HISTORY
The rise and fall of the Merina empire 1787–1895
Madagascar under the French 1895–1958
Independence: Part 1 – The First Republic
Independence: Part 2 – The Democratic Republic of Madagascar
The early history of Madagascar is still largely unknown. Because of the geological and fossil record, palaeontologists know more about the geological formation of the island and how its unique fauna evolved than anthropologists and historians do about the first people who lived here.
Prehistory
Around 180–160 million years ago (mya), during the dinosaur-dominated Jurassic period, a huge plateau in the supercontinent of Gondwana began to drift apart from what later became Africa. While still attached to India and Antarctica, this proto-Madagascar drifted southeast on its tectonic plate for the next 40 million years and came to rest roughly in its present position about 130mya. Further plate movements separated the new island of Madagascar by a narrow rift from Antarctica and from what later became India, accompanied by seismic and volcanic upheavals and massive outpourings of lava. Over the course of the next few tens of millions of years, the seas filled the widening channel as the Indian plate drifted north to collide with Asia, and the Indian Ocean was formed. The landmass “furniture” was now in place for the easterly monsoonal winds to create the conditions for Madagascar’s eastern rainforests to form.
The isolation of Madagascar removed it from more cosmopolitan evolutionary trends, giving a unique, local character to its evolutionary story and leading to by far the highest rate of endemism (species found nowhere else) of any comparable landmass on earth. The fossil record, especially in dinosaurs, shows that long after Madagascar’s physical separation, some of the animals living on the island at the time were very similar to those living in India and even South America. The lines of most of the ancient “founder” species on Madagascar died out, however, and in any case after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs around 65mya, the Malagasy fossil record dries up.
HOW MADAGASCAR GOT ITS SPECIES
The existence of Malagasy boas and iguanas, and the close evolutionary links between the primitive, shrew- or-hedgehog-like tenrecs of Madagascar and the solenodons of the Caribbean, are evidence of Madagascar’s ancient, Gondwanan link with the Americas. And while a small number of today’s species did evolve from “founder” ancestors, scientists widely agree that most ancestral species must have got lucky through a chance process nicknamed “sweepstakes dispersion”, having drifted across the Mozambique Channel on fallen trees, floating mats of estuarine vegetation or cyclone debris. The ancestors of many of today’s birds, bats and insects would, equally fortuitously, have flown or been blown onto the island. Among the birds, the recently extinct giant flightless Aepyornis (and relatives) and vangas are endemic to the island, the latter comparable in their elaborately specialized diversity to the finches of the Galapagos that provided Darwin with evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection.
The tenrecs and lemurs are two of only four groups of indigenous non-flying mammals found on Madagascar, the others being endemic rats and mice and a group of civet-like carnivores called euplerids of which the fossa is the best-known example. All these 162 mammals are found nowhere else on earth, and each of the four groups is believed to have a single common ancestor. The clue to explaining Madagascar’s astonishing faunal diversity may lie in the nature of their ancestors’ accidental arrival. Over millions of years, nothing would have come of countless solitary colonists: only when a small group, and at least a male and female of breeding age, arrived together (perhaps a once-in-a-million-years chance) would they have started a new line, increasingly inbred and prone to mutations as the generations passed, but eventually radiating into new species able to exploit the virgin ecological niches presented by a largely uninhabited island. Thus evolved 29 species of tenrec, 101 species of lemur, eight civet-like carnivores, and 24 rats and mice, all from four ancestor species.
Just as noticeable as the variety of mammals found nowhere else is the absence of so many common mammal groups of Africa: Madagascar has no elephants or rhinos; no giraffes, antelopes, zebras or buffalos; and, discounting domestic animals, no cats or dogs. There were several species of small hippopotamus, whose common ancestor could have been a long-distance African swimmer: all became extinct over the last couple of thousand years, believed to have been wiped out by human hunting pressure leading to habitat destruction.
Madagascar’s earliest humans
While the lemurs flourished on Madagascar, one branch of the primate order that never evolved on the island were the great apes and humans (Hominidae) – there are no fossil sites of human ancestors and related “ape-men” species here. Where evidence is lacking however, myth often fills in, and one prominent early species, at least in folk history, is the Kalanoro, often considered the same as the earliest human inhabitants or Vazimba. Kalanoro were hairy, forest-dwelling, proto-human primates who frequently raided villages for food and were wont to steal babies, exchanging them for the own. Similar stories are found all over Africa, and they also exist in the folk tales of Southeast Asia, where long-haired forest people often feature.
The Vazimba are the earliest people to have a place in Madagascar’s oral history, but it isn’t known whether they had an African or Austronesian origin (more likely both), nor whether they really were of small stature with no knowledge of rice-farming and iron-smelting (as is often cited), or were simply described in these terms in order to demonstrate a suitable contrast with the more hierarchical societies which grew from them. In fact, virtually nothing is known for certain about the provenance, appearance, language or social life of Madagascar’s earliest inhabitants. Even the odd clay potsherd can’t be identified as local or imported, though the absence of any stone weapons means that the earliest inhabitants were certainly Iron Age people.
THE LAST OF THE MEGAFAUNA OF MADAGASCAR
The early arrivals would have found an untouched, Eden-like landscape, heavily forested, and remarkable even by the standards of the time. As well as the smallish animals we know today, Madagascar had a well-developed megafauna, featuring the chimp-sized giant sloth lemur (Palaeopropithecus ingens); the massive ground lemur (Archaeoindris fontoynontii), weighing around up to 200kg; the arboreal koala lemur (Megaladapis edwardsi), a tubby, tailless primate about the size of a small gorilla that clung to tree trunks like its namesake; two species of endemic hippopotamus (Hippopotamus madagascariensis and H. lemerlei); a giant tortoise (Testudo grandidieri) 1m long and weighing about a tonne; and several species of huge flightless birds that would have dwarfed an ostrich. The largest of these, the elephant bird (Aepyornis maximus) weighed more than 400kg and stood 3m tall.
Archeologists know that humans lived with these animals because butchery sites, where the subfossil bones of prey show cut marks, have been dated to roughly 300 BC, when humans were already hunting sloth lemurs and hippos and breaking open elephant-bird eggs. By the end of the first millennium AD, pressure from the growing human population on the coasts, moving inland with their livestock and clearing the forests for firewood, cultivation and zebu grazing, was pushing Madagascar’s bigger native species into untenable pockets of habitat. As the populations of the megafauna declined, the build-up of leaf litter created the conditions for devastating forest fires and a spiral of ecological degradation set in. The first millennium AD is thought to have been a particularly dry period, and these slow-moving, slow-breeding, easy and rewarding targets for hunters rapidly succumbed once suitable habitats had reduced beyond a certain point.
It is known, however, that some of these species lived until comparatively recently, because their Malagasy names are still known. The last elephant bird, or vorompatra, was probably killed in the far south in the late seventeenth century. The sloth lemur (tratratratra) may have survived in the central highlands until about the same time according to the administrator Étienne de Flacourt, based at Fort Dauphin, who was told about both animals by local people. And the last Malagasy hippo, or tsyngomby, may even have survived into the twentieth century, as locals in Belo-sur-Mer claimed to have seen one, which they called a kilopilopitsofy, in 1976.
The peopling of Madagascar
Madagascar’s early inhabitants mostly stayed close to the coast, with the west coast the most populated region, followed by the sheltered areas around the Baie d’Antongil in the northeast. For perhaps the first five hundred years, the impact on the island was very limited. Fish, shellfish, large mammals and birds and forest fruits formed the bulk of the population’s diet, perhaps supplemented by coconuts.
