History · Mayotte

Mayotte: The Island That Chose France

A Muslim, Comorian island in the Mozambique Channel that voted to stay French when the rest of the Comoros left in 1975 — now the poorest, and most contested, department of France

By Worldlore Editorial · 30 September 2026

A satellite view of a green island surrounded by one of the world's largest coral lagoons
Mayotte from orbit, ringed by its vast lagoon. It is the south-easternmost of the Comoro Islands, in the channel between Madagascar and Mozambique. (European Space Agency / CNES / Wikimedia Commons · Attribution (free use with credit))

A piece of the Comoros inside France

Mayotte is a small island — Grande-Terre and Petite-Terre inside a huge lagoon — that is geographically, culturally and religiously part of the Comoro Archipelago: mostly Sunni Muslim, speaking Comorian and a Malagasy dialect, African. It is also a department of France and a region of the European Union — and by far the poorest part of both, with the youngest population in France and vast informal settlements. The Union of the Comoros claims Mayotte as its own, and a series of non-binding UN General Assembly resolutions have backed that claim. The people of Mayotte have repeatedly voted, by huge margins, to stay French.

A short history

  1. 1st millennium CE onward

    Settlement

    Swahili-Comorian and Malagasy peoples; part of the Indian Ocean trade.

  2. c. 1500

    Sultanate

    Long Muslim by now, Mayotte gains its own sultanate.

  3. 18th–19th centuries

    Raids

    Malagasy slave raiders and rival sultans repeatedly attack Mayotte.

  4. 1841

    Cession to France

    Sultan Andriantsoly hands Mayotte to France.

  5. 1886

    The Comoros

    France makes the other islands protectorates, ruled with Mayotte.

  6. 1974–1975

    The split

    The Comoros vote for independence; Mayotte votes to stay French.

  7. 1976

    Confirmed

    Further referendums keep Mayotte French; the UN objects.

  8. 2011

    Department

    Mayotte becomes France's 101st department.

Sultanates and slavers

The Comoro islands were settled over the first millennium and more by Bantu Swahili-Comorian and Malagasy peoples, and drawn into the Indian Ocean trading world. Islam took hold from around the 11th century, and by about 1500, when Mayotte's own sultanate was founded, the islands had become a patchwork of small sultanates. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Mayotte was repeatedly raided by Malagasy slavers and fought over by neighbouring sultanates, and it was left thinly populated.

A white-and-green mosque with a slender minaret in a Mayotte town
A mosque at Mtsapéré. Mayotte is overwhelmingly Muslim, and traditional Islamic law long governed parts of daily life; departmental status is replacing it with the French civil code. (Jean-Pierre Dalbéra / Wikimedia Commons)

The French foothold

In 1841 the sultan of Mayotte, a Malagasy prince who had seized power there, ceded the island to France for a pension and protection. It was France's first foothold in the Comoros.

The small rocky peninsula of Dzaoudzi on Petite-Terre, joined to the island by a causeway
Dzaoudzi, on Petite-Terre — the first French administrative centre, and the colonial capital of the whole Comoros until it moved to Grande Comore. (franek2 / Wikimedia Commons)

France made the other three Comoros protectorates in 1886 and administered all four islands together, first from Mayotte. France soon abolished slavery on the island, and sugar plantations, later replaced by vanilla, copra and ylang-ylang, were worked by labourers brought in from Africa.

The split

In a December 1974 referendum, the Comoros as a whole voted about 95 per cent for independence — but Mayotte voted roughly 63 per cent against. The other three islands declared independence in 1975; France counted the vote island by island and kept Mayotte, holding further referendums there in 1976 in which nearly everyone chose to remain French. The UN General Assembly has condemned this as a violation of Comorian territorial integrity in a series of resolutions.

The independent Comoros then went through some twenty coups and secession attempts, a chaos that hardened Mahorais determination to stay with France — and drew growing numbers of Comorian migrants toward Mayotte's higher wages and French services.

Department, and crisis

The waterfront town of Mamoudzou with market buildings, taxis and hills rising behind
Mamoudzou, the capital. A 2009 referendum voted 95 per cent for full departmental status, and Mayotte became France's 101st department in 2011 — its poorest by far. (David Stanley / Wikimedia Commons)

Departmental status aligned Mayotte's laws with mainland France's and extended parts of the welfare system — and made the island an even stronger magnet for migration from the Comoros and mainland Africa. Roughly half the residents are foreign nationals, many of them undocumented, and the pressure on housing, water and schools is acute, producing recurrent social crises, vigilante violence, and mass expulsions. In December 2024, Cyclone Chido — the strongest storm in about 90 years — flattened the informal settlements, with an official toll of 40 dead and a true figure that is still debated.

What Mayotte carries

Mayotte's history poses a hard question about self-determination. Its people, given the choice in the 1970s, chose to remain part of the country that had colonised them rather than join the newly independent nation they belong to by geography, language and faith — and they have reaffirmed that choice every time since. France has kept the island, and with it one of the most intractable development and migration crises anywhere in the European Union.

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