an emissary, Mtswa-Mwindza, to Mecca—but by the time he arrived there, the Prophet Muhammad had died. Nonetheless, after a stay in Mecca, he returned to Ngazidja and led the gradual conversion of his islanders to Islam. Among the earliest accounts of East Africa, the works of Al-Masudi describe early Islamic trade routes, how the coast and islands were visited by Muslims including Persian and Arab merchants and sailors in search of coral, ivory, tortoiseshell and slaves.
They brought Islam to the people of the Zanj including the Comoros. As the importance of the Comoros grew along the East African coast, both small and large mosques were constructed. Despite its distance from the coast, the Comoros is situated along the Swahili Coast in East Africa, it was a major hub of trade and an important location in a network of trading towns that included Kilwa, in present-day Tanzania, Sofala, in Mozambique, Mombasa in Kenya. After the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 15th century and subsequent collapse of the East African sultanates, the powerful Omani Sultan Saif bin Sultan began to defeat the Dutch and the Portuguese, his successor Said bin Sultan increased Omani Arab influence in the region, moving his administration to nearby Zanzibar, which came under Omani r
Comoros
Madagascar
Mauritius
Réunion (France)
Seychelles