Settlers from Austronesia
By the eighth to twelfth century AD, the first verifiably Austronesian settlers were beginning to arrive – according to tradition on the northeast coast – bringing with them Southeast Asian food crops: bananas, sugar cane, yams, cassava, taro and most significantly rice. Though they were probably transported by Malay and Javanese seafarers, the exact identity of the new colonists is unclear, but as well as possibly including intentional emigrants, and social or political refugees, they almost certainly included Dayak and other slaves and bondservants from the Indonesian archipelago.
As well as boats that used outriggers for stability in rough seas, the Austronesian heritage included new kinds of weaving and metalworking technology. The new culture also brought a highly expressive reverence for the dead that surpassed the traditional fear-based respect of African settlers for their ancestors, by introducing a regular communion with the remains of the deceased in famadihana ceremonies – similar in many ways to the Toraja funeral and reburial rites from Sulawesi in Indonesia.
The Rasikajy and the Antaimoro
Trade along the shores of the Indian Ocean was on the increase, and Arabic- and Swahili-speaking settlers were also soon established in several small towns on the northeast coast known as the Rasikajy culture. Cattle herders began to push up the river valleys towards the highlands (where there are widespread settlement sites dating back as far as the thirteenth century), intermarrying with and displacing the Vazimba as they penetrated their hunting lands.
Early Muslim immigration seems to have culminated around the fifteenth century with the arrival on the east coast of the Antaimoro, some of whose families claimed to have come from the Arabian peninsula. This group, who may also have included Malay and Javanese Muslims, introduced the first truly literate culture to Madagascar, with manuscripts on medicine, divination and astrology in the sorabe alphabet (from the Arabic sura, meaning “writings” and the Malagasy be or “great”). These documents used the Arabic script to communicate Malagasy – a process seen by the pre-literate people of the island as literally magical. The Antaimoro’s influential priests, or ombiasy, were soon credited with a multitude of cosmic skills, spanning everything from propitious house-building and town-planning to where to plant and when to fish, and they were in great demand as diviners and soothsayers by leading families across the island.
The Merina
The most powerful Austronesian migrants, identifying themselves by the fifteenth century as the Merina, were increasingly dominant in the highlands, and with their cosmopolitan roots, communication with the dead and powerful magic, they exercised a very strong hold over the minds and spiritual lives of other Malagasy peoples. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Jesuit missionary, Luis Marriano, described the island’s entire population of around 1 million as entirely Malagasy-speaking. A mass language conversion, under the potent influence of the Merina, seems the only plausible explanation for Madagascar’s linguistic unity.
The first kingdoms
Madagascar in the seventeenth century was a patchwork of regional political alliances and trading networks. Rice cultivation was widespread in the settled highlands, with many marshy areas converted to rice fields, while in the drier south and west, where human life was more precarious, the cult of zebu cattle was becoming highly developed, with bull-wrestling, the slaughter of herds at funeral feasts and feud-like cattle-raiding between villages all deeply rooted in the unpredictable pastoral economy.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the first larger kingdoms emerged, on the west coast, where the cattle-herding Sakalava people formed the Menabe (“Great Red”) dynastic kingdom to the south around present-day Morondava, and the Boina kingdom to the north near present-day Majunga and the Betsiboka River. These were entities partly based on slaving, trading local captives and imported slaves from Africa with Swahili and other foreign ships. Boina was later forced into a tribute relationship with Imerina, the Merina empire in the highlands.
On the east coast, the Betsimisaraka Confederation dragooned a loose affiliation of neighbouring statelets into a larger grouping under the leadership of the Zanamalata – mixed-race descendants (“Children of Mulattoes”) of local women and European pirates and traders.
Early European contacts
The earliest confirmed European arrival in Madagascar was Fernando Soares, a Spanish captain, who landed on the northern tip of the island in 1506. Throughout the sixteenth century, Portuguese and Dutch traders sailing the spice route to the East Indies (Indonesia) disrupted the ancient, cyclical Swahili trading networks that had lasted more than seven hundred monsoon seasons.
By the seventeenth century, the French and English were rivals in the region, trading the latest firearms and other weapons for slaves but they made little effort to settle the island. The English established a short-lived settlement at the Baie de Saint-Augustin, south of present-day Tuléar, in 1645–46, and the French had a base at Fort Dauphin from 1642 to 1674, though it failed after the death of the local company governor, Étienne de Flacourt, and the garrison was massacred by local warriors.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, numerous European pirates moved into the seas around Madagascar once the Caribbean started to become heavily patrolled by Spanish and English colonial naval vessels. Behind Madagascar’s dangerous reefs, or tucked between its many offshore islands, pirate vessels were able to do their work undisturbed. William Kidd and others settled in Madagascar, and Baie d’Antongil, Nosy Boraha and Nosy Mangabe on the east coast and the inlets around Diego Suarez in the far north were soon lively, mixed-race areas. Nosy Boraha was even briefly the location of a “Pirate Republic” called Libertalia.
The British began formal diplomatic relations with the Merina in 1817, training King Radama I’s Merina army and overseeing the arrival of the first missionaries from the London Missionary Society. The French, meanwhile, occupied the offshore islands of Nosy Boraha, naming it Île Sainte Marie, and Nosy Be, in the northwest, where they moved their regional governor, formerly based on Réunion island.
MADAGASCAR’S TRIBES
Madagascar has eighteen ethnic groups, peoples or tribes – or 22 if you include the Europeans, Karana (Indian and Pakistani Muslims), Chinese and Comorians. Traditionally, the groups are distinguished as much by their regions as by unifying cultural factors. Many peoples formerly had three broad social classes – slaves, commoners and nobles – but this kind of inherited social status is much less important in twenty-first century Madagascar, with individual wealth and modern economic and family affiliations growing more significant every year. Below is a list of the more prominent ethnic groups.
HIGHLANDS
Betsileo
Merina
Vazimba
NORTHEASTERN
Betsimisaraka
Bezanozano
Tanala
NORTHERN
Antankarana
Tsimihety
WESTERN
Ankarana
Antalaotra
Sakalava
SOUTHERN
Antaimoro
Antandroy
Antanosy
Bara
Mahafaly
Vezo
The rise and fall of the Merina empire 1787–1895
With the help of the powerful Andafiavaratra of the northern highlands, King Andrianampoinimerina (r. 1787–1810) and his son King Radama I (r. 1810–28) united the Merina kingdoms of the central highlands into a single state. Their successors subjugated the Merina’s southern neighbours, the Betsileo and Bara, and came close to effectively controlling the whole island apart from the far south.
French influence at court
With international recognition of Imerina – the Merina empire – came the desire of the Merina elite to embrace foreign influences, from Christian missionaries to literacy and the new technology of the industrial age. But traditionalists in the Merina lands made life uncomfortable for the royal court and the threat of withdrawal of support was ever present. After Radama’s death, Queen Ranavalona I (the “Cruel Queen”, r. 1828–61) was placed in power by Radama’s prime minister, Rainiharo, who also secretly married her. The court went on to expel the missionaries and began the systematic persecution of Christians. Individual Frenchmen, however, were allowed into royal circles for the purposes of educating the court, and enabling industrial development. These included a shipwrecked sailor turned industrialist and polymath who became the royal court’s chief engineer, Jean-Baptiste Laborde, and a former slaver and opportunist gold-digger Joseph-François Lambert. Lambert extracted an agreement in 1854 from the 26-year-old Prince Rakoto to grant him access to the island’s mineral wealth on the prince’s accession to the throne in return for a ten percent cut – the so-called Lambert Charter. Lambert even forged a letter from the Prince to the French government requesting them to depose the queen. When that fell on deaf ears, in 1857 he and Laborde tried to mount a coup themselves, an adventure that almost cost them their lives and saw them banished from the island.
Open doors, modernization and manipulation
When he finally came to power, Rakoto, renamed King Radama II (r. 1861–63) invited the missionaries back, reopened the country to Western influences and tried to abolish traditional practices such as the death penalty and ordeal by poison. The British sent a goodwill mission, installed a permanent consul in Antananarivo and pledged support for the country’s continued independence. Radama meanwhile surrounded himself with like-minded non-traditionalists, and found himself drawn into the pre-arranged land and mineral rights deal with Laborde and Lambert over the heads of the traditional kingmakers and supporters of the royal court, the Andafiavaratra clans. The clans, led by Prime Minister Rainiharo’s son Ranaharo, organized a coup, murdering most of Radama’s close circle and strangling the king himself. After his assassination Radama’s wife Queen Rasoherina took the throne (r. 1863–68) as a constitutional rather than absolute monarch, marrying as part of the arrangement first the new Prime Minister Ranaharo and then his brother Rainilaiarivony, who also succeeded him as prime minister. In 1869, Queen Ranavalona II (r. 1868–83), who had also taken Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony as her consort, converted to Protestantism, along with vast numbers of highland Malagasy. When his wife died, Rainilaiarivony put his new wife, Queen Ranavalona III on the throne as a puppet queen (r. 1883–97).
French military intervention
The First Franco-Malagasy War (1883–85) came partly as a result of a trade access deal between Paris and the Sakalava rulers of western Madagascar that Rainilaiarivony was not prepared to sanction, and partly through pressure on Paris from the inheritors of Laborde and Lambert who claimed full entitlement to the mineral concessions fraudulently obtained from the royal court three decades earlier. The war stuttered on for months, with French ships bombarding first Majunga and then Tamatave, and the Merina trying to enlist the support of the British, who did not want a fight with the French. The treaty that finally resulted ceded Diego Suarez to France. Ultimately, though, it led to Madagascar being traded between Britain, which wanted full control of Zanzibar, and France, which claimed the same for Madagascar, an agreement that Paris and London signed in 1890, leading the British to give up support for Malagasy independence.
Still stuck on the Lambert Charter and with new-found confidence from British acquiescence, the French continued to demand a full protectorate over Madagascar and got minor concessions from the Merina court. As Rainilaiarivony reinforced Antananarivo’s defences the French opened new hostilities against Tamatave and Majunga, the Second Franco-Malagasy War (1894–95), and sent a column to Antananarivo, which they captured in October 1895.
Madagascar under the French 1895–1958
The French initially planned to rule through a figurehead government, but an uprising broke out, the Menalamba (“red shawl”) rebellion, pitching traditionalists against Christians, Europeans and the corrupt royal court. It was violently suppressed by the French, who executed the movement’s leaders and exiled Queen Ranavalona and former prime minister Rainilaiarivony to Algiers in 1897, where he died the same year and she in 1917.
The invasion over, and having failed at persuasion, the French began a period of military rule of the island. French settlement was encouraged, education from 6 to 13 made compulsory, and the Malagasy were taxed and had the hated idigénat (a special legal code for non-French subjects) and corvée (forced labour) imposed upon them. Despite the heavy-handedness, French citizenship was an option for Malagasy subjects – at least for those few who could afford a full education and become appropriately évolué (“developed”) – and the lobby for political change in Madagascar took in a wide range of forms and views, from radical independence movements to appeasement and working the system.
World War I saw many Malagasy men conscripted to fight and die for the French tribe against the German tribe, but the interwar years saw little significant improvement in the rights of most Malagasy.
World War II
With the outbreak of World War II, some Malagasy expected a different outcome, but France fell in 1940 and the French governor of Madagascar, after toying with declaring for the Free French, opted instead to ally himself with the Nazi-controlled Vichy government. Unknown to the Malagasy, the Nazis were seriously considering a Madagascar Plan, using the island as a vast deportation camp for Europe’s Jews. The bizarre scheme received a terminal setback when Germany lost the Battle of Britain and the ships that would have been commandeered for the deportations remained under British command.
After a long period of British hesitation, and with the Japanese fleet seemingly on the point of sailing into Diego Suarez and achieving dominance in the Indian Ocean, a response to Vichy Madagascar eventually came from the British, whose invasion in 1942 – the Battle of Madagascar – saved the island from Japanese tyranny. It was instead now delivered into the hands of the Free French who, far from liberating Madagascar, used its human and natural resources to help liberate France.
The Malagasy Uprising
Towards the end of the war, nothing came of the 1944 Brazzaville Declaration on the future of France’s African colonies: it offered no timeline for self-rule and no sign of independence on the horizon. As de Gaulle himself said: “Self-government must be rejected – even in the more distant future.” No less hopeful outcome could be imagined. After the scornful rebuttal, in 1946, of the efforts of Madagascar’s three deputies to the French National Assembly to get the administration to consider full independence for the colony, Madagascar erupted violently. The Malagasy Uprising, which commenced in March 1947, knocked the administration sideways. In a coordinated onslaught, police posts and settler plantations around Moramanga and Manakara were attacked by traditionally armed warriors. The insurrection quickly spread throughout the remote south of the country and began to affect Antananarivo. The French reacted with massive force to the 550 killings committed by the rebels, slaughtering an estimated 50,000–100,000 fighters and innocent civilians before finally quashing the uprising in December 1948. In the worst known incident, French soldiers machine-gunned more than a hundred detainees belonging to the MDRM (Democratic Movement for Malagasy Rejuvenation – Madagascar’s first political party), the country’s first political party, in Moramanga on May 29, 1947, a date now commemorated by a national holiday.
Aftermath
The MDRM National Assembly deputies who had called for independence were accused of masterminding the uprising and tortured and imprisoned for nine years. A state of emergency was declared and across the country the political lights went out for a decade as Merina intellectuals and administrators were directly accused or suspected of involvement and all dissent was snuffed out. The French supported the pro-Paris PADESM (Party of the Disinherited of Madagascar), which recruited mostly from the coastal peoples, the so-called côtiers, and had strong overtones of resistance to Merina elitism; hundreds of its members had been killed by MDRM supporters during the uprising.
Meanwhile, throughout France’s other African colonies, there was a growing clamour for independence and a palpable acceleration towards it. The Loi Cadre or “Blueprint Law” of 1956 offered each country autonomy within a French family of nations, but with defence, higher education and currency still to be controlled by Paris. Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958 and immediately offered all the French colonies the black-and-white choice of limited self-rule or go-it-alone independence. With the exception of Guinea, all of them, including Madagascar, chose initially to stay with the family, voting for autonomy within an association of states called the French Community.
Independence: Part 1 – The First Republic
Self-governing Madagascar was far from overjoyed with the new dispensation. On the eve of independence, Malagasy politics had become uneasily tribalized – and this in a country with no real tribes, and only one language – with Merina dominance widely resented by the côtiers. The newly autonomous country was led by Phillibert Tsiranana (1912–78), a former teacher of Tsimihety descent with a modest background. After getting involved in local politics in Majunga, he had formed, with active French support, the PSD (Social Democratic Party) and campaigned initially on a ticket that stopped short of full independence by using French socialist support to resist Merina domination and the lure of the Soviet Union, busy in this period (at the height of the Cold War) forming crude alliances with impoverished Third World nations. Somehow, he managed to always square the circle, retaining both his core support among provincial elites and his popular appeal that alienated no one while keeping both the French and the pro-independence nationalists on side. Divisions in his own party, however, meant he ultimately had no choice but to negotiate the terms of full separation from France. Independence was declared on June 26, 1960, albeit with a string of French-favouring provisos that granted continued influence and jobs to France – the so-called Métropole – to which so many Malagasy felt a mix of allegiance and resentment.
Unrest and revolt
Tsiranana lasted twelve years, winning a relatively democratic election in 1965 and a completely fraudulent one in 1972, and succumbing eventually to his inability to square the circle forever. It was a stroke, however, that initially removed him from the scene for several months in 1970, enabling successors to line up to to replace him. When he returned from convalescence, he faced the Peasant Rebellion in 1971 led by Monja Jaona of MONIMA (the National Movement for the Independence of Madagascar), which exploded when peasants near Tuléar responded to new tax demands by attacking police posts across the region. He then faced a student strike for faster “Malgachization” of jobs, qualifications and control of the economy, which turned into the May 1972 Revolution; Tsirinana set his thuggish Republican Security Forces (FRS), recruited in Moramanga, onto the students and shot several protestors dead in central Tana. May 1972 was deeply influenced by the May 68 student protests in France, but coloured most of all by the realization that a decade of neocolonial independence had brought most Malagasy little improvement to their lives, while wealthy French people still lived and worked among them.
Independence: Part 2 – The Democratic Republic of Madagascar
Tsiranana’s government disintegrated after May 1972, when the army refused to support him. The collapse ushered in three years of military rule, which promoted links with China, North Korea and the Soviet Union, followed by seventeen years of military-in-all-but-name civilian dictatorship under a Betsimisaraka former naval captain Didier Ratsiraka (b.1936), whose father had been a colonial administrator in Tamatave and who was one of the earliest members of PADESM.
Ratsiraka, who was known as the “Red Admiral”, commenced his rule in 1975 with a series of radical nationalizations of banks and insurance companies, shipping, and the oil refinery at Tamatave. He formed a new party, AREMA (Vanguard of the Malagasy Revolution) and, cleaving to Mao’s China, proclaimed a Socialist-Christian revolution in Madagascar, the charter of which was enshrined in his Red Book (Boky Mena), a collection of interminable speeches.
Rule of the Red Admiral
Ratsiraka’s rule was a period of chaotic social disorder, with frequent food riots and demonstrations as the new republic’s inadequate institutions struggled to produce and distribute resources and services to a burgeoning and disparate population. Much revolutionary rhetoric disguised shameless corruption that enriched party apparatchiks at the expense of the rural poor and the urban underemployed. A directionless policy of “omnidirectional investment” was instigated – meaning indiscriminate borrowing to pay for everything, with kickbacks for all involved. By 1980, the government was dealing pragmatically with the IMF’s demands for free market reforms, a process that went on throughout the 1980s and beyond.
The 1980s saw a continual rumble of protest against corrupt officials and dissent from the party line, with the church increasingly playing a role in criticism of Ratsiraka’s clique. The hugely popular Kung Fu organizations – Malagasy Christian self-defence martial arts groups that idolized Bruce Lee – became allied with the opposition to the one-party state and were violently destroyed in 1985, with the killing of hundreds of members.
Coup plots and rumours of coup plots emerged throughout the 1980s, while Madagascar’s economy at best continued to tread water. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, in November 1989, Madagascar, in common with many countries in Africa and Eastern Europe, was experiencing a massive groundswell of popular opposition to one-party rule. Pro-democracy demonstrations swept the country in 1991, at one of which the presidential guard fired on the crowd, killing dozens.
Ratsiraka asked Guy Razanamasy, the mayor of Antananarivo, to form a new government in August 1991, but the popular Forces Vives opposition was so strong that together with the church and sections of the armed forces, they demanded Ratisiraka’s removal before agreeing to participate.
Transition to democracy
The country began a hesitant, and still deeply corrupt transition to multi-party rule, with moves towards a more federal system. Elections in 1992 saw a former doctor and medical professor, Albert Zafy (b.1927), emerge as president to oversee the transition to a Third Republic. The incompetent Zafy was impeached in 1996 for abuse of power, then succeeded briefly by Norbert Ratsirahonana (b.1938) who, despite his short term in office, did engage with the international community and attempted to make some political and economic reforms. He was followed in turn by the returning dictator Didier Ratsiraka, trying on a more democratic suit. Despite his previous form, Ratsiraka’s experience and old boy network saw him stay for five years as first president of the Third Republic before the country’s new constitution eventually caught up with him early in the new millennium in the shape of more genuinely democratic elections.
Marc Ravalomanana
By the 1990s, the practice of personal enrichment at the expense of the state (résistance), which had been viewed as normal and even slyly admirable in the early years of French colonialism, had mushroomed into an institutionalized hydra that undermined every aspect of public life and destroyed all trust in government. A charismatic and self-made Merina business leader, one-time farmer Marc Ravalomanana (b.1949), was elected mayor of Tana in 1999, and set out publicly to make a difference to the lives of people in the city. Promoting sanitation and security, he opined that democracy alone was not enough: he wanted to clean up, purging the capital of corruption as well as squalor and crime. As CEO of Tiko, Madagascar’s biggest dairy business, and vice president of the FJKM, the country’s largest church, he was in a uniquely influential position and his star rose rapidly. Seen as a son of the soil, Ravalomanana campaigned for the presidency against Ratsiraka, achieving huge public shows of support that reminded people of the pro-democracy movement of a decade before.
Ravalomanana’s first term
In the December 2001 presidential poll, Ravalomanana beat Ratsiraka though failed to secure an overall majority, and both claimed victory. Ratsiraka’s supporters retreated down the RN2 to his base at Tamatave to form a new “capital”, setting up barricades and destroying bridges as they went. In a Herculean standoff that lasted months, Ravalomanana was besieged in Tana, as the economy collapsed around him. In a recount in April 2002, Ravalomanana scored 51 percent and the US endorsed his presidency – as eventually did France, which also agreed to look after the exiled Ratsiraka.
Ravalomanana’s first term in office saw the first appointments to the new National Council to Fight Corruption, and a clean new Central Intelligence Service created to replace the old and feared DGID (General Directorate of Information and Documentation) security service. Ratsiraka, meanwhile, was sentenced in absentia to ten years hard labour for embezzlement, and his former prime minister Tantely Andrianarivo to twelve years.
Ravalomanana’s “Madagascar Action Plan” of 2006 placed the focus on infrastructure projects, education, health and the use of English. With the economy beginning to recover, and plans afoot to replace the country’s six unwieldy provinces with 22 regions, Ravalomanana’s confident and populist approach gave him a relatively easy re-election in 2006.
Andry Rajoelina
Ravalomanana, however, was beginning to lose the plot: as not just president but church leader and one of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs, he may have thought himself unstoppable. In 2009, a Merina media owner from a wealthy Catholic family – and the latest mayor of Tana – Andry Rajoelina (b.1974) had his TV station closed down after Ravalomanana took exception to an interview with the exiled former dictator Didier Ratsiraka. Rajoelina pounced. Citing Ravalomanana’s recent purchase of a new US$60m presidential jet, and a widely discussed land deal between Ravalomanana and the South Korean Daewoo Corporation, Rajoelina took to the streets with his supporters. He denounced the president for selling Madagascar down the river and lining his pockets with a cut in Daewoo’s proposed 1300 square kilometres of maize and oil palm plantations.
2009 coup
In a rolling political crisis that lasted though the tail end of 2009’s rainy season, Rajoelina’s supporters repeatedly came out to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the speed of change under Ravalomanana, with rising inequality, and with a president that many now identified as a hypocrite and dyed-in-the-wool member of the Merina elite after all. On February 7, 2009, 31 of Rajoelina’s supporters were shot dead and more than 200 wounded by the presidential guard while demonstrating outside the presidential offices. Finally, on March 11, sections of the armed forces came out for Rajoelina and forced a coup, making him president of the ineptly named High Transitional Authority or HAT. The former DJ was sworn in as president in Mahamasina Stadium on March 21. It should not have surprised Rajoelina’s supporters that the world, with one voice, turned their backs on him. For all Ravalomanana’s faults, nearly fifty years after independence, with the country placed 149th out of 172 on the UN’s Human Development Index, another coup was the last thing Madagascar needed.
International isolation and the 2013 elections
Ravalomanana sought exile in South Africa, and Madagascar was suspended from the African Union and most other international bodies. The economy and tourism went on hold as foreign governments cautioned against visiting the perennially unstable island; and security across the country sagged as the Malagasy, rich and poor, improvised their own solutions to the problem of making a living, which included a massive rise in the ransacking of natural resources, from rosewood to gems and rare tortoises to vanilla. For four, stagnant years, round after round of crisis talks, and endless proposed and postponed elections, led finally to presidential elections in 2013. The elections were preceded by media and PR campaigns for each of the two main candidates the scale of which had never been seen before. Rajoelina and Ravalomanana, both barred from standing, each fronted a proxy who took 16 and 21 percent respectively in a field of thirty candidates, before slugging it out in the second round.
Hery Rajaonarimampianina
It was Rajoelina’s man who eventually took office in January 2014. The new president of the long-hoped-for genuinely democratic Madagascar was former Air Mad CEO Hery Rajaonarimampianina (b.1958), who had served as finance minister under Rajoelina. A government was eventually formed, led by prime minister Roger Kolo (b.1943), whose cabinet satisfied most observers and stakeholders. Kolo’s period in charge wasn’t scintillating in terms of achievement, though the economy began to grind into step again, and in January 2015, he and the rest of his government were forced to resign en masse, following an overwhelming electricity shortfall on the national grid which resulted in rolling blackouts and mass protests. Former army general Jean Ravelonarivo (b.1959) took over as prime minister. Meanwhile, and most importantly, the world has once again become prepared to shake Madagascar’s hand. Ravalomanana’s return from exile in 2014, long mooted and negotiated, excited the media and thrilled his huge support base, though he has been largely under house arrest, while his public statements have called for reconciliation.
MUSIC
Madagascar has a multifaceted and surprisingly accessible musical tradition, which reflects in part its cultural diversity. Most Malagasy music is in major keys, making it easy on the Western ear, and requiring no great effort to tune into. It’s true that the familiar sounds of hip-hop and r’n’b are all-pervasive, and the eternal offbeat thump of Bob Marley and co is usually in the background somewhere, but Madagascar’s own music (and that of its Indian Ocean neighbours) always bubbles through.
Even in the hardest of times since independence – and Madagascar has experienced more than its share – the country’s music has enjoyed success abroad. But during the years of dictatorship, musicians who failed to play by the rules got no support at all from state institutions. Today, with widespread access to simple digital recording technology and the internet, those constraints are beginning to lift, and now many aspiring performers and groups can now get a public airing – although whether any of those dodgy online song and dance videos are any good is another matter.
TRADITIONAL INSTRUMENTS
The valiha, which is believed to derive from Southeast Asia, is Madagascar’s best-known musical instrument, a typically 16-to-21-stringed tube zither made from a limb-sized length of giant bamboo. The strings were once made of skillfully separated strips of the bamboo’s outer skin: nowadays brake cables or fishing lines may serve – so long as it retains its melodic harp-like tones, nobody minds. Another type of zither is the marovany, a box zither strung on both sides and played with both hands, creating intricate, rippling melodies.
A kind of lute or mandolin (in fact it’s often called mandoliny), the kabosy is often played by soloists along with a mouth harmonica on a neck rack; it probably first arrived with Arab and Swahili seafarers. From the Betsileo highlands, the jejy voatavo is a resonated, stringed instrument that sounds something like an Appalachian dulcimer. It comes in many varieties, with some capable of being strummed as well as bowed. The lokanga fiddle or violin usually has just three strings and is very popular in the south, especially among the Antandroy.
Notable among woodwind instruments is the graceful, whispering sodina: an end-blown flute, it too seems to have been born in Southeast Asia. For percussion, the key instruments are the big kayamba scraper-and-shaker, a frame of reeds filled with seeds, and the West African goblet-shaped hand drum that everyone calls djembe, its Malian name.
History and traditions
Regional folk music based on local instruments was the norm until the early nineteenth century. The kabary oral tradition of speech making and oratorical storytelling, passing on the wisdom of the ancestors in proverbs and often flowery metaphor, found its way deep into the country’s traditional music. In the highlands, which still have a strong influence on the regions, travelling hiragasy (“Malagasy song-music-drama”) players were and still are the main form of live entertainment. They come out when booked, and traditionally appear for famadihana ceremonies. They nearly always include kabary in their shows, accompanied by musicians (mpilalao – musical entertainers), who originally would have played valiha, kabosy and other traditional instruments.
Influence from the west
With traditional singing styles among the highland Merina usually based around group harmonies, they quickly adopted church choral singing when the first missionaries were invited in the 1820s. Western instruments, too, were introduced to the royal court during this period, when the first brass instruments were incorporated into military training programmes by foreign advisors, and pianos were shipped out to Antananarivo’s wealthy families. Less affluent families aspired to accordions, saxophones and harmoniums, and in the poorer parts of town a guitar was seen as a very special possession. The hiragasy troupes incorporated accordions and fiddles, and sometimes brass and woodwind instruments as well.
In the rural areas, people continued to make their own traditional instruments and handed them down from generation to generation. Playing styles were greatly influenced by the latest sounds to emanate from royal court and Antananarivo’s Haute-Ville elite, whose musicians had adapted their sound to echo the traditional valiha zither – a chain of influence that went full circle. Dance styles were also translated for Malagasy tastes: the Merina afrindrafindrao (“move-move”) is a line dance based on the old quadrilles danced in the Merina royal court that were first tried out when the dance became fashionable in England in the early 1820s.
Modern dance music: the big players
Malagasy music first made an impact abroad in the 1960s, when it began to incorporate electric instruments. A family singing group, Les Surfs, won a radio talent contest and ended up featuring on French television singing cover versions of European and American hits of the time. Mahaleo, formed a few years later, were much more enduring and influential, and played their own folk-protest compositions inspired by traditional forms. Surviving members still occasionally regroup.
Watcha-watcha and tsapika
A major influence on musical styles in western Madagascar in the 1970s came from the soukous explosion out of Zaire and Congo, which put the electric guitar centre stage. Refracted through Antillean zouk, and the influence of benga in Kenya, the sweet vocals and finger-picking guitar style gave Madagascar the dance music known as watcha-watcha in Nosy Be and Diego Suarez. Channelled more through South African township music, the same guitar-based music plus accordions became tsapika (also pronounced “tsapiky”) in Tuléar in southwestern Madagascar – where it is still a major force in the clubs.
Tuléar sounds
Tuléar, unprepossessing as it as a town, is probably your best first port of call for local music on the island. The Bara guitarist D’Gary made his name here, with a guitar style that took its inspiration from traditional musical instruments like the marovany and the lokanga – a roots/contemporary crossover for which he has often been compared with the likes of Ali Farka Touré from Mali and the pioneering Jean Bosco Mwenda from Katanga (now in the DRC). Also from Tuléar, Régis Gizavo is an accordionist with an international reputation. He worked with the Madagascar All Stars – Justin Vali, Dama, Marius Fenoamby and Erick Manana – on an album and tour of the same name in 2012.
Rossy
While the traditional position of court praise-singer has never existed as it did in many parts of West Africa, musicians are always prone to political manipulation. One influential artist of the 1980s who has seen his star wane in recent years is Rossy (Paul Bert Rahasimanana), who blended hiragasy vocals, accordion and brass with contemporary production values. As a young performer from a poor background, he was drawn to the socialist rhetoric of revolutionary strong man President Didier Ratsiraka, performing at numerous party functions, and even taking a position in his Ministry of Culture. When Ratsiraka fell, Rossy fled to France. He returned after Andry Rajoelina deposed Marc Ravalomanana.
Tarika
Better known on the world stage than any other musician – at least through the 1990s and the early years of this century, when they frequently toured – are Tarika. Formerly Tarika Sammy (tarika: band), they’re led by sisters Hanitra Rasoanaivo and Noro Raharimalala, singers and instrumentalists, and often backed by Donné, Ny Ony and Solo playing acoustic traditional instruments. Their latest incarnation is Tarika Be, still with the old instruments, but more electric and with kit drums. Hanitra, the charismatic spokesperson for the band, is responsible for their energetic style, uncompromising lyrics and forceful attitude. She recently recorded the soundtrack for the Hollywood documentary, Lemurs of Madagascar.
Salegy
If there’s one sound you’re likely to retain after a trip to Madagascar, it’s the urgent and sensuous 6/8 rhythms of salegy, particularly associated with the Sakalava people of the west and northwest. Bursting with inventive guitar licks, accordion (or a keyboard version of) and layers of percussion, including a western drum kit and djembe African hand drum, salegy is a hugely popular party and club sound. Most salegy stars are men, with Eusèbe Jaojoby from Diego Suarez probably the biggest of them all, credited with turning salegy into an almost global phenomenon. Leading the charge for female salegy is Ninie, followed by the all-female band Koezy.
Music of La Réunion and Mauritius: séga and maloya
Blowing in from across the Indian Ocean are the insistent 6/8 rhythms of séga – a close buddy of salegy that always gets the crowds onto the dancefloor – and the folksier, more African-inflected style of maloya, with its drums, shakers and call and response vocals. Séga pumps out on endless promotional videos featuring a lot of hip-shaking on beaches, while for good maloya, listen out for the highly politicized and entertaining performances of Danyèl Waro. Then there’s the less mainstream seggae (reggaefied séga) and seggaemuffin…
Where to watch, hear and buy
Most large towns in Madagascar have at least one or two live music venues where someone will likely be playing at weekends, if not every night. Tana has quite a few venues: check the names of artists on Facebook for upcoming gigs. If you want to make music a central part of your trip, then be sure to stay at Antshow in Tana. Owned and run by Hanitra Rasoanaivo, it’s a wonderful springboard for a musical visit to the island.
Seeing a hiragasy performance is more a question of being in the right place at the right time (September is always good for famadihana ceremonies), but long taxi brousse rides can sometimes yield such opportunities from your co-passengers. For CDs (normally 5000ar for home-made collections, or 10,000–20,000ar for local studio releases) there are always itinerant music-sellers wandering around markets: ask them what you’re looking for, and someone will have recordings. Or chance a lucky dip. As for checking out performers before you go to Madagascar, or after you get back, there’s just one word: YouTube.
DISCOGRAPHY (CDS)
Jaojoby Salegy (Rogue, UK, 1992). As a gentle introduction to salegy, this album–Jaojoby’s first – has worn its years well. For a faster take, still with his family on board, try Malagasy (Discorama) from 2004.
Henry Kaiser and David Lindley with various artists A World Out of Time (Shanachie, US, 1992). American guitarists record local music with top Malagasy musicians, and play on some tracks themselves.
Madagascar All Stars Madagascar All Stars (Cinq Planètes, France, 2010). A liltingly beautiful set of tracks from an all-star combo, headed up by the country’s top valiha player, Justin Vali.
Tarika Son Egal (Xenophile, UK, 2009). Originally released in 1997, this re-release of their standout album about the 1947 rebellion (brutally put down by the French with Senegalese – Sonegaly – infantry) is timelessly inventive and appealing.
Various artists Madagasikara One: Current Traditional Music of Madagascar (GlobeStyle, UK, 1986). Recorded by roving muso adventurers Ben Mandelson and Roger Armstrong on a pioneering trip, this includes traditional highlands tunes and folk songs from the south.
Various artists The Rough Guide to the Music of Madagascar (World Music Network, UK, 2005). A little bit (in fact a lot) of everything, running the gamut from trad to modern Mad.
Various artists Tuléar Never Sleeps (Earthworks, UK, 2003). Wonderful compilation of relentless tsapika tunes featuring guitar, accordion, and the local marovany.
BOOKS
The first printing press in Madagascar was installed in 1827 to publish evangelical and educational material, but the colonial French policy of cultural assimilation and all-French education suppressed most writing in Malagasy. Very little Malagasy literature, in Malagasy or French, has been translated into English, but if you read a little French, it’s worth persisting with the often lyrical output of nearly a century of modern poets, dramatists and novelists. The oral tradition is influential in many of their oeuvres, and encompasses hainteny (literally “lingustic knowledge”) – allusive love poetry, imbued with ancestral wisdom – and symbolic hiragasy performance (literally “Malagasy song-music-drama”), fully of proverbial wit, and incorporating kabary or oratorical public pronouncements.
There are few bookshops in the country, and none with any good range of books in
English. Titles marked with a 
are especially recommended. Works marked with
a 
are published only in French.
MALAGASY LITERATURE
Peter Hawkins The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the
Literatures and Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean. A
rare survey (the other, much more studied “hybrid archipelago”
being the Caribbean) that concentrates – very readably – on
the post-colonial experience, and covers Madagascar in detail.
Colleen J. McElroy Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of
Madagascar. The fascinating fruits of a Fulbright fellowship
research project into oral literature in 1993, exploring in numerous
examples of transliterated poetry and legend how the Malagasy take wisdom
from their ancestors by telling metaphorical tales of moral conduct and the
origins of things.
Esther Nirina Rien que la lune. Born in 1932 to a Merina father
and French mother, Nirina returned to Madagascar in the 1990s after living
in France and working as a librarian for more than three decades. Her
delicate, elegiac poetry fusing personal wisdom and Madagascar’s oral
traditions set about reviving a literary scene bogged down in arguments
about the political crisis and the use of French. “Just the
Moon” is a collection of her best works.
Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo Traduit de la nuit (translated into English as 24 Poems). Considered to be the pioneer of modern French-language literature on the island, Rabéarivelo – a Merina from a poor family with a noble background – was a passionate and tormented poet who was denied the chance to visit la Métropole by the French authorities and ultimately committed suicide in 1937, aged 35. He is best known for beautifully adapting traditional hainteny love poetry into French and composing news pieces for a wider audience.
Jacques Rabemananjara Les boutriers de l’aurore. A playwright,
poet and politician, Rabemananjara – a Betsimisaraka born in
Maroantesetra – was one of the three elected deputies to the French
National Assembly accused by the French government of being behind the 1947 Uprising and later served as VP in the first independent
government. This 1957 play (“The Dhows of Dawn”) is an epic
drama about the arrival of the first Austronesian immigrants in the Baie
d’Antongil.
Jean-Luc Raharimanana Nour, 1947. Born in 1967, Raharimanana returned
from France to Madagascar under Ravalomanana in 2002 to support his father,
a history professor, who was on trial for inciting hatred for daring to
discuss the history of Merina oppression of other Malagasy peoples. The
narrator of Nour, 1947 is a rifleman (one of the
despised Tirailleurs Sénégalais),
who himself rebels during the 1947 rebellion. The novel dances through
Malagasy history while combining almost unreadably indulgent bloody violence
with descriptive lyricism.
Michèle Rakotoson Lalana. This novel (“The Road”), by
one of Madagascar’s best-known modern writers in Malagasy (born into
an intellectual Merina household in 1948), tells the story of two young
Tananarivien artists and lovers, one with AIDS, trying to reach the ocean.
Followed by the ancestors, the young men’s journey unfolds amid a
real and symbolic landscape of environmental destruction and social
injustice.
TRAVEL
David Attenborough Zoo Quest to Madagascar. Attenborough’s 1961 BBC TV series followed an animal-collecting visit by London Zoo, and includes attending a famadihana ceremony and reconstructing an elephant bird egg. Fascinating reading (if you can pick one up from a second-hand bookshop).
Gerald Durrell The Aye-Aye and I. The affable raconteur of animal
quirks and human foibles is in good form in this visit to Madagascar to save
rare species – starting with the best description of an aye-aye ever
written. Posthumously, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust has
spearheaded the fight to conserve Madagascar’s vanishing fauna and
natural environment.
Mark Eveleigh Maverick in Madagascar. Jaunty tale of an enthusiastically misguided attempt to walk the length of the west coast with a zebu pack bull in quest of Vazimba pygmies. Although published in 2001, this is still essential reading for adventurous visitors – especially if you plan on exploring the zone rouge region between Tana and the Tsingy de Bemaraha.
Alison Jolly Lords and Lemurs and A World Like Our Own: Man and Nature in Madagascar. Readably idiosyncratic accounts and anecdotes, covering lemurs, history and anthropology, by the renowned primatologist. Jolly (1937–2014) was based for many years at the De Heulme family’s Berenty Private Reserve, near Fort Dauphin.
Dervla Murphy Muddling Through in Madagascar. Although Murphy’s 1983 backpacking trip around southern Madagascar by taxi brousse already seems historical (the RN7 was still a bumpy track), this good-natured account of the journey, accompanied by long-suffering 14-year-old daughter Rachel (who has all the best lines) is delightfully witty, insightful and encouraging.
Peter Tyson Madagascar – The Eighth Continent.
Accompanying, by turns, herpetologist Christopher Raxworthy, palaeoecologist
Dave Burney, archeologist Bob Dewar and primatologist Patricia Wright, Tyson
travels widely across the island, leaning over the scientists’
shoulders as they unpeel new wonders of Madagascar’s natural and
historical heritage. Although much has changed since the mid-1990s, this is
still top pre-departure or in-country reading.
HISTORY AND CULTURE
Philip M. Allen & Maureen Covell Historical Dictionary of Madagascar. This second edition (2005) is a one-stop shop for raw information on many facets of Malagasy culture and society, with short articles on everything from forests to Free French, from Merina to mining and from Radama II to religion.
Mervyn Brown A History of Madagascar. The most comprehensive and accessible history of the island, covering the whole period from the early settlers to the 1990s.
Maureen Covell Madagascar: Politics, Economics and Society. Published in 1987 in a “Marxist Regimes” series before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this offers a somewhat credulous analysis of the Democratic Republic of Madagascar – as if policy mattered to Ratsiraka and his clique. Fascinating nonetheless for coverage of the Kung Fu movement among other aspects of the one-party state.
William Ellis Madagascar Revisited: Describing the Events of a New Reign and the Revolution which Followed. The Rev. William Ellis (1794–1872) had been a missionary in Polynesia before attempting to start a mission in Madagascar in the 1850s. Rebuffed by Queen Ravalona, he was finally welcomed by her son Radama II in 1861 and stayed for three years. Facsimile editions of this book vividly describe his work, the bloody history of Christian persecution under the old queen, the signing of the Lambert Charter (which ultimately led to Madagascar’s fall to the French) and the overthrow and death of Radama II.
John Mack Madagascar: Island of the Ancestors. Highly accessible, well-illustrated British Museum publication, accompanying a major 1986 exhibition, that concisely covers the breadth of the island’s cultures.
Mike Parker Pearson In Search of the Red Slave: Shipwreck and Captivity in Madagascar. The fascinating story of Robert Drury, who was captured by Antandroy slavers in the far south in the early eighteenth century and lived to publish the tale in 1728 in Madagascar: or Robert Drury’s Journal, During Fifteen Years Captivity on That Island – a true-life version of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
Jørgen Ruud Taboo: A Study of Malagasy Culture and Beliefs.
Although researched between 1934 and 1953, this remarkable book from 1960 is
still the definitive reference on fady –
the mass of cultural prohibitions laid down by the ancestors that still
strongly influences Malagasy life. Allowing for the occasional
Norwegian–English translation lapse (“apes” presumably
refers to lemurs) it’s a fascinating study of how shared fady provide the foundations of traditional social
structure.
NATURAL HISTORY AND CONSERVATION
Nick Garbutt Mammals of Madagascar: A Complete Guide. A beautifully photographed guide to every mammal on the island, with very clear maps, this is the guide to choose if you want to know about more than lemurs – although the oddly abbreviated text makes it somewhat hard to read.
Frank Glaw and Miguel Vences A Field Guide to the Amphibians and Reptiles of Madagascar. Although the lack of English names is a bit perplexing for the novice (most of the 235 amphibians and 370 reptiles have no common names), this is the indispensable, if heavy, herper’s field guide to the most rewarding country in the world, with excellent colour photos and distribution maps of every species.
Heather E. Heying Antipode: Seasons with the Extraordinary Wildlife and Culture of Madagascar. Always enjoyable and occasionally rhapsodic account of a rainforest herpetologist’s seven years (off and on) in Masoala, Nosy Mangabe and Maroantsetra.
Alison Jolly Thank You, Madagascar: Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly. Posthumously published, Jolly’s abridged diaries, describing “an eyewitness account of a major case study in the politics of conservation”, make for illuminating reading, and namechecks every significant figure involved in the country’s relationship with its own natural heritage since independence.
Steven M. Goodman and Jonathan P. Benstead (eds) The Natural History of Madagascar. The indispensable researcher’s (or very keen enthusiast’s) companion for all questions natural and Madagascan, this monumental 1700-page compendium of 230 scholarly articles covers the gamut from ancient geology to the trade in rare reptiles via freshwater birds and lemur food plants. An extraordinary resource, but don’t try to take it with you.
Russell A. Mittermeier et al Lemurs of Madagascar. The third edition of this
magnificent work is a masterpiece of natural history writing and guidance,
although borderline impractical as a field guide, weighing in at 1.35kg
(pocket-sized identification guides are also available). Detailed write-ups
on each of Madagascar’s 101 species are enhanced by a mass of extra
information on parks and reserves, the history of lemur study, and the
importance of conservation on the island.
Thomas Pakenham The Remarkable Baobab. Having “scoured the world for baobabs with shapely limbs and unusual characters”, the renowned arborist and historian writes with affection bordering on adoration for “the wooden elephant”. Half of this mini-coffee-table book is devoted to enchanting photos from Madagascar, and delightful musings about their subjects.
Ken Preston-Mafham Madagascar: A Natural History. Published in 1991, this still offers the best single-volume coverage of the island’s flora and fauna, with superb photos that have rarely been bettered.
Ian Sinclair and Olivier Langrand Birds of the Indian Ocean Islands. It’s surprising, considering the quality of other guides on wildlife, that this is the best birder’s book to Madagascar’s 300 species. The neatly painted illustrations are mostly on the mark, though the limited text tells you little about habits or local distribution.
MISCELLANEOUS
Jill A. Donenfield Mankafy Sakafo: Delicious Meals from Madagascar. Enjoyable little compendium of recipes and food lore that’s particularly good for long-stay visitors and expats and gets right inside the rice-, coconut-, seafood- and zebu-based cuisine.
Andrew Walsh Made in Madagascar: Sapphires, Ecotourism and the Global Bazaar. Its title playing on the common phrase for something local and poor quality (vita gasy) this twenty-first century ethnographic case study of the Parc National d’Ankarana covers places, issues and people that visitors will certainly encounter – the ecotourism industry and park guides; the dwindling artisanal sapphire mines; and the physical location itself, “the rocks” vested with special sacred qualities by the Antankarana.
LANGUAGE
The language of the whole of Madagascar is Malagasy – one of the Southeast Barito languages (part of the Malayo-Polynesian family), the rest of which are spoken by forest Dayak hunter-gatherers in southern Borneo. While grammatically the connection is indisputable, the vocabulary of Malagasy retains a number of words to do with domestic animals and livestock husbandry from Africa’s Bantu language family (which includes Swahili), while the days of the week are Arabic terms. The Austronesian connection must have lasted for centuries, as Malagasy also includes significant words borrowed from Malay and Javanese, especially maritime terms and words for parts of the body, which were not in the original Dayak lexicon, and even from Sanskrit, absorbed into Malay and Javanese, and then re-borrowed by Malagasy.
Malagasy’s absorbent tendencies continue, with so much French vocabulary now incorporated that educated Malagasy often mix the two languages in conversation. The same is beginning to happen with English – the preferred second language of the second-generation independence era – with countless English terms “malgachified” by use in social media. Speaking a little school French is undoubtedly helpful, while a few phrases of Malagasy will endear you even more to hospitable locals. You will, however, increasingly find people who speak some English.
While Malagasy-speakers from around the island can always understand each other, Malagasy has two broad dialects – Eastern and Western – with variations in each. Eastern Malagasy includes the classical Merina dialect or Plateau Malagasy, and also extends down to the east coast, while Western Malagasy includes most of the rest of the country – with the exception of the far north, where Antankarana Malagasy is somewhat different from either.
Spelling and pronunciation
In a short visit, you probably won’t get very far with Malagasy, and books, courses and teachers are hard to come by outside the country. Its orthographic conventions – the way the language is written – are hard to understand at first. The initial efforts to transcribe the spoken language into writing using the Roman alphabet were undertaken by early nineteenth-century Welsh missionaries aiming to accommodate the views of Malagasy-speakers who had already learned French. Appreciate that, and you start to understand some of the written form’s peculiarities, which are certainly no more illogical than those of English.
There are 21 letters in the Malagasy version of the Roman alphabet: they make do without c, q, u, w and x, other letters or combinations taking their places. All words end in one of four vowels – a, e, o or y (the vowel i never ends a word, although it’s pronounced in the same way). The main pronunciation rule is to place the stress on the penultimate syllable and drop the last syllable completely (“vazá”, not “vazá-ha”). As long as you remember this, reading Malagasy words isn’t too difficult. However, they can be very long, so when remembering proper nouns – people’s names and place names – it’s often helpful to concentrate on remembering the second syllable as the start of the name. You won’t go far wrong pronouncing Antananarivo as Tananarive and the people called Antankarana as Tankarana.
MALAGASY NAMES
The difficulty of remembering long, compound names can be embarrassing – so many places seem to start with An- or Am-, and so many people’s surnames commence with Ra-. Learn to park those frequently repeated elements to one side and concentrate on the next syllable. When considering people’s names, Ra- is an honorific, equivalent to Mr, Mrs or Miss and precedes most names in the highlands, while with place names, Am- or An- usually signifies "The Place Of" in a largely redundant fashion, like–ton, -bury or –ham do in English-language place names.
VOWEL SOUNDS
a is long, like the Ar in “Arthur”
ao is a long oo, like the u in “lute” when in the middle of a word, but sounds like the ow in “how?” when at the end of a word
e as ey in “grey”
i as ee in “feet”
o is always long, like or in “order”
oa is a long oo, like the u in “lute” when in the middle of a word, but becomes a diphthong and rhymes with “lure” when at the end of a word, such as soa (“good”)
y as the long ee in “feet” (only used at the end of a word)
CONSONANTS
Consonants are pronounced as in English, with the following rules and exceptions:
g is pronounced hard as in “golf”, not soft as in “agenda”
h is always soft, almost as in French “hôtel”
j ranges from the z in “zebra” to the j in “juice” and the hard s in “design”
n’n is a long n
r is strongly rolled as in Spanish “rapido”
Useful words and phrases
GREETINGS
NUMBERS
DAYS
USEFUL FRENCH TERMS
FOOD AND DRINK
Many Malagasy food terms are corruptions of the French, and people tend to use the Malagasy and French terms for certain items interchangeably, or with a minor change of pronunciation – like labiera (bière) and dite (du thé).
BASICS
FRUIT AND VEGETABLES
DISHES
Glossary
andevo slave descent
anta- people of
arabe avenue, boulevard
bazary market
be big/large/many/very
Bajaj motorized trishaw or tuk-tuk (from the Indian vehicle manufacturer)
bonara tree
boutre dhow
fady taboo or cultural prohibition, often very local
falafa/falafy leaves and stems of the ravenala palm, used in traditional house construction
fotsy white
gasy inoffensive informal abbreviation of Malagasy
hiragasy traditional entertainment troupe
hova freeborn (Merina, Betsileo)
kely small
lakana pirogue
lalana street, road
lamba cloth, cotton wrap
lavaranga balcony, terrace
maintso green
mainty black (also means slave)
manga blue
mena red
ombe/omby cow
parihi lake
razana ancestor
renala baobab
rova hill fort
salegy music of the west coast
sarety zebu cart, from the French charette
tavy slash-and-burn agriculture
tsingy limestone pinnacle landscape
varamba trolley or cart
varanga balcony, terrace
vazaha foreigner, in practice usually white European
voay crocodile