tourists, mostly from North America and western Europe, who take guided tours through the jungles, cactus forests, and deserts. It’s also a favorite, safely exotic destination for French vacationers, who come mostly for the beaches, nightlife, and excellent haute cuisine. In the French tourist brochures, it sits alphabetically between its two main tropical rivals—the French-speaking Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
Long Sea Journey
There are no cave paintings, parchment scrolls, or even oral traditions to tell us when Madagascar was first settled by humans—a lack of evidence that has led to a long and vigorous debate over origins. However, most scholars agree that in the scheme of human history, settlement came late, probably not before the fifth century. By that time, trade routes had been established across the Indian Ocean, linking Southeast Asia, India, the Arabian Peninsula, and east Africa.
Geographically, one might expect the first settlers to have come from Africa, making the relatively short (250–400-mile) journey across the Mozambique Channel. Astonishingly, they came from the other side of the Indian Ocean—from the Malay Archipelago, or what today is Indonesia. Although it is not known who they were or when they arrived, the historical evidence is persuasive. The Malagasy language borrows words from Javanese, Malay, and the languages of Borneo and Sulawesi; its nearest linguistic relative is a language spoken in southern Borneo. Some crops—rice in particular—are found throughout southeast Asia. On the coast and rivers, Malagasy travel in outrigger canoes like those used in Indonesia. Ethnomusicologists compare the simple Malagasy xylophone to one used by tribes in Borneo. Conclusive scientific evidence came in a 2012 study of matrilineal lineage that made a statistical comparison of the mitochondrial DNA of people from Madagascar and Indonesia. The team, led by Murray Cox of New Zealand’s Massey University, concluded that Malagasy and Indonesian DNA separated about twelve hundred years ago, close to the date when historians believe the island was first settled.
What were the reasons for settlement? At the time, much of the Malay Archipelago was part of the Srivijayan Empire, a major trading power that had the ships and men to mount an expedition; however, there is no historical evidence that it did. “Most likely, then,” notes the Economist in an analysis of the settlement evidence, “the first Malagasy were accidental castaways, news of whose adventure never made it back home. But there is still a puzzle.” Because people inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, the study tracked only the female line of descent. That means that the first party of settlers must have included some women—perhaps as few as thirty, according to Cox. Most ships’ crews were male, so why were women on board? One explanation is that the women were the cargo, and that Madagascar’s original inhabitants ended up on the island by chance after a slave ship wandered off course or was wrecked on the reefs.2
Whichever historical narrative is applied—that the first Malagasy were traders or shipwrecked slaves—it is unlikely that they were heading for Madagascar, or that they even knew where they would end up after they left the Malay Archipelago. Even with favorable winds, trading ships could not have made a direct crossing of the Indian Ocean. It is almost four thousand miles from the west coast of Sumatra to Madagascar, and the ships would have run out of fresh water and food after a few weeks. Instead, they took the long way around, stopping at ports in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea before heading south along the east coast of Africa, a journey that may have taken years. Although most trading ships returned home with cargoes, some did not, their crews deciding to settle and seek their fortunes in ports around the Indian Ocean. They intermarried with the indigenous people, creating the racially mixed population that is typical of many coastal communities.
Archaeological evidence shows that Bantu peoples from East Africa may have begun migrating to the island as early as the sixth and seventh centuries. Some were herders from the Great Lakes region, and they brought their animals with them. Linguists have noted that most Malagasy words for domestic animals have Bantu-language roots; for example, the word for the humped cattle zebu is hen’omby, from the Swahili word for beef, omby or aombe. Other historical records suggest some Bantus were descendants of sailors and merchants from the east coast—from modern-day northern Mozambique north to Somalia—who crossed to western Madagascar in their dhows to trade. Finally, some may have been transported to the island as slaves. Migrants cultivated crops found throughout the African continent, such as manioc and sweet potatoes.
The early settlers from the Malay Archipelago are referred to in some sources as the Vazimba, as if they were a distinct ethnic group that occupied a specific region during a certain period. It’s a convenient way for historians to box them into a timeline to fit a narrative of conflicts, cattle raids, and slavery. From a Malagasy perspective, history is more complicated. As Luke notes, the Malagasy use vazimba as a word for any unknown population that was in a place before they were and “left enigmatic traces of themselves such as abandoned tombs or a standing stone.” Throughout the island, “there are traces of lost people who settled and moved on and whose history and passing are lost in time. So vazimba are not really the ‘original’ or even ‘early’ people of Madagascar, just vanished predecessors, just people doing what all Malagasy people do: settling, moving on, fading away.” The problem, as Luke points out, is the use of the definite article; once you talk about “the Vazimba” rather than “vazimba,” you elevate their status from “just people” to that of an ethnic group.
A second wave of settlers from the Malay Archipelago arrived between the eighth and twelfth centuries. They were the Merina, Richard’s ancestors. They brought with them their traditional clan organization and agricultural practices, particularly rice cultivation. They settled mostly in the highland regions where the landscape of rice paddies today looks as if it could be anywhere in Thailand or Indonesia. Their skin color and straight dark hair make them Asian in appearance. However, many communities, especially in the coastal regions, are racially mixed, with generations of intermarriage between people of Asian and African descent, Arab seafarers, and later Chinese and Indian traders and European settlers.
From the seventeenth century, Madagascar became important in the Indian Ocean trade in silks, spices, and slaves, and a haven for pirates who preyed on merchant ships. Although successive European powers—the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, followed by the Dutch from the Cape Colony, then the French and the British—tried to establish trading and military posts, most settlements were short-lived. Other Europeans ended up on the island by accident, shipwrecked on its notorious reefs. The tribes, especially in the south, were often hostile, and disease and climate took their toll. The only group that adapted relatively successfully were the pirates who used the harbors of the east coast as bases to prey on merchant ships sailing to India; they had goods to trade for food, and some took Malagasy wives. By the mid-eighteenth century the British navy had sent most of the pirates scuttling back to the Caribbean. While other areas of Africa fell under European rule, Madagascar, relatively isolated and lacking exploitable agricultural or mineral resources, remained off the colonial radar. The island was divided between three large kingdoms and small feudal domains headed by warrior chieftains. They were almost always fighting each other, stealing zebu and taking captives to use as slave labor.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Merina chieftain Andrianampoinimerina had subdued his rival kinglets and created a unified kingdom in the central highlands. He vowed that the Merina kingdom would have “no frontier but the sea.” In their imperial ambitions, the Merina kings had a willing ally in the British, who were competing with the French for military and commercial dominance in the Indian Ocean. The British struck a deal with the Merina kings—guns for slaves. In return for stopping the export of slaves to the French colonies of Réunion and Mauritius, Britain recognized Merina sovereignty over the island and provided economic and military aid, including firearms, enabling the kings to extend their domain outside the central highlands. The Merina replaced local chiefs with civil servants who collected taxes and imposed labor quotas. The irony is that while restricting the export of slaves—and so dealing a severe blow to the French plantation economy on Réunion and Mauritius—British support for the Merina boosted the internal slave trade. By the mid-1820s, the British-trained, musket-toting armies of Andrianampoinimerina’s son, Radama I, had conquered or subdued most of the island, capturing or taking as tribute thousands of Malagasy. A century after Britain abolished slavery