Comoros

The Union of the Comoros is a small African country composed of a few islands between Mozambique and Madagascar.

The country declared independence from France in 1975, but since then has endured coup after coup, making its political stability shaky. There’s also the fact that some of the islands have done petitions in the past to France for it to re-rule them. This has created some frictions with the French, since they administer the island of Mayotte, which is supposed to be under the Comores administration.

Since the islands were formed from volcanic activity, you can guess there are still lots of it going around here. And considering how small are the islands, every time there’s an eruption, the population of the whole island has to be evacuated.

It produces a lot of vanilla and is the world’s biggest exporter of ylang-ylang (used to make essential oil).

By the way, it is a Muslim country, something you could easily not know considering how south the islands are. The Arabs probably sailed from Yemen to here, and the Muslim population was formed probably by trading slaves.