Mutsamudu

The boat from Grande Comore anchored in Mutsamudu’s port in the early afternoon and I went ashore in a small tender with six other passengers, a crate of Fanta, and someone’s outboard motor wrapped in a plastic sack. The port smells of fish and salt and the particular sweetness of ylang-ylang that drifts down from the hills on Anjouan — an island that produces more perfume essence per square kilometre than anywhere else on earth. That smell hit me before I was even on the dock and I spent the next twenty minutes just trying to locate its source, finding instead the market stalls and the road that climbed toward the old city.

The medina of Mutsamudu is the thing that makes Anjouan feel consequential in a way that the guidebooks — the few that mention it — do not adequately prepare you for. It is a walled city of coral stone and lime plaster, built over centuries of Arab and Swahili influence, with streets so narrow in places that you can touch both walls with your arms extended. The doors are carved wood, some of them clearly very old, with Arabic inscriptions and geometric patterns worn soft by hands and years. Children sprint through alleys too small for adults to move at speed. Women carry baskets on their heads with a practiced ease that makes carrying anything any other way seem inefficient by comparison. The citadel at the medina’s edge — built originally in the seventeenth century, modified by various subsequent rulers — looks down over the city with the patient authority of something that has outlasted several political systems and expects to outlast several more.

What I did not expect was the spice market tucked into a small square near the old mosque. It was late enough in the afternoon that the light was turning golden and the vendors were beginning to pack up, but one old man was still there, seated behind sacks of cloves, cinnamon, and something he called cardamome locale that was smaller and more intensely fragrant than any cardamom I had encountered in Mexico or France. He sold me a paper twist of it for a price I would have been embarrassed to pay. I ate cardamom rice that evening in the small restaurant near the port and thought about the distance things travel from the place they grow.

The city’s energy is more layered than Moroni’s — it has the feel of a place with longer memory, something more entrenched in its own history. The sultanate of Anjouan was powerful enough at various points to resist colonisation and negotiate its own terms; that confidence is still perceptible in the way people hold themselves. On my second evening I was invited to share tea on a rooftop with a family I had not met before dawn, and we sat watching the last light leave the sea, none of us with much common language, all of us in no hurry whatsoever.

When to go: May through October is the dry season and the most comfortable time to visit. The medina can be walked year-round, but the roads to the interior of Anjouan — the ylang-ylang distilleries, the villages of Sima, the waterfalls — are considerably more accessible in the dry months. Mutsamudu itself is small enough to explore entirely on foot; most of what is worth seeing is within walking distance of the port.