It’s late evening in the Comoros, a remote volcanic archipelago situated between Mozambique and Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean, and the residents of Domoni have gathered in great numbers around the edge of the town’s central square to celebrate the marriage of Badaant el Mounyrou and her husband Dhinourayni Ali Kassim Ali Mbaliya.

Top: Female wedding guests dance and play drums outside the house of the bride on the third day of the wedding. Above: Spectators line the walls of the old sultan’s palace to watch a bull fight. Right: A young wedding guest. Far right: Drummers during the Hambarousi dance

Wedding guests arrive in traditional dress

Spectators line the rooftops of nearby buildings and jostle for space around the square’s perimeter wall. Inside the arena, dancers avoid the horns of a charging bull while the crowd whoops and cheers. Drummers beat out a steady rhythm on their tam-tams as the sun sinks

The country practises two distinct forms of marriage, known as the Petit Mariage and the Grand Mariage. The former is an ordinary Islamic wedding. The latter features a string of rituals that routinely last for two weeks.

Men wearing ceremonial scarves and garlands of flowers perform a traditional dance

“Our budget was 18m Comorian francs ($41,700),” says the bride’s uncle Zarouk Inzouddine, a retired colonel of the Comorian army who, as a powerful and well-respected local figure, has played a large role in the preparations. “But you never know what the real cost will be. It’s our custom but it’s also like a religious obligation. If your marriage is lesser than your friend’s you’ll feel shame your whole life. So everyone wants to do better than the others and spend more.”

Performers dressed as military officers – a popular feature of some Comorian events – attend the Madjiliss ceremony on the first Saturday of the wedding celebrations

Bow-tied members of a dance troupe perform alongside wedding guests

Inzouddine had invited me to join the wedding nine days previously, before the opening event, a “small” ceremony attended by family and friends that involved live music and a professional dance troupe of about 30 young men immaculately dressed in black suits and bow ties.

In the subsequent days, the family progressed through a dizzying array of processions, meals and intricately choreographed dances. During the Madjiliss ceremony, a few days after the start of the wedding, hundreds of people crowded into the town’s main stadium wearing garlands of flowers and vibrant traditional dress, as Inzouddine delivered a lengthy speech railing against terrorism in northern Nigeria.

Above: Members of the bride’s family arrive with gifts. Right and below: Men wearing ceremonial scarves and garlands of flowers perform a traditional dance

Each island, region and town in the Comoros conducts the Grand Mariage in a slightly different way, but all feature a rich and ornate tapestry of symbolic rituals, evoking different elements of the island’s complicated history as a maritime trading nation.

Such weddings are not only for show and pride. They also play a key role in both the local economy and the social order. In the main island of Grande Comore, a man who has not had a Grand Mariage will find himself effectively blocked out of political power. Those who cannot afford to have a Grand Mariage are not permitted to sit in the front row of the mosque or wear certain items of clothing. They are cut out of local decision-making and are not considered to be fully adult in the same way as those who have had a Grand Mariage.

Above: Gifts for the groom are brought to his house. Right: Bundles of wedding gifts lie wrapped up on trays. Far right: Wedding guests leave money in a box at the foot of the bride’s bed on the morning of her marriage

Gifts worth thousands of dollars were exchanged between the two families. So much wealth changes hands during the course of a Grand Mariage that whole industries are supported, from farmers and food processors to jewellers and musicians. One morning, I visited a jeweller named Hassan Abdou, a 33-year-old who works in a small workshop in the town’s old medina, artfully crafting traditional jewellery. “Weddings are big business here,” he told me, explaining that his livelihood depended on them almost exclusively. “People need necklaces, rings and earrings for the family of the bride. And everybody wants them in gold.”

A jeweller makes a piece of wedding jewellery in his workshop in the old town of Domoni

The tradition of Grand Mariage also affects the balance between men and women. The bride typically receives so much jewellery from the family of the groom that she can enjoy a certain level of financial independence. This is especially true given that the Comoros have a matrilocal system of residence, rare in Islamic cultures, whereby the groom will move into the home of his bride, not the other way around.

This leaves the wife with her own property and valuable assets, usually in the form of gold, and goes some way to explaining why the Comoros ranked first in a recent survey to establish the status of women in Islamic countries around the world.

The groom is carried through the medina on the eve of the wedding, accompanied by drummers and followed by a procession of friends and family

On the 10th night of the wedding the groom’s family made final preparations before departing for the home of his bride. Dressed in full traditional attire, with a long, curved sword strapped to his hip and a veil covering his face, Dhinourayni climbed into a throne decorated with coloured lights and held aloft by four bearers. To the beat of drums, the procession of about 200 people set off through the winding alleyways of the ancient medina, chanting, singing, and occasionally throwing grains of rice at the throne to ward off evil.



The decorated hands and full wedding attire of the bride on the wedding day. Right: A girl in the bride’s family watches through the doorway as the bride prepares her wedding attire. Far right: Badaant el Mounyrou, wearing full wedding attire, waits in the marital bedroom for the arrival of the groom

Surrounded by friends and family, the bride and groom share their first kiss

After eventually arriving at his bride’s house, the groom joined her in the bedroom, where his mother-in-law washed his feet, and the couple were handfed mouthfuls of food, as per the custom, before finally sharing a kiss. The crowd in the bedroom cheered.